The awareness that I am Jonah was not immediate.
I woke many hours ago delighted to be alive. I woke with a knowing about what I liked to do and what I did not like to do, what made me happiest, what made me frustrated. To know these personal elements is like chiseling granite to form a piece of beauty. And though the beautifulness wore off as the day wore on, the aura of having meaning…having purpose… did not. It bore the day with me like a friendly shadow, attached protecting comforting knowing.
But the day dragged on. I began to tire of the drudgery, the making beds, the cleaning bathrooms, the dusting furniture, the vacuuming floors. I felt like I was cheating my inner self by choice.
Still, it is good to at least know the goal…
Then the distance between myself and the goal measured itself through a video from Super Soul Sunday, an interview with Tim Shriver.
A Kennedy.
A man after my own heart.
A man who had listened to his heart and followed soon after with his soul.
Leaving me in the dust and so far behind.
Reminding me in vivid colors of the goal I had traded for wrinkled sheets and dust balls.
https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey/videos/tim-shriver/440376803354492/
I posted the video on my facebook page and then tried to write what the interview meant to me. But I couldn’t find the right words, because it had meant so much. My clients. My friends. A time in my life that I had planted roots where the wind insisted on blowing, had changed lives while my own had been changed forever. And I continue to beam with joy whenever I share any of their stories.
“Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying, “I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, ‘I am driven away from our sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?’ The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O Lord my, God. As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the Lord; and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty. But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.“