Let Your Life Speak

In Parker Palmer's book Let Your Life Speak, he invites us to to seek the true calling on our lives, embracing a sense of meaning and purpose as we claim peace, joy, hope, and fulfillment: 

We arrive in this world with birthright gifts -- then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse us of them. As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures like racism and sexism our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others.

We are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of our lives. Then, if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss -- we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.

"Let your life speak" is an old Quaker saying that speaks to the complexity of our lives, Palmer writes. Our lives speak through our actions and reactions, our emotions and physical states of being, and our intuitions and reactions ... as well as our words. Our lives are "experiments with truth" as we seek to speak the birthright gifts we were once given.

The journey can be arduous as we strive to peel away the "images of acceptability." What steps can you take this week?

God bless,

Jennie