I often wonder if I’ll ever be content with how I’m spending my life.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy where I am. I do.
It is generally gratifying and challenging and sometimes I actually feel like I’m making a difference. Life is not overly difficult right now. I have great family and friends, and I am not ungrateful for any of that.
But there is a feeling that burns in my chest that there is something bigger that I am supposed to be doing-that I’m using a small fraction of the potential we all are given.
I think part of it is that I’ve met some pretty amazing people over the past few weeks that I’m secretly really jealous of.
One guy, Chad, decided at age 17, that he was going to clean up the rivers of the United States. He started with a single boat, piling trash in his parent’s backyard. And now he has a major cleanup operation with a full crew, barges, a tugboat, a soon-to-be-aired TV series, and a host of national honors and awards. I met another guy, Paul, who started his own custom heavy equipment fabrication shop and now has a government grand-funded side project of building a biomass-burning furnace that could heat a whole block of homes on nothing more than mulched waste wood products for over a week at a time, unattended. It doesn’t stop there though. He’s already making and selling a dozen other products created from what other throw away and has plans to open biomass processing centers across the U.S., built from other discarded materials (I won’t give away all his secrets).
I hear people tell their stories about serving the poor, the oppressed, and the orphans in places half way around the world and how life-altering it is. How a group of unlikely, untrained, and seemingly naïve missionaries visits a place in the desert and the next thing you know, the ambassador of some far off place is coming to their home in Wisconsin to talk about foreign policy.
I just don’t have that kind of vision. And when I hear others speak of their plans and dreams that they are actually chasing and believing, I feel….mundane. Average. That I am wasting the days I have been given.
Isn’t there something more?
And am I so caught up in this fever-paced, calendar-ized, rush through one thing to get to the next, life that I’m missing it?
What have I been created to do?
And if I find that thing, how do jump from this race and chase after it?
