Reflections on My Plot of Ground

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourshing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am ever so slowly coming to the point in my life when I must accept that my plot of ground, "the given" of my life, is my own and not someone elses, or something else. My life is what "is." There has been much frantic searching to make my life more than it is, to "expand my plot." This causes a deep and misierable sort of spiritual anemia. This anemia gives way to a malcontentedness and uneasiness with my life. It makes me feel like Bilbo Baggins who, by carrying the ring of power for a little too long, felt like "butter spread over too much bread." We are each given a finite spirit that is capable of only a limited number of things. We mistake our longing for the transcendant and infinite beauty of God for our longing to "make something of our lives." I make that mistake.
Now with the dawning of a new day in Anjuli's and my own life, I am pressed to consider these things all the more. Can I accept "the given" of my own life? Can I accept "the given" as the will of God? Can I accept the will of God as "good, pleasing, and perfect?" I daresay that were I to accept this I would discover the very inner life of Christ who, "did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant... he humbled Himself." These "boundaries" or "limitations" on my life are profoundly humbling. I can make no more of my life than God wills it to be, but it is precisely those limitations, "my little plot of land" that ought to be my teacher and guide which leads my longings to the transcendant God "in whom I live and move and have my being."
This leads me now to consider my family; my beloved wife, and my son, and how this is "that plot of ground which is given me to till." As I quiet my heart, I find that if this is the plot God has assigned me, if all I do with my life is love my family, fulfill my commitments to my work, then I will find that secret joy with which Jesus lived and loved. I will close this entry with a quote from G.K. Chesterton's work Orthodoxy wherein he describes this secret of joy. "Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."