Intro to Reading: Blog 9

I read Let Your Life Speak:  Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker J. Palmer.  I read this week for 3 hours. 

This book focuses on finding one's vocation through listening to one's heart and the inner voice within.  It talks about understanding your limitations and potentials and learning to really listen.  It goes on to talk about how we often have to suffer and journey into the darkness of things before we can reach the light and be made stronger.  This only makes our relationship with God stronger and is a necessary part of life.  The book also has a segment on depression.  It talks about the meaning of depression, the author talks about what it is like for the person in depression, and what it's like to be the onlooker into another's depression and how an onlooker can sometimes only make things worse through encouragement.  The result of depression is meant to be a journey towards God.  The book also talks about leadership and community.  It tells how in order to be a good leader you can't be power hungry, rather you have to lead and serve those your leading from your heart, and that is where your power as a leader lies.  Also being a good leader means taking risks and seeing failure as a learning opportunity.  Book emphasises how community is meant to help encourage one another in their inner works to the Lord (such as meditation, journaling, silent prayer...spiritual disiciplines) and be with one another in their aloneness.  The author ends the book with a reflection: our lives are like the four seasons in that it is a never ending journey one that we can not control, thus we need to learn to let go. 

This book was very inspiring to me and really was something that I could relate with a lot at this point in my life.