Other Perspectives Assignment

I'll temporarily cease my determined search for a successful Spider Solitaire game to update this blog.  Recent posts have included insights in response to several personality surveys.  This week's assignment goes a bit further.  I asked several people what they believed I am passionate about, good at, and am likely to be doing ten years from now.

Here's the list of what they think I'm passionate about: singing, family, relationships, God's Word, performing arts, artwork, photography, pleasing God, and genealogy.  I'm a fairly mellow person, and to me, passion conveys enthusiasm and excessive energy around a particular subject, so I have a difficult time saying that I'm passionate about anything, but I will say that all these are things I either enjoy or care about, so I wouldn't really disagree with any of them.  And perhaps it sounds really "Christian," but I believe I would put pleasing God first on this list, followed by relationships, genealogy and the arts.

Now for what my dear friends, family and mentors consider me to be good at: Bible study, friendships, details, working menial tasks to completion, including others, insightful communication, listening, general intelligence, singing, photography, languages, art and planning.  What a list!  It certainly does something to inflate the ego.  Along the lines of personality, these responses center on details, determination and thoughtfulness, if I'm drawing the right conclusions.  I would tend to agree with this.  I spend a large portion of the day observing and speculating.  I am very detail-oriented and don't mind doing boring tasks, but am rather determined and don't like leaving tasks unfinished.  Along the lines of talent, it sticks to artsy type pastimes, all of which I enjoy, but haven't gotten used to the fact that some people get to make a living doing them.

And last is the list of possible careers, which, I will say seems to match my own feelings in the matter, because it covers a vast array of interests and is pretty long: Bible translator, greeting card designer, accountant, professional photographer, architect, psychologist, social worker, missionary, teacher, something international, designer, writer, artist, and writing/editing devotions or Christian literature.  Naturally, this doesn't do much in helping me decide a major, but it nice that others believe I could end up doing those things which are on my ginormous list of possible careers.  I'm not sure, though, whether these careers ended up on the list because of my friends' insights into my personality, or because they didn't necessarily disagree with what I have from time to time mentioned I might like to do in the future, and they simply remembered those careers and repeated them back to me.  Either way, it does help to see certain career interests being confirmed by those who know me well.

I'm not particularly concerned about what I'll be doing in the future, or even trying to narrow down this list too much.  God's calling for my life will be shown at some point, and perhaps only realized after I have completed it.  For now, I consider myself fortunate to have a future that is so full of possibilities that it could go in any direction and I might be able to do any number of jobs to serve God and further His kingdom.