A Road Less Travelled

 For most of my life I’ve thought that it would be a lot simpler if I had one all consuming interest. You know, the one thing that I would obsess about and I would know that I could serve God best by just working on the this one thing and studying it. For a lot of girls it seemed to be horses. I read several books on horse-girls and considered having this be my all consuming passion, but I never really got into it. For a while I was intrigued my geology and read up on gems and Moh’s scale of hardness and such things, but that phase passed. I dabbled in butterflies, coin collecting, collecting baskets, medicinal herbs, and at various stages planned my life as a gymnast, figure skater, private detective, actress, singer (yeah, yeah, I know–I’ve given up on that one), chef, or famous author. Writing was one of the things that carried through as a strong theme, but it shared the limelight with reading, baking, and all kinds of handcrafts, which really didn’t help narrow it down to my one all consuming interest. I decided this meant I was meant to be a homemaker and gave up on any other kind of focus. But still, it seemed like it wouldn’t hurt for a homemaker to have a specialty, and I couldn’t figure it out.

Fastforward to the present (give or take a couple of days): I’m watching a DVD on organizing the family, which Theresa suggested might be helpful for me personally. This guy (Patrick M. Lencioni) talks about core values and strategy and your three strategy anchors. The idea is you write all your strategy points that come to mind–these are basically all the things that are true about what you’re doing with your life or things that important to you. Then you kind of squint at it and say, “Well, I’m doing this because of this one…” and draw a little arrow. (Like, we live in the city because community is important to us. Just to pick a random example.) Pretty soon two or three of the things you’ve written down will have lots of little arrows pointing to them, and you’ve discovered your anchor strategy points. He has a couple of examples of this with lovely little arrows which all line up neatly pointing to the proper anchors.

Uh huh. Sure. It looks all simple when he does it–that’s because he planned it out beforehand. So I give it whirl. Next thing I know things are sliding into place. “No wonder I do crafts–it supports three of my other strategy points! And of course I read because I like stories, but then the stories feed into appreciating beauty…” Pretty soon I have three core strategy points that strike me as almost, but not quite, blindingly obvious.

The first one is appreciation of beauty–I lump this in with looking forward to heaven because they’re very closely linked in my head. Then is lifelong learning, then community/friendships. So I look at these three and think, “No wonder I’m intrigued by the idea of Christian culture and art–even if I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to look like.”