ROBERT : Life is not a problem . . . .

'Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.’ Thomas Merton wrote that. I wish I had.
      In fact, I just wish I had heard it when I was young and wrestling with what I might be if I ever grew up. I spent a lot of years living in the tension between what I wanted to do with my life and what I thought the One Who made me wanted me to do with my life.
      I assumed, like a lot of Church folks do, that what God really wanted was for me to do or be something that I did not want to do or be. And I figured that the trick was to correctly guess what that was so that God would be happy enough to bless my efforts at least, no matter how unhappy the whole thing made me.
      I knew that I wanted to be a writer when I was thirteen years old. I did not tell anyone though, because I thought God wanted me to be a publisher like my father and his father before him. And like everyone around just assumed that I wanted to be as well.
      The Church folks thought it was what I should be, my folks thought so, the grownups that I counted on for advice thought so too. In the absence of a burning bush or a brother who could make snake out of a rod, I just figured God thought that was the plan as well.
      So for most of my life, I made choices about my career under the assumption that God did not really want me to be what it was that I secretly wanted to be the whole time.

Here is the mystery part —
      For twenty years I spent my hours and days and energy and love trying to do work that I did not like a fair amount of the time.
      I thought I was being a good guy by doing God’s will even though I really wanted to do and be something else altogether. I thought I was at least going to earn a reward in heaven. God thought I was just being prepared to be what it was that I had been intended to be all along.
      That secret wish that no one else knew was not something that I made up on my own. It was whispered into me before I was even born, whispered into me by the One Who made me.
      I stumbled onto this wondrous little mystery while lying flat on my back in a room in a psychiatric hospital. I had gone there to recover from twenty years of depression that in many ways was deeply connected to the wrong assumptions that I made about what God’s dream for me might actually be.
      Living your mystery got you waylaid by a candle and some silence. I got three weeks in a psych ward.
      I would not complain too much if I were you.