Puzzle Pieces.

Vocation (noun) - An inclination, as if in response to a summons, to undertake a certain kind of work, especially a religious career; a calling

What exactly is a calling? How do you hear it? And what if it changes?

Sometimes it seems I’m going along and things are working just fine, but sooner or later I begin to get this sense around the periphery of my life that things aren’t all as they should be. Things just aren’t clicking. I’m taking all the steps that make sense, I’m working hard, putting in my time, paying my dues, but I’m not seeing results.

What changed? Me? Or the things surrounding me?

Can a person have more than one vocation? In their life? At the same time? Is it possible to not have one at all?

More questions. My fear is that I won’t figure out the answers until it’s over. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be, but that’s not easy for me to accept. I like to understand things – to dissect them and find out how they work. With most things I can do that – I take something apart, look at its pieces and how they go together, and begin to understand not only how it works, but the thought process of whoever built it in the first place.

Life doesn’t work that way. The more I take it apart and cut into it, the deeper I get – the more things I find that I don’t understand. So I keep cutting and cutting, hoping to find something that connects to something else, and pretty soon I just have a big mess on the floor that I don’t know how to put back together.

Maybe that’s an argument for believing in God. When I take apart something made by a human, I can begin to grasp the intellect of the person that put it together. But life? Even my own – no way. It’s way to complicated for me to understand.

Stooping.

Today I'm thinking about family, careers, and Christmas, and how they're all very intertwined. As Christmas is approaching I'm realizing how difficult we can make this time of year on ourselves. Christmas has always been one of my favorite times because I'm very much a person who loves spending good quality time with those closest to me. However, Christmas (or our commercialized, Americanized version of it) seems to cast a glaring light on the differences between the haves and have-nots like no other occasion.

Why does Christmas make us miss what we don't have so acutely? It doesn't seem to matter what we do have (which is probably a lot if you're wealthy enough to have an internet connection), we still long for more. Whether you're single and want to be married, or married and want a baby, or you don't have enough to buy your kids everything they want for Christmas, or your job stinks and it's hard to socialize at "Holiday" parties with the people who make your life miserable - those are situations we were probably in before and will still be in come January, but the pangs seem to hit closer to the heart in December.

And what about our ideas of charity? Is giving toys to poor people at Christmas a good thing? Or are we just perpetrating the commercialization of the birth of Christ? Are we just accentuating the chasm between those with and those without? And is not having a lot of money really a bad thing?

And Christmas seems to make us nostalgic. Was the past really better than the present? Will the future be any better than the past?

I have more questions than answers.

As I get older, I keep coming up with more and more questions, but the answers don't seem to come at an equal pace. So it seems I actually understand less and less. Man, when I was five I had it all figured out. Actually, when I was 18 I had most of it figured out. Even at 24 I was still in pretty good shape. Now, two years past 30 I'm feeling the weight of all those unanswered questions.

Maybe that's why old people stoop over...

In the beginning...

So, having a blog seems to be the thing to do. All the cool kids have one, right? It's been a long time since I composed my thoughts in any kind of systematic fashion, but I've been thinking a lot lately, so maybe it's time...