Letting Go of Imagined Castles

I have been stewing some thought into the gifts I have been given, and how to use them better, for the glory of God. I don't have all the answers but I believe it is the thing we most seek in our lives, even if we don't know that we seek it. We all want to fulfill purpose, and that is part of the gifts we are given to use for good.

One thing I know and see so much these days is that in this world, we tend to look at others to decide who we are and what we want to do. That's obviously not the way that God wants us to live, as that sets us up for a comparison game that will never be satisfied, and it leaves our own gifts behind.

Thomas Merton wrote, in his book No Man is an Island, how it is only when we let go of all that we hold onto and stop trying to be what everyone else seems to be, that we can truly know who we are. We become too focused on others as we "seek to imitate one another's imagined greatness". 

It hit me that we so often lose sight of our own vocation/gift by looking at other people and wanting what we imagine they have. Let me emphasize the important words in that sentence as "wanting what we imagine they have." So many times our own imaginations take off with assumptions of imagined castles in the sky that someone else gets to live in, but if we look more closely, we shall see that right where we are at this moment is probably right where we need to be. There is growth opportunity here. That imagined castle just isn't right for you. Maybe it isn't clear, yet, but it will be. 

The letting go part is that we are to have an indifference toward things of our lives so that we do not try to possess anything, as if they fulfilled us. Anything can be taken away from us in our lives, but not God. Only God is able to fill us completely, but we try to fill ourselves with other things that hinder our true selves from being expressed.