I am currently in a season of reading. I can’t seem to devour books fast enough. It has been a ridiculously revealing and yet wonderful journey…
As of late, I have been savoring The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning.
This is a passage that bears sharing. It aptly describes where I am at in life and reflects the emerging drive that I find in my bones.
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A man can have piled up an impressive portfolio of dollars and honors, get his name in Who’s Who, and then wake up one morning asking, “Is it all worth it?” Competent teachers, nurses, and clergy can reach the top only to discover that the job no longer fascinates; There is nowhere higher to go. They find themselves terrified of stagnation and asking, ” Should I switch careers? Would returning to school help?”
Gail Sheehy’s second journey began at thirty-five when she was covering a story in northern Ireland. She was standing next to a young man when a bullet blew off his face. On that Bloody Sunday, she felt herself confronted with death and what she called “the arithmetic of life.” She suddenly realized, “No one is with me. No one keeps me safe. There is no one who won’t ever leave me alone.” Bloody Sunday threw Gail Sheehy off balance and flung at her a barrage of painful questions about her ultimate purpose and values.
It need not be a bullet that initiates a second journey. A thirty-two-year-old husband learns of his wife’s infidelity. A forty-year-old company director finds that making money suddenly seems absurd. A forty-five-year-old journalist gets smashed up in a car accident. However it happens, such people feel confused and even lost. They can no longer keep life in working order. They are dragged away from chosen and cherished patterns to face strange crises. This is their second journey.
Second journeys usually end quietly with a new wisdom and a coming of true sense of self that releases great power. The wisdom is that of an adult who has regained equilibrium, stabilized, and found fresh purpose and new dreams. It is a wisdom that gives some things up, lets some things die, and accepts human limitations. It is a wisdom that realizes: I cannot expect anyone to understand me fully.
For the Christian, this second journey usually occurs between the ages of thirty and sixty and is often accompanied by a second call from the Lord Jesus. The second call invites us to a serious reflection on the nature and quality of our faith in the gospel of grace, our hope in the new and not yet, and our love for God and people. The second call is a summons to a deeper, more mature commitment to faith where the naivete, first fervor, and untested idealism of the morning and the first commitment have been seasoned with pain, rejection, failure, loneliness, and self-knowledge.
The call asks, Do you really accept the message that God is head over heals in love with you?
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Excerpt from Chapter Nine of the book “The Ragamuffin Gospel” by Brennan Manning
