The other night I confronted the ghost of myself. She isn’t exactly a ghost, I realize, she is a future shadow, an echo from a time that never was. I have told you of her before—I only wish I could lean in and listen to yours—but perhaps she bears repeating.
She is the academic I almost was, published and polished. She is the one who took the robes, the academic regalia, hooded and smiling, and walked into the world where she did whatever it is people think you should do with a PhD. Each year she prepares her syllabi, her tenure portfolio, her papers. She thinks, and thinks, and is anxious about her thinking. She publishes. She is a person who knows what to say she does at a dinner party, and people step back, impressed, when the Dr. precedes her into the room.
I’m intimidated by her, I’ll admit. If she glances over at me, sitting as I am in my car on the way home from horseback riding, if she shares that drive through the tunnel of trees blanketed in the falling dark of a Texas night, she poses the question -
did God really say, leave all this behind?
And of course that isn’t what God said. It’s the wrong question, and there is no answer.
There was no audible voice telling me to turn off the academic path. There was the time I paced my front lawn on the phone with an advisor who advised that a PhD is only good for 2-3 years before any committee would ask what I had been doing with it, and the despair that clawed up my throat was so strong I had to sit down in the itchy grass. There was the time I saw a red-bellied woodpecker out the front window and was so overjoyed I had recognized it that I wept.
These are the voice of God. And they are also just the collection of stories of someone living, trying out a way of being. They are the stories of a life: that is what we have, isn’t it? A life. A life with God. Mary Oliver asks us what we want to do with it, the “one wild and precious life”? But I have given up even that question, the doing of my life falling away in the face of inhabiting it.
How do I inhabit my life?
How do I inhabit the moment on the horse as she rises into the trot, throwing me upward? How do I inhabit the binoculars trained on the sky - and yes, there is the red-tailed hawk, sure as day, circling high? How do I inhabit the night watch with the sick kids, and the creating of the bookshop shift schedule, and the restocking of the stories that have been my undoing and my rebuilding?
I inhabit my life, maybe for the first time without a constant critique of just how I am doing that. I have gone after the longings that have kept all these years in my heart. I have found that God is there, in the satisfaction of small desires. In getting to know myself. In inhabiting my life, there, there God is.
This is the life I inhabit, tender choice by tender choice. This is what I have.
How beautiful. How good.
How beautiful! Inhabiting life
- this one life God has gifted to us.
Thank you for sharing your beautiful thoughts.
May you (and I) continue to discover the unfolding of His LOVE in the places we find ourselves.