A member of my synagogue recently reminded me of a basic truth. Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
[featured-image single_newwindow=”false”]Put differently, in life the head less is less important than the heart. To do anything well, you need to know yourself and the heart that drives you.
In any job–including the clergy–it’s easy to become wrapped up in the meetings, the processes, the emails. We get so caught up in what to do that we forget why we do it. We can get so caught up in what we are doing that we fail to notice who we are becoming.
It’s not only in our work. It can happen in parenting: we get so focused on driving to baseball and dance that we forget why our kids do them in the first place.
We Lose Our Way When We Lose Our Why
We need reminders of our why. Remembering them not only makes us happier. It also makes us more productive and focused. Michael Hyatt reminds us that “we lose our way when we lose our why.”
Another word for our “why” is our purpose. We do not discover our purpose. We uncover it. In so doing, we uncover ourselves. We know who we are and what we are meant to do. We meet the person we most need to meet.
Meeting Myself
At age 16 I visited Israel. It was a ten-day trip for grandparents and grandchildren. My 82-year-old grandfather was the oldest person on the trip. He walked slowly and with some pain. My grandmother was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
Yet, he insisted on taking me and my two cousins. He pushed himself to go. Sometimes he would stay on the bus while we hiked and walked.
But we’d talk on the bus and each night after dinner. He’d tell us how excited he was to be there with us.
Who I Became
During this trip, as I was developing a love of Israel, I was discovering something about my family and about faith. They were connected. I saw my life, and my choices, as shaped by what my grandfather and my people had done. A new path, a new possibility opened before me.
The path did not unfold rapidly or directly. Yet, I felt what Christian thinkers often call a calling –a desire to serve and devote my life to something larger than myself.
Figuring out our calling can be overwhelming. How do we uncover the unique gifts we bring to a world of over seven billion people? But we can and we must. It leads us to become who God created us to be.
An Angel With a Stack of Books
Such is the lesson of a story told of Rabbi Hayim of Volozhin. He was among the nineteenth century’s greatest Jewish scholars. As a boy, however, he was an indifferent student.
One day he decided to abandon his studies and enter a trade school. He announced the decision to his parents, who reluctantly acquiesced. That night the young man had a dream. In it an angel held a stack of beautiful books.
“Whose books are those?” he asked. “They are yours,” the angel replied, “if you have the courage to write them.” That night changed the young man’s life. Reb Hayim was on the way to discovering who he was meant to become.
And so are we.
