Have you reached that "certain age" in life? The age when your children are grown, or nearly so. Are you looking at your life and asking questions such as: "Is this all GOD has planned for me?" "What am I going to do with the rest of my life?" "What can I do that is meaningful and will be of value long after I have left this earth?" If you are a woman who is asking herself these or similar questions, Embracing Your Second Calling by Dale Hanson Bourke may offer the motivation and inspiration you are seeking.
The author was a corporate "player" who thought nothing of zipping from one coast to the other for an early morning meeting and then zipping back for a family event that evening. She was high energy and lived a fast paced life juggling work, husband, children, home, church in order to be successful in all things. Until one day when she woke up and asked herself why she was living that way and was that all there was to life. So she took an early retirement and from there she began the search for meaning in life, as it were. She took other jobs and a couple more retirements over the next few years, always going toward a slower pace of life. Sort of. LOL Frankly, her slowest day would probably make me dizzy.
Maybe you, as I did, are thinking this book won't have anything to offer you because you have never been a high power anything and if you slow your pace of life anymore someone may call the funeral home. I admit that it took me a while, and a couple of re-starts, to finish this book; mostly because I thought it would be wasting my time since I'd never been "success" oriented in the way she was. But I like to finish what I start so I finally buckled down and did it. I'm glad I did. What Ms. Bourke has to say is good for anyone; young or old, high energy or lethargic, success oriented or content to just get by.
Some of the things Ms. Bourke focuses on in Embracing Your Second Calling include prayer, relationships, and getting beyond the "titles" by which you've been identified to this point in life. She looks at the life of Naomi and contrasts her worldly failures and spiritual successes with what we value in our lives today, bringing a number of things into better focus than they seem to be when see them through our smudged "world view". She talks about the importance of prayer being the foundation of everything we do. But she presents a picture of prayer that is more practical, I think, than we usually see because it doesn't involve setting aside hours each week to bring our "shopping list" (my words, not hers) to GOD. She discusses the importance of relationship, both friendships and mentoring, in the lives of older women. She also talks about dropping old "baggage" from the past and being willing to accept a new "identity" for the future in order to let GOD make us who He intended all along that we should become.
Ms. Bourke's writing style is simple, almost conversational. She looks at the facts of Naomi's life and considers possible motives but does so without going into a deep study of Biblical languages, etc. She tries to look at life and our choices in life based on an eternal value system. But she does this without being preachy or critical about the things she has left behind. I am amazed that she could accomplish this. :-) Reading this book felt almost like talking with an old friend whose heart was knit to my own.
Embracing Your Second Calling isn't a book to tell you that one life style is right and another is wrong. Her focus is on priorities but without focusing on a list. For Ms. Bourke this meant simplifying her life; although, as I indicated earlier, her "simplified" life still looks pretty hectic to me. Rather than saying, "Do this" or "Don't do that" she focuses more on values. Without criticizing anyone's choices, past or present, she gently encourages those eternal values I mentioned earlier. Most of the women she talked about in the book lead lives that are much closer to the corporate executive end of the spectrum than the stay at home mom end where I have lived. This is the main thing that almost kept me from finishing the book. However, she did such a good job of presenting the principles she was sharing that such differences didn't really matter and were hardly noticeable.
So, I said this book is good for women in any walk of life; and that is true because those principles are valid in all our lives. However, it is really written for the woman who is in a place to make changes in her life or who is having changes thrust upon her, for whatever reason. Ms. Bourke suggests that there are things more important than "success" or "winning" and that we should be making our life decisions based on those more important principles. If you are a young woman with children to care for and think you aren't in a place to make changes in your life, you can still find inspiration in this book. It won't encourage you to put your children in day care and go into the workforce; what it will do is encourage you to begin to build those important activities into your life NOW so you don't have so many changes to make when you hit those middle years. If you are already in the middle years, as I am, it doesn't criticize what you've done or are doing. The books isn't really activity focused so much as it is attitude, heart, and eternity focused. It encourages us to stretch ourselves to the point where we find ourselves outside our natural comfort zones. That will look different for each of us.
Are you ready to give GOD control of what you do and where you go? Are you ready to be stretched to places you never thought you would be? Are you ready to look at life from a perspective that doesn't value success more than being who GOD made you to be? Are you ready to be the woman that GOD made you to be, the woman He has been shaping through all your life this far? I heartily recommend Embracing Your Second Calling.
Happy Reading :-)
Thanks for sharing, Diane. One of my great interests is encouraging others (and myself) to live purpose-fulfilling lives during these middle and senior years! What a great opportunity to benefit from the teachings from the victories and failures and status quos of our pasts, to engage in deep prayer for empowerment from God's Holy Spirit to live out the purposes and exercise most fully the spiritual gifts each of us have to bring forth spiritual fruits and productivity in these years! I see them as potentially the most exciting ones. God bless us and help us to follow Him fully and fulfill His calls and empower us to manifest the fruits and gifts of His Spirit working in and through us! LH
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