I don't even have ducks...

While I was away, one of the stops we made was at a wonderful publishing house clearance bookstore in Grand Rapids.  While there I picked up a book by an author who has never yet steered me wrong.  Every book of his that I've read has been profound, and this one, which I read in the car on the remainder of the (long) drive home wasn't an exception.  This one was timely, too, as it's about finding one's calling, and, well, I'm unemployed and moving towards 30 years of age, and beginning to wonder if I shouldn't perhaps try to find a calling, or at the very least, a career, sometime soon.

In any case, I had the book with me today when I met a new friend for coffee.  After we'd shared a little of our lives with each other, I knew I had to share with her a passage I'd marked in the book.  (The book, by the way, is "The Echo Within" by Robert Benson.)  And then I had to laugh at how it's message was hitting me all over again too.

Benson writes:

I like my ducks in a row.  I like my t's crossed and my i's dotted.  I like, as the old revival song says, my old accounts to be settled.  I like for things to go the way we drew them up on the blackboard, to go according to plan, to be right on the money.

These are things I have to be careful about when I am trying to listen for the calling voice of God.  God does not seem to be particularly interested in whether or not my ducks stay in line.
(Benson, pg.141)

I had to laugh.  My calendar is quite literally blank.  All of the things I had planned are gone.  I like my ducks in a row.  I like the security of that.  Trouble is, right now, I don't even have ducks!