Let Your Life Speak
Listening for the Voice of Vocation
by Parker Palmer
Summary
Let your life speak. In other words, be the person you were born to be, the part of the image of God you were created to display to the world. To do so, you must embrace the good as well as the bad in yourself, and learn to recognize your human limitations. Refuse to take the path of least resistance, which will squeeze your life into a confining box. And instead, embrace the beauty and difficulties in all seasons of life, pay attention to your inner self, wait for ‘way to open,’ and take the necessary risks when it does. This kind of authentic living is what will make the world a better place. But it is not easy to do. Younger generations need the guidance and encouragement of elders to help them persevere on the journey.
Author’s Website
Let Your Life Speak - Book by Parker Palmer
Favorite Quotes
“It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values in the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live—but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.”
“Each of us arrives here with a nature, which means both limits and potentials. We can learn as much about our nature by running into our limits as by experiencing our potentials.”
“When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless—a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other’s need to be cared for. That kind of giving is not only loveless but faithless, based on the arrogant and mistaken notion that God has no way of channeling love to the other except through me…When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself—and me—even as I give it away.”
“A leader is someone with the power to project either shadow or light onto some part of the world and onto the lives of the people who dwell there.”
