This month’s introductory question: So, what do you want to be when you grow up? This is a question we ask children and adults. We grow up getting clues as to who we should be from significant others and multimedia images and stories. We begin in a once upon a time and have a goal of living happily ever after. Somewhere between the ages of three and ten, we seem to be drawn to the land of superheroes.
If you doubt that we all arrive in this world with gifts and as a gift, pay attention to an infant or a very young child. They arrive in this world as this kind of person rather than that, or that, or that. They do not show up as raw material to be shaped into whatever image the world might want them to take. They arrive with their own gifted form, with the shape of their own sacred soul. Biblical faith calls it the image of God in which we are all created. Thomas Merton calls it true self. Quakers call it the inner light, or “that of God” in every person. The humanist tradition calls it identity and integrity. No matter what you call it, it is a pearl of great price.”[2]
Today you will meet a man, a friend of mine actually who has spent a great deal of his life facilitating the process of discovery for himself and for those young folks for whom he has been an agent. This chapter of his story is about his tour as a chef on VisionQuest Rehabilitation Wagon Train for troubled teens.
[1] /www.kqed.org/mindshift/24472/for-students-why-the-question-is-more-important-than-the-answer
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Until next time, remember,-
You are not alone.
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You are not your circumstances.
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You have everything within you to live a purpose-filled life.