http://www.journeyoflyle.com

A few days ago someone I went to high school with asked me:

What do you want to do with all of your schooling once you are finished? What is your ultimate goal?

At about the same time as she asked me this, I was also working on my mid-program review for which one of the questions I had to respond to was:

What are your personal goals as a student in your degree and what progress have you made toward accomplishing these goals?

Some who know me, know that I am not a “goal” oriented person. Its not that I don’t have desires and hopes, and have nothing I wish to accomplish. I just don’t have measurable quantifiable goals. I find them to restrictive and constraining. Instead I prefer to leave my options open and be flexible to what may come.

Yes there are things I want to happen which may be quantifiable and measurable, such as eventually graduate, but I am willing to adapt and adjust even that if needed. For I am not going for a degree for the sake of the degree but because I feel that it is important an important part of my call and will aid me in fulfilling that call. At least that is how I have interpreted and understood the reassured call that I needed to continue my education for what I am called to be. But that sense of call in and of itself was to further my studies, which I have been doing, and not superficially for the end degree.

Often I have expressed my end desires as “Doing that which I am called to do” or “Embracing my call as a minister and as a human” or… “Share the peace of Christ by responding, embracing, and living my calling.” But what does this mean? What is truly my ultimate goal?

Well I think I have found perhaps a more clear and in depth expression that can be understood from people of different perspectives and understandings. (Its a work in progress so it will probably receive tweaking as the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years…. go by). It is longer here than how I expressed it in response to either question.

My life goal and aspiration is to work with and in community to:

• Help heal and restore broken and unhealthy relationships. (Including such relationships as between self and self, self and other, self and community, self and humanity, self and creation, self and Creating One, community and creation, community and Creating One…. and all other relationships)
• Help people to see and embrace their worth and the worth of all persons. (and the worth of creation)
• Help people see, embrace and respond to the grace and love that is present in their lives and the lives of those around them. (and in all of creation)
• Help people to actively and radically respond to that grace and love, in order that others may come to see and recognize it. That they to may aid in the restoring and healing of relationship.
• That in this process I am open to the actions of others so that I to may be healed and made aware.
• That in this process I recognize, embrace, and rejoice in the many ways that people define and understand and encounter this process which to me is the faithful response to the grace and love that I most clearly see in the birth, life, ministry, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ and in the continuing presence of the eternal Living Christ and moving of the Spirit which is also evident in all of creation, but others see, understand and encounter in many other ways.

As for my education, I feel it aids me in embracing this life long goal, that can truly not be measured, at least not by me.

Peace