WHAT YOU CAN’T NOT DO
How Your Purpose Drives You
Have you ever felt an inner pull toward something you couldn’t fully explain — a longing, an urge, almost a compulsion, to follow a particular path?
I’ll never forget a night in a Paris hotel room with my daughter Julia. It was Christmas, the first one since her father had died. We’d come to build a different kind of holiday — one without him in it.
The trip was raw. Julia had trouble putting words to her grief; we’d been divorced fifteen years, and our losses didn’t quite match. But at the Christmas Eve service, the old hymns undid her. She heard her father’s voice in them — deep, resonant, unmistakably his — and she finally broke down in my arms. For the first time all trip, I didn’t feel helpless.
A few nights later, near the end of our stay, I came back from dinner to find her hunched over her laptop. She looked up with a brightness in her eyes I hadn’t seen since she was four or five.
“I’m going to pursue a career as a chef.”
I felt two things at once: a jolt of excitement, and a flash of oh no — four years of college, post grad portfolio school, and now this? Photography, then communications and philosophy, and now culinary school?
I caught myself. I’d changed direction five or six times myself before I found the work that fit. It happens. Often. It isn’t a detour — it’s the process.
Julia had already read my face. “I don’t need the full program,” she said. “I can take targeted classes — knife skills, food safety. I’ll pay for it myself. I can start in January.”
She’s never looked back.
What she found that night wasn’t just a career idea. It was the place where her skills, her personality, and her passion converged into something she could actually give the world. Parker Palmer has a phrase for the posture that gets you there: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.” Vocation isn’t manufactured by willpower — it’s discovered by paying attention to who you already are.
Where This Shows Up in Real Life
Maybe you’ve had a moment like Julia’s. Or maybe you did the other thing — followed the opportunities in front of you and got good at climbing. Stability, prestige, the next rung.
I see this constantly in my clients. Engineers, designers, technologists who excelled at the work they loved — and got promoted straight out of it, into leadership roles that demand an entirely different skill set. They’re good at managing now. But the thing that made them come alive is gone.
I see it in clients winding down their careers, staring down retirement and asking: What now? Golf and travel can’t be the whole answer — so how do I actually use what I still have to give?
And I see it in clients in their thirties, buried under the simultaneous demands of career, family, and a mortgage, wondering why no one warned them it would be this hard, or pull this many directions at once.
Different seasons, same question underneath: What am I actually for?
Frederick Buechner put it simply: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” He built that idea on two non-negotiables — work you need to do, and work the world needs done. Miss either one and you land in a ditch on one side or the other: burned out from pure self-sacrifice, or empty from chasing only what serves you. “Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do.”
My Own Turn
I ran into this question myself last November. I was recovering from a serious illness when my pastor announced an opening for Deacon.
My heart leapt. That’s the only honest way to describe it — a physical jolt, something in me shouting pick me.
Eight months into the discernment process now, I took a Spiritual Gifts Inventory — longer and more detailed than one I’d taken years ago. I was curious whether it would say the same thing. It did, and it didn’t.
Years ago: Administration. Leadership. Exhortation.
Now: Leadership. Hospitality. Shepherding.
Not a different person — a more refined read on the same one. Get things done. Make people feel welcomed and fed, body and soul. A drive to help people grow — spiritually, emotionally, relationally, professionally.
It also confirmed what I’m not: no gift for fixing things, building things, or managing details. That used to feel like a gap. Now it feels like information.
The real revelation wasn’t a list of strengths, though. It was this: I’m not just good at certain things. I’m called to them. Designed for a particular purpose, and being asked to live it out now, in a new form — not a break from my past, but an extension of it.
Your Turn
It might be worth sitting with your own version of this question. Not “what am I good at,” but “what am I for.” A few places to start:
What does it tell you about the decision in front of you right now — the one you’ve been circling without landing?
Where might it point you on whatever you’re currently stuck on?
And where might it show you renewed fuel, right where your tank has been running low?
You may not get a lightning-bolt moment like Julia’s, or a heart-leap like mine. But the pull is there if you listen for it.
These days, when I watch Julia plate a dish with the same care she once put into a photograph, I see it plainly: gladness meeting hunger, in the most literal sense there is.
So try this, this week. Don’t overhaul your career or quit your board seat by Friday. Just name it. Finish the sentence: the thing I can’t not do is ___. Say it out loud to someone, or write it down where you’ll see it again. That’s the whole assignment.
Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it — listen for what it intends to do with you.
A note for paid subscribers
I built something to go with this one. It’s not another essay — it’s a short workbook called The Can’t-Not-Do Inventory: four guided exercises to help you find your own version of Julia’s laptop moment, using your own life instead of a stranger’s questionnaire. You’ll walk away with a small, doable next step, not a five-year plan. Also included is a bonus section for parents to help their school age or young adult children discover their career path.
It’s below the paywall. If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, this is a good week to become one.
Welcome — here’s your workbook
Thanks for being a paid subscriber. Attached is The Can’t-Not-Do Inventory, a six-page companion workbook to today’s essay.
It walks you through four exercises: naming the moments you’ve felt most alive, choosing between a faith-based or secular lens on your gifts (or both), asking three people who know you well what they see in you, and turning what you find into one small step you can take this month.
Set aside 45–60 minutes. Grab a pen. Work through it alone, or with someone you trust across the table.
If something surfaces that you want to talk through, reply to this email — I read every one.
— Elaine
Yes Terri! I love having a friend like you who is Listening and always learning. You inspire me!
The "What You Can't Not Do" is a terrific workbook. Thanks for sharing this. I am going to carry Parker Palmer's quote in my heart. "Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you"...