Let Your Life Speak - Vocational Call

My old copy of Let Your Life Speak sits in a box in Los Angeles. Using my Border's bookstore 20% off coupon, I decided to purchase another copy here in Hawaii. Not that I have the extra cash, but it's a timely book worth reading at this juncture. An excerpt by Parker Palmer that I identify with:

"Vocation, the way I was seeking it, becomes an act of will, a grim determination that one's life will go this way or that whether it wants to or not. If the self is sin-ridden and will bow to truth and goodness only under duress, that approach to vocation makes sense. But if the self seeks not pathology but wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves--violence in the name of a vision that, however lofty, is forced on the self from without rather than grown from within. True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding out lives in check until we honor its truth."

"Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about--quite apart from what I would like it to be about--or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions."

Excerpt from: Parker Palmer, "Let Your Life Speak" (1999): 4