I lately found a prayer I wrote in my journal on my 60th birthday. It was the time of life when my days were filled with singing and traveling on weekends, helping our daughters with their four children (ages 3-10) with their schedules, writing song lyrics, publicity pieces, and articles, and keeping up with home, meals, guests, and the laundry. At that time I had also opened a place we called Gaither Family Resources, a welcoming place filled with books, music, décor, and coffee shop.
My life was varied and busy—too busy. I was always fighting for solitude to think and read, and longing to expand my academic research. There were books I needed to write. I was jugging all these things like a circus performer, loving it all but seemingly never able to focus on my “calling”. Here is the prayer:
Dear God,
It seems as if my plans for myself have always been written in Jello. Maybe it’s because my best gift has turned out to be adapting. I never could narrow down what I wanted to do or what I should prepare for because I was interested in it all.
I still feel that way, but now I am coming to believe that this smattering of jobs you’ve given me is my calling. In fact, I’ve come to recognize after sixty years of living – how dense can I be? – that maybe even the things other people perceive are my callings, the things you’ve given me to do, weren’t my calling either – or at least, not all of it.
I am finally coming to believe that you simply call me to show up for work. (I’ve always been everybody’s workhorse and sometimes resented that.) But you give me a job to go to so that you can interrupt my days. It’s been the interruptions – as I look back – that really counted for eternity.
I’m so sorry that I have missed some of these. I repent that I’ve sometimes turned people away you sent into my life – put them off, cut short my times with them, scheduled them for a more convenient time – when you intended them to be my life.
I used to pine over books that didn’t sell as much as I hoped they would, degrees I couldn’t finish, and opportunities I couldn’t take advantage of. I still do sometimes.
Today help me to see what you really give me to do: help the person in the ditch; take the child on my knee who’s interrupting my conversation and talk to him or her; fix soup to lift someone’s work load; talk to the person in the store who’s keeping me from finishing the display… Whatever you put in my path – let me assume it’s my calling and do it with verve and joy. Amen.
Now, more than two decades later, I have come to believe what our daughter Suzanne always says: God’s will for your life is to do the next thing.
Yes! God’s will is and always has been to embrace and do what is on my plate for today with all the energy and passion I have, and not ask God for any more information until I have done that. I have discovered that when we “walk in the light”, the light moves. If we stay in the light of “God’s will” for today, we must move, too. Perhaps we see God’s will only in hindsight. As “regular” as it seems at the time, it doesn’t get any more glamorous than that. But I have also learned that when we bring our preparations to God, give up our pre-made plans, and give all our struggling to the Holy Spirit, we have grabbed a whirlwind by the tail. When we ask God for an adventure, we better mean it!
