What Color Is Your Parachute?

and assure them of your love). Since you know this is part of your Mission, part of the reason why you came to Earth, your calling is clear. You know which road to take, which decision to make.

You have not behaved at your most noble, recently. And now you are face to face with someone who asks you a question about what happened. Decision time. In your mind’s eye you see two spiritual roads lying before you: the one leading to less honesty in the world (you lie about what happened, or what you were feeling, because you fear losing their respect or their love), the other leading to more honesty in the world (you tell the truth, together with how you feel about it, in retrospect). Since you know this is part of your Mission, part of the reason why you came to Earth, your calling is clear. You know which road to take, which decision to make.

Comment 4: The Spectacle That Makes the Angels Laugh

It is necessary to explain this part of our Mission in some detail, because so many times you will see people wringing their hands, and saying, “I want to know what my Mission in life is,” all the while they are cutting people off on the highway, refusing to give time to people, punishing their mate for having hurt their feelings, and lying about what they did. And it will seem to you that the angels must laugh to see this spectacle. For these people wringing their hands, their Mission was right there, on the freeway, in the interruption, in the hurt, and at the confrontation.

Comment 5: The Valley Versus the Mountaintop

At some point in your life your Mission may involve some grand mountaintop experience, where you say to yourself, “This, this, is why I came into the world. I know it. I know it.” But until then, your Mission is here in the valley, and the fog, and the little callings moment by moment, day by day. More to the point, it is likely you cannot ever get to your mountaintop Mission unless you have first exercised your stewardship faithfully in the valley.

It is an ancient principle, to which Jesus alluded often, that if you don’t use the information the Universe has already given you, you cannot expect it will give you any more. If you aren’t being faithful in small things, how can you expect to be given charge over larger things? (Luke 16:10–12, 19:11–24). If you aren’t trying to bring more gratitude, kindness, forgiveness, honesty, and love into the world each day, you can hardly expect that you will be entrusted with the Mission to help bring peace into the world or anything else large and important. If we do not live out our day-by-day Mission in the valley, we cannot expect we are yet ready for a larger mountaintop Mission.

Comment 6: The Importance of Not Thinking of This Mission as “Just a Training Camp”

The valley is not just a kind of “training camp.” There is in your imagination even now an invisible spiritual mountaintop to which you may go, if you wish to see where all this is leading. And what will you see there, in the imagination of your heart, but the goal toward which all this is pointed: that Earth might be more like heaven. That human life might be more like God’s. That is the large achievement toward which all our day-by-day Missions in the valley are moving. This is a large order, but it is accomplished by faithful attention to the doing of our great Creator’s will in little things as well as in large. It is much like the building of the pyramids in Egypt, which was accomplished by the dragging of a lot of individual pieces of stone by a lot of individual men.

The valley, the fog, the going step by step, is no mere training camp. The goal is real, however large. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth, as it is in heaven.”

SOME RANDOM COMMENTS ABOUT YOUR THIRD MISSION IN LIFE

Your third Mission here on Earth is one that is uniquely yours, and that is:

a) to exercise the Talent that you particularly came to Earth to use—your greatest gift that you most delight to use,

b) in those place(s) or setting(s) that God has caused to appeal to you the most,

c) and for those purposes that God most needs to have done in the world.

Comment 1: Our Mission Is Already Written, “in Our Members”

It is customary in trying to identify this part of our Mission, to advise that we should ask God, in prayer, to speak to us—and tell us plainly what our Mission is. We look for a voice in the air, a thought in our head, a dream in the night, a sign in the events of the day, to reveal this thing that is otherwise (it is said) completely hidden. Sometimes, from just such answered prayer, people do indeed discover what their Mission is, beyond all doubt and uncertainty.

But having to wait for the voice of God to reveal what our Mission is, is not the truest picture of our situation. St. Paul, in Romans, speaks of a law “written in our members”—and this phrase has a telling application to the question of how God reveals to each of us our unique Mission in life. Read again the definition of our third Mission (above) and you will see: the clear implication of the definition is that God has already revealed His will to us concerning our vocation and Mission, by causing it to be “written in our members.” We are to begin deciphering our unique Mission by studying our talents and skills, and more particularly which ones (or one) we most rejoice to use.

God actually has written His will twice in our members: first in the talents that He lodged there, and second in His guidance of our heart, as to which Talent gives us the greatest pleasure from its exercise (it is usually the one that, when we use it, causes us to lose all sense of time).

Even as the anthropologist can examine ancient inscriptions, and divine from them the daily life of a long- lost people, so we by examining our talents and our heart can more often than we dream divine the Will of the Living God. For true it is, our Mission is not something He will reveal; it is something He has already revealed. It is not to be found written in the sky; it is to be found written in our members.

Comment 2: Career Counseling: We Need You