I’ve been looking for myself.  In that unsuccessful quest I have mostly found selfishness and disappointment.  I’ve also found a lot of worry and fear.  As you can probably guess, these aren’t exactly the things I was looking for.  While I think that facing who you are is a noble effort, but only if you realize you can’t do anything about it—not without Jesus.

We’re always trying to figure out where we fit in this world.  We want to know what our job should be or whatever, and say that this is our calling.  I really don’t think what we do for a living is our calling.  It’s a place God can use us, and where we can love and befriend others, but not our divine place in the world, not even for pastors.  Jesus said that “whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matt 16:24).  That’s our calling, no matter who you are.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “Your real and new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it.  It will come when you are looking for Him.”  There’s a lot of truth in that.

What we are killing ourselves looking for is usually pointless and will mean nothing in the grand scheme of things if it’s not Jesus.  As a friend of mine wrote, “We all live in the quantum particles that only God can command, and for most of our lives we find ourselves awash in seeming random fortune. Only Order understands Itself, and in this still primordial pool, we mostly drown while trying to solve the problem of drowning by feverishly trying to improve the style of our Speedo.”  In other words, the only way to keep from drowning in this thing we call life is to reach out for the Lifegiver.