TGIF
A dear Christian friend of mine, Buddy Goodman, gave me a book for Christmas that I read over the holidays. More importantly, I have given much additional thought to that book since I first read it. The title of the book is How To Find Your Mission In Life, written by Richard N. Bolles, and was originally published in 1991. He is also “author of the best-selling job-hunting book What Color Is Your Parachute?, which explores the spiritual aspects of finding one’s place in the world.” I have spent so much time in recent months rethinking how I arrived at this place in God’s world.
All I knew in high school is that I loved math more than any other subject, had the same math teacher throughout high school, and which led me to become a math major in college. During my freshman year in college, I noticed a beautiful girl named Cindy Wilhelm (her maiden name) who I saw speaking to a good friend of mine from church back home, who also went to high school with Cindy, and who agreed to introduce me to her at the right time. Soon after meeting Cindy, I took my first statistics course in college and knew instantly that I wanted to go to graduate school to study statistics. It is truly amazing how quickly these three critical life events happened, seemingly randomly, in my life – (1) becoming a math major in college, (2) meeting Cindy, and (3) deciding to continue graduate studies in statistics. I had no idea how important these three life events would be to my overall life satisfaction, and where it led Cindy and I together on our life path.
Cindy and I completed college, got married that summer of 1970, and planned to move to Gainesville FL for me to attend graduate school for two years. We then figured that we would need to move north to find a job for me, with my Master’s Degree in statistics well in hand. Well, that two-year plan blew up quickly as I continued my studies to earn a PhD in Biostatistics, and then landed a faculty job at UF, which lasted for 30 years. The reality is that we raised our two children happily in Gainesville, and watched them become proud Gators as well as their parents!
So Cindy and I have lived happily in Gainesville now for almost 56 years, and for all but two weeks of our entire married life. How could this have possibly happened?
Richard Bolles then explains in a chapter titled How Our Mission Got Chosen: A Scenario for the Romantic. Richard states It is a mystery which we cannot fathom, in this life at least, as to why one of us has this talent, and the other one has that; why God chose to give one gift – and Mission – to one person, and a different gift – and Mission – to another. Since we do not know, and in some degree cannot know, we are certainly left free to speculate, and imagine.
We may imagine that before we came to Earth, our souls, our Breath, our Light, stood before the great Creator and volunteered for this Mission. And God and we, together, chose what that Mission would be and what particular gifts would be needed, which He then agreed to give us, before our birth.
Thus, our Mission was not a command given peremptorily by an unloving Creator to a reluctant slave without a vote, but was a task jointly designated by us both, in which as fast as the great Creator said, “I wish”, our hearts responded , “Oh yes.”
Our searching for our Mission is therefore a searching to recover the memory of something we ourselves had a part in designing.
I did not realize at the time the significance of those three events occurring very closely together, and how influential each one of them would be on our resulting lives. However, over time they made all the difference in my life and Cindy’s, a true GodWink moment for both of us as we realize the major impact God had on our lives in that small moment of time, and then continuing throughout our married life together!
I will likely continue on this topic next week as well, as there is another aspect of this book that I wish to share with you.