It is snowing.
A lot.
In this part of the country that much snow means trouble.
All we can do at this point is weather the storm.
Which means a lot of sitting.
And waiting.
There are plenty of other things I could be doing today. Productive things. Work-related things.
While my only choice is to dial down my angst, part of me secretly loves times like these. Times where my plans get interrupted; times when all I can’t go 90 miles an hour.
When I stop moving for too long, I really start to take stock of my life.
This been such a rescue for me in the past. These sitting and waiting times have saved me from continuing down a road I shouldn’t have been on. A wrong turn that I was trying to solve by going faster.
I imagine you’ve had times like this too. Times when you were…
- traveling for work, and get stuck in a massive delay at the airport.
- waiting for a tow truck to pull you out of a ditch.
- stuck in the waiting room of the quick-change oil change place that has had your car for over an hour.
These are great opportunities for reflection, and sometimes I suspect that God arranges moments like these to slow us down, to get us out of our usual frenzied pace.
Then, and perhaps only then, do we ask ourselves the most dangerous question we will ever ask ourselves:
What am I doing here?
The reason this question is so dangerous is because the answer has the potential to up end our lives. Daring to ask that question could lead us to all sorts of other wild places such as the desires of our heart, and how we could have abandoned them so long ago.
If we ask that dangerous question we could also start to think about our calling, and if there even is such a thing as having a purpose, and if so, how we can find it.
And then we begin to realize that yes, there is such a thing as a calling. We begin to see people living from their purpose, and we begin to want that in our own lives as well. We forgive ourselves for taking the wrong turns, we forgive ourselves for our former misplaced priorities. We begin to see our way out of the fog.
The next time you find that life has hit your pause button, and you are not going to catch the flight, or get your car back, or do anything that was on your list for that day, take a few minutes… no…take an hour to sit with this question: “What am I doing here?”
If you stay with it, I promise you, answering that question will lead you on more adventures that you can possibly imagine.
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When I let my wife proofread this article, she said I needed to follow it up with some practical how-to behind my suggestion. So, here it is…
Here is one exercise I put together that will allow you to start working toward your future right now. I hope you enjoy it.[/feature_box]
