What do I want to be when I grow up.  This is a question I have been wrestling with for oh…. Well… since I was born.  As a matter of fact I think we all have.  What is the purpose of our lives? What is it that we wish to aspire to become and to continue to be in a process of becoming that?

 

When I was a child the answer was easy.  I would stand up straight and overly sure of myself say I want to be a paleontologist.  That thought started around the time that I was able to know what a dinosaur was (that is one of my earliest memories) and lasted through middle school.

 

Then high school happened and something happened. Something changed.  Paleontology took a back seat. My love for science began to become secondary to my love of what I would call religious experience.  I wanted to share that with people. I wanted to share the knowledge and truth about God I found revealed in nature.  I wanted others to love as I loved and to find some peace as I had. I decided to submit to what I will term a call experience and to pursue ministry proper.

 

College brought about a crisis.  I was no longer wanting to become something but had found myself becoming something.  As time went on I realized I was becoming an ecologist/biologist who still had notions and a love of God and the world.  I still wanted ministry and felt called to it but no longer was that call specifically to work with youth in the church.

 

Seminary.  It has refined me. Sharpened many of my senses and sensibilities.  Helped me adapt my understanding of God to what I know from science.  The more I do this the more distant from the church I feel.  As many might suggest I have spent many hours searching out my purpose, and more and more I am realizing that all I want to do is share by helping people develop their own ideas and truths about God.  However, as far as what I want to do when I grow up…? I am farther from an answer than I have ever been…

 

So I ask and encourage all of you reading this to ask with me, along side me, what is it that I/you/we should/want to be when I/you/we grow up…?  as well as asking what does God want I/you/us to be when we grow up?