"Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?" – Mary Oliver (at left)
Awhile back I asked a physician I know if he chose obstetrics because he loved the work. "No," he said. I chose it because I can do it pretty well," he answered.
For thirty years, this doctor has been traveling a career pathway not because he loves his work but only because he "can do it pretty well." Has he been "breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"
Author Roger Housden asks a provocative set of questions in the introduction to his book, Risking Everything: "Have you longed for a life in which every last part of you is entirely used up? Have you ever followed that longing? Taken a step back from the known in your life and found yourself falling, falling, yet with the irrational certainty that the world is more right with you than it has ever been?"
During high school, I ran the mile on our track team. It's a four-lap race and I had a bad habit of loafing through the middle two laps and then running like crazy on the final lap. I managed to win fairly often with this approach but it drove my coach crazy. "Why don't you pour it on for all four laps," he said. "If you can run that fast at the end, then you could have run faster in between."
He was right. Although I feel as though I've "poured it on" across most of my career, I simultaneously feel as though I haven't taken enough risks or tried hard enough. It's so much easier to rationalize breathing enough to get by rather than taking a full breath and then "risking everything."
What is there to lose? If we make the leap, we will be ripped from the moorings that may have given us false comfort. Simultaneously, we are sure to discover new lands – places where we can live out so many of our unused gifts.
Isn't this what Love wants from us – to give everything and trust that God's Love will be with us all the way? And this is what Love asks of caregivers as we confront the pain of another: to enter their agony knowing we will be burned along the way. Then to know that we have done everything we can to lift another into the arms of Love.
This is our ultimate calling. Only the most courageous can live it out. It is only that small group who will be able to say to themselves, at the end: I have lived my life to the full."
-Reverend Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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