Why People Are Important
TODAY’S HEARTSHOT IS….Why People Are Important
Everyone’s heard the old expression “two heads are better than one”. But have you ever heard this one? “Every man, woman and child is like unto a river”. No? That’s because I just made it up to describe a similar truth. A little story will illustrate what I mean.
Imagine a village surrounded by walls so high, no one can climb them. Foundations run so deep as well, that no one has ever managed to dig underneath to see what’s outside. To make matters worse, no doors or windows exist, so villagers are trapped inside. Even so, this village is a productive, happy, fun place to live because of the rivers. Out of the ground in many places flow bountiful rivers. Each delivers different toys, joys, and sustenance of all kinds, like horns of plenty.
A gigantic variety of everything necessary to life springs out of the ground in this hallowed place. And….truth be told, your world and mine is just like this. Except in our world, each Human Being is like an unending river of invention and inspiration. Every person without exception is an endless source of new and different perspectives on the world. But for you and I to profit from these gifts, we must meet many rivers, just like villagers in the story above. We must realize that each soul on earth can help us find our Way. On the other hand, refusing to partake of these gifts, will make us like men or women in the village above who stay away from rivers. Trapped in a place without joys and inspiration we’d live a shallow joyless life. And the moral of this little story? Accept the gift of life from those around you.
Now Back to The Continuing Story
What’s a Calling?
Do you really know what a calling is? I had no idea for decades. I thought I did. But I was wrong. Like most people, I thought a calling was a job sitting out there somewhere I’d fit into perfectly… like one big bad apple tossed into the right sized basket….if I found it.
A job I’d love if I could just track the darn thing down, because it suited me like peanut butter paste suits badly burnt toast. There’s some truth to this of course. But when all is said and done, ideas like this mislead us badly about callings. In truth, callings are very different animals indeed. They’re about a curious sounding thing called “destiny”. Put another way, your calling and mine is what we’re put here to do. There’s a good reason callings are called “callings” too. It’s because an “inner voice” tells us what to do with our lives. It “calls to us” from within, telling us who we are.
Pardon me? Like millions of other people, you don’t believe in destiny or “voices from within”? That’s O.K., There’s a really simple, easy way of looking at callings that’ll make good sense to you. Those famous “inner voices” aren’t difficult to swallow either, if you look at them a bit differently. As a matter of fact, once you take a different look at callings….and follow me to get yours back…you’ll even believe in destiny. By that I mean you’ll discover the purpose your life has always had…..even before you were born.
Happy Days Again
Now go back and look for happy words in the last post. Don’t want to? Alright, here they are. “Playing, exploring, wondering, and discovering”. Last post I talked about how I wished for “happy days” because my life seemed empty. I harked back to youthful days filled with happy words like those above. But those words don’t really just describe “fun and games”. Our early lives aren’t really happy just because we don’t have bills to pay, things to worry about, or responsibilities. Real, true “Happy Days” are all about growing. Those happy words describe growth.
Growing Makes Us Happy
Growing is what you and I were doing right from birth. We all begin our lives growing human, and we’re supposed to keep it up until we die. We’re becoming all we can become in these early years, and that’s what makes us happy. But, sadly, a terrible fear stops most of us from growing. It keeps us from hearing our inner voices and stops us dead in our tracks. Most of us know something is gone missing somewhere. We begin to feel there should be more to life than we’ve got. Somehow we know we have the potential to do bigger and better things….but can’t figure out what those things are. When these feelings hit us, we often wish we were kids again, back in good old “happy days”. What we don’t realize, is we’ve lost our calling. We’ve stopped growing.
Put another way, we stop growing the Right Way. Lots of people keep on growing. But callings aren’t just about growing. Growing isn’t enough to make us happy. I will now give you a very good example of growing that illustrates what I mean.
Growing Isn’t Enough
You and I are supposed to grow in a very particular way from birth to death. We must grow in a direction meant for us. Growing any which way is a very bad thing indeed. The best example of growth without direction is……cancer.
Cancer cells grow wildly. They don’t stop when they’re supposed to or stick to their proper place in the body. They’ve lost the direction they came with and just keep on growing. Anything that simply grows without purpose or direction is….by definition….cancerous. Sadly, that also applies to men and women. You can take school courses and seminars and read book after book, growing in knowledge and acquiring skills galore. But if you don’t know for sure this is the right way to take your life, you and those big cancer tumors are like twins. Your life has turned cancerous on you. You have no idea which way to take your life….but you’re taking it somewhere anyhow. And here’s the thing. To find that famous thing called “authentic happy success”, you have to grow the way you were meant to grow. You have to grow your Way. And……believe it or not….there is only one Way you and I are supposed to grow. Each of us comes here with One path to take. Stray from this Path we’re meant to grow down and we are absolutely lost. How do you find this Path? That’s what this blog will teach you. Next post we’ll continue doing exactly that.
