Distorted Reality – Dream the new beginning.

I feel thankful for my current job.  I’ve previously had some problems with work because I’ve had sustained periods of illness.  Because I was depressed, the environment where I was working (with kids who were in the sort of social situations that would cause the greatest optimist to despair) eventually caused more problems for me because my recovery was being slowed by my work.  Now I have a job that has the potential to bore me to tears, but I have a really sound team around me; a few really sound, genuine people.

While I’m really pleased that I have this role, especially in the current job market, where any role is hard to find, I want to think long term on this stuff and work out where I should be heading for my future career path.  Wow – that sounds really official for me, doesn’t it?  But you know what I mean – where is it that I’m ‘meant’ to be?

I’ve always been a little cautious of using the word ‘calling’ to speak about the occupation that God has in mind for me – this is mostly because the word sounds so religious, which feels wrong because work is such an everyday thing and the use of ‘religious language’ seems to be an attempt to sanctify this most secular of subjects.  But ‘calling’ also seems wrong because I think that my ‘calling from God’ has more to do with my relationship with him, the way I act as a husband and relate to my wife and the way I father my sons than anything else.

Still, I’ve come once again to that point where I’m questioning where God wants me to head with my career.  I’m at an absolute loose end and have come to a point where I could happily go on to try any number of different career directions, from feature writing in magazines to being a live-in carer at a children’s home in a developing country, from beginning a teacher training scheme to gaining a contract for my novel.  I’ve even had conversations recently with friends where I got excited about ordination in the CofE!  There are some very obvious obstacles to most of these (apart from that fact that I’m not a member of a CofE church, the lack of novel offer is closely related to the slow speed of my writing and publicising, teaching is a questionable idea due to my lack of organisational skill and, in general, the fact that the right job advert is immensely hard to find) but I think my greatest struggle is knowing where I should be heading.

The fact is that I am profoundly bad at that spiritual discipline of listening.  I try to practice silence with God, I (to quote the mighty Bono) ‘cease to speak, that [he] may speak’, but I so often fill that silence with the unstoppable prattle that fills my brain.  I know listening takes practice, but the same flightiness that makes me interested in so many options for my future career path makes my practising anything very difficult.

Perhaps I need to practice practice.

I’ve always had this aversion for middle of the road, middle class, middling Christianity.  I decided when I was a kid that I didn’t want to simply do the same thing as every other middle class Brit, but with added church.  I wanted to see a purpose in my daily grind – work for the purpose of the Kingdom of God.  More recently, as well as seeing the limitations of my point of view in my younger years, I’ve also been aware that I could easily fall into a life where I work for the cash, then go to church on Sunday and pray with other Christians about the daily stress of work and cash.

I guess that’s what I was thinking about when I gave this site its name: seeing that the everyday, the bits between the highs in life, the times when your nose is to the grindstone – these are not the bits where it’s just me and my situation.  There is more than this.  There is more for Christian life than where we fit prayer into our busy daily schedule.  The highs I experienced at the Christian events I attended as a kid were never the reason for it all – they were just the Gretna Green service station on the long car journey between the Highlands and the south coast of England.

But we already know this stuff.  The hard bit isn’t recognising that there is distortion in how I see and live my life, the hard bit is seeing how things should be when the distortion is gone.

What I really want to know is not just where God wants me to be, but when I get there, will I live differently in any way to the other people around me.  Because – while I do try to show there’s something more to life as I add data to databases and file papers – all I really have is the hope that the Holy Spirit might do something special without me noticing!

I realise this post is rambling.  It’s not really going anywhere.  But this is something I’m throwing around my own mind at the moment.  I think it’s time for me to ‘cease to speak’ now anyway.