today i am grateful for…
gentle, profound reminders of God’s plan for my life, His hope for all of our lives. I started reading Abraham Verghese’s Stone for Cutting this morning on my subway ride to work. I was transfixed by the dialogue on page 7, a conversation between a young boy, Marion, and a nun, Matron. My breathing slowed and my heart raced as the words pierced me deep and then gently rocked me back calm again. God’s timing is not just perfect, it is Perfection!
We, man/woman, can’t help but ponder purpose. Some of us grapple with and then quickly pin down questions of calling, bliss and purpose. We step into our purpose easily. We know exactly what we’ll be and we start our race early. Others of us wrestle for days, years, decades even with thoughts of what we will become, what we will create, what we will leave behind. Some will say do what makes you deliriously happy, or do what comes easiest and most natural to you. At different points in my life I accepted that; it made (makes) sense. Why do something hard or that requires herculean effort, life’s too short, right? Verghese offers a profound alternative: leave no part of your instrument (your talents, your intellect, your soul) unexplored, do the hardest thing you can imagine and find out what God has made possible in you because life is indeed too short.
Verghese writes:
I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and adolescence. “What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?” she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life.
I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency: “Why must I do what is hardest?”
“Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can play the ‘Gloria?’
How unfair of Matron to evoke that soaring chorale which always made me feel that I stood with every mortal creature looking up to the heavens in dumb wonder. She understood my unformed character.
“But, Matron, I can’t dream of playing Bach, the ‘Gloria…,” I said under my breath. I’d never played a string or wind instrument. I couldn’t read music.
“No Marion,” she said, her gaze soft, reaching for me, her gnarled hands rough on my cheeks. “No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria. Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.”
I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field – internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.
And so I became a surgeon.
What is the hardest thing you can imagine doing? Go, and do that.
for a beautiful life,
{image found via pinterest | listen to an inspiring TED talk by Abraham Verghese here}.
