Let Your Life Speak – the popular title by renowned spiritual writer and educator, Parker Palmer, is an apt summary of my discovery in the midst of a global pandemic. The book also prompted this journey for me. A specific line of the book penetrated through the hard exterior of acquired false humility (some call that pride haha) and the dullness of my own hearing to anything beyond status quo. The line is one quoted from Frederick Beuchner, “Vocation is where your great pleasure meets the world’s great need.” I spent most of my life to this point meeting the great needs I saw and intuited around me and doing the mental, emotional, and spiritual gymnastics to convince myself these needs, are in fact, my great pleasure. Vocation is a concept I have spent two years thinking about, praying about, and, perhaps misguidedly, trying to “solve.” Thank you to all those that have supported me in this journey! But, humans are more complex than a simple equation to solve.
Curiosity of vocation is leading me past the questions of what job would I like or be “good” at to the deeper questions of “what does it means to live a deeply human life?” What does it mean to be human? What does it look like to be a human being and to live a life that flourishes, not just survives (graduate school anyone…)? Parker Palmer goes on to comment that this journey of discovery necessarily must begin from within, to know who you are (maybe even what you are) and recognize your stunning beauty and natural limitations. The discovery of how you, specifically, particularly incarnate the life and image of God on earth in a unique distorted way in this beautifully broken matrix of society, nature, and humanity. The point being that you cannot start with what the world needs – it needs everything and often urgently. I mistakenly thought discovery of self could happen through meeting all the needs around me. What I discovered is that I simply have an addiction to meeting needs, being helpful, and assuaging my own insecurities through my indispensability to others – most often in a spiritual sense.
Now, need meeting can be quite good. My toddler has quite a few needs. Soon he will wake up and need a (another?!?) snack. What I am discovering is the hope of glory – Christ in me. Emphasis on me. Not that Jesus shouldn’t have the emphasis. But my particular background, early experiences, education and ministry orients me to Christ in you, or Christ in the world and what I am discovering is the seedling beauty and promise within a Creation theology and the basic Gospel. I am made in God’s image. I reflect him and this image is increasingly, by the power of the Spirit, conforming me to the image of God’s son – for the purpose of holistic, mature, abundant life with God. The point I am making with all this abstract language is that I reflect something of God – not simply when I meet needs or perform a religious service, but by being Landon. By being… human.
Accompanied with this truth came an unwelcome sense of freedom, as Jesus says, “You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.” Unwelcome because this freedom meant admitting truths, and subsequent truths unleashing longings, desires, hopes, dreams, that up to now I could hide from by helping you find Christ (meeting your needs). Simply put, it is a journey of owning more and more my full humanity and the invitation to mirror God’s creative goodness and abundance in the world.
This journey has already prompted major career decisions, future uncertainty, and lots and lots of reading. One of the other blessings/challenges it has given me is the opportunity to own my voice. To share it vulnerably and let more of my self – the real one – be seen by you, the world. So, I started this blog to reflect on this journey, to ask honest questions, to record my thoughts and discussions, and tangentially, I hope it is inspiring to discover Christ in you.
To Be Human is my own reflections, thoughts, even dreams meant to nurture this nascent image (humanity and divinity) in each of us – mostly myself. It is to honor authors, thinkers, and communities I engage with through serious reflection and honest questions. Much will be conversations prompted by the books I am reading or reflecting on. Some of it will be directed toward pastoral leadership and current conversations or questions for the church. My hope is that it will prompt serious reflection and honest questions in you and ultimately that these would lead to people, families, and communities pursuing wisdom and character. My desire is that we all might re-member more of our humanity in a world subtly pressuring us to the confines of machine, standardized, and disembodied existence. As Craig Gay puts it, to embrace “ordinary embodied human existence” and thus to embrace Christ our brother.
To Be Human 