"What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been!"
"I first learned about vocation growing up in the church . . . I mean the idea that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice or moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not yet - someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach.
That concept of vocation is rooted in deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be 'selfish' unless corrected by external voices of virtue. It is a notion that made me feel inadequate to the task of living my own life, creating guilt about the distance between who I was and who I was supposed to be, leaving me exhausted as I labored to close the gap.
Today I understand vocation quite differently - not as goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess."