Daily 5 - Day 293

Today's Daily 5:

1. Coffee with a new friend.  The kind of coffee where you're really not sure how it is going to go, and then you discover something of a kindred spirit and you talk and talk and talk and it spills over into the rest of your day and brings smiles.
2. The sun is finally out and it was warm enough to walk today without a down vest and fleece jacket on.
3. Dreaming just a little about a change in direction
4. Feeling really okay for the first time in a little while... feeling like there is life coming amidst all the crazyness of my "never boring" life
5. smiling at emails from various friends
6. an invitation to have coffee next week with another new friend (thanks especially S. and LP/CA)
7. free food at mom and dad's
8. actually getting a few resumes out there, and having a number more to send off in the coming days
9. rice krispy square and an iced passion tea lemonade at Starbucks
10. walking, listening, praying

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!

I Liked This...

From today's "Americancatholic.org" Minute Meditation:

Embrace the Mystery

Learn the mystery of surrender and trust, and then it will be done unto you, through you, with you, in you and very often, in spite of you.

— from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality