Just Plowing My Little Field

A number of years ago, I thought I knew what I was supposed to do with my life. At the time I thought that this plan was God ordained. For the years that I lived with that dream, it was all consuming. There were aspects of that dream that were hard, things that I was just not gifted to do. But other parts of that dream were wonderful, like electricity flowing in my veins.

Then the dream began to unravel.

For about seven years now, I have been wandering, a defeated refugee from that broken dream. Meanwhile, I have tried to keep up appearances. I’ve loved my wife and kids, tried to be a good husband and father. I’ve punched the clock at work. All the while wandering, not so much physically, but wandering in a spiritual sense.

I tried to hang onto the remnants of the dream. Occasionally I would try to jump start the dream by pursuing the opportunities that were in line with what it used to be. None of those opportunities came to anything.

As I sat in church today, the realization came to me that the door my former dream is closed. I wasn’t sure if it was closed permanently or just for a time. But I felt pretty sure that it was closed for a reason.

Then, this afternoon I read this post from Donald Miller’s blog. This part of Miller’s post really struck me.

“If you have an opportunity to “build God’s kingdom” in some massive way, but the work is like pulling teeth, I think you have to really ask yourself if that is what God is calling you to do. There are times (Jonah) when the problem isn’t the work, it’s you. But there are also times when the problem is the work itself, namely that the work just isn’t for you.”

In this post he compares what we are ordained to do, with farming and plowing a field. He asks the question:

“So my question to you is, what’s your field, and are you plowing it? Are you plowing too little? Are you plowing too much? What’s your sweet spot, and in ten years, will you have a small orchard that can feed your family and some of your friends? What’s your land to toil?”

As I read his post, I realized that the door to my former dream is closed because; to use Miller’s words it’s not my field to plow. Now that I write these words, I can officially pronounce the dream dead. What’s funny is that rather than feel sad about the death of this thing I once held so dear, I feel a sense of relief.

Miller goes on to write:

“I firmly believe that God calls people into work, gives them a heart to do things, that seem to have nothing to do with the kingdom, and furthermore, nobody will ever be able to figure out why it is God would have them do it. Except this: Nothing speaks more powerfully than a person who has been set free to do the work he loves.”

Martin Luther spoke to a similar concept when he said that when we work in our ordinary occupations, that we are “masks of God”. By this he means that we put our face on God’s work in the world by our vocations even if that vocation is an ordinary one.

I don’t have to chase that former dream in order to please God. Apparently it wasn’t my field to plow. I am free to plow my little field and in doing so am pleasing to God in my own little way.