Story #073
Only God Can Count the Apples in One Seed
Max J Miller
David and I talk every Friday afternoon. Same time, same ritual, two screens, two creators, and myriad unfinished projects. He’s been my creative sparring partner for years now — the person I bring half-formed ideas to before I’m sure they deserve to exist.
A few Fridays ago, I brought him doubt instead of an idea. I’d been circling something I’ve been trying to build for three years, unable to find the strategic ground to actually launch it, unable to say out loud what it was really for. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation — not planned, not rehearsed, faster than I could think it through — David asked me a simple question: What’s your calling?
And I heard myself answer before I’d decided to: “My calling is calling the elders of our culture back to their calling of raising the level of wisdom in all aspects of our society.”
I sat with that sentence after the call ended. Say it slowly, and you’ll hear it too — calling, calling, calling. The same word does three different jobs in one breath. It calls me, first, whether I planned on it or not. And what it calls me to do is call others back to something that was already calling them, quietly, maybe for years, maybe since before they had language for it. A real calling doesn’t just point you toward your own work. It points you toward waking other people up to theirs.
I want to be clear about what this isn’t. I’ve had real vocations — leading a theater company through its most alive years, designing theme parks that people traveled continents to stand inside, ghostwriting the words of people whose lives were genuinely remarkable. I was good at all of it. Yet, none of it produced the feeling I had on that Friday call, the sense of having said something truer than I knew I believed.
There’s a passage I wrote in the very first months of this newsletter, back before I had any idea what it would become. I called it an Elder’s Manifesto, and I wasn’t trying to write my own job description — I was just trying to say something true about what I hoped my generation might still be capable of. The gist of it was this: that we would not drift quietly into irrelevance while the world burned with division it didn’t ask for. That we would not retreat into the comfort of our accumulated years while younger people inherited the mess we’d helped make. That we would show up instead — awake, present, listening the way you only listen when you understand how little time is actually left.
I didn’t know it yet, but I was already answering David’s question. It just took me a year and a Friday afternoon to hear it.
Here’s what I don’t want to skip past, because David and I don’t skip past it with each other: this has cost something. Real time, real money, invested in a vision with no guarantee it amounts to anything anyone will remember. Both of us have made that bet — different projects, same wager — and we both know exactly what the alternative looked like. For me, it would have looked like more travel. More unhurried afternoons with family, the kind you don’t get back. I didn’t choose those things. I chose this, and some weeks I still don’t fully know why, except that not choosing it felt like a smaller kind of death than choosing it and failing might.
I don’t say that for sympathy. I say it because I think a calling that costs you nothing probably isn’t one. It’s just a hobby with better branding.
There’s a line I’ve returned to more than once in this newsletter, because I haven’t found a truer one: any fool can count the seeds in one apple, but only God can count the apples in one seed. Robert Schuller said it, and I don’t think he was talking about patience so much as scale — the difference between what you can measure this year and what you actually planted.
I don’t know what this work will produce. Some weeks, it produces nothing I can point to — no metric, no return, nothing to show for the investment except the investment itself. But I keep planting, and I keep watering, because I’ve stopped believing the harvest is mine to count. It never was.
If my calling really is calling elders back to theirs, then I suppose this paragraph is where that has to happen directly, reader to reader, rather than as something I describe from a distance. So, what’s calling you? Not the thing you feel obligated to do. Not the need in front of you that happens to be loudest this week — because I’ve learned, slowly and sometimes expensively, that the need is not the same thing as the call. There are a thousand worthy causes I am not responsible for. There’s only one sentence that came out of me, unrehearsed, on a Friday afternoon, true before I understood it.
What’s yours? And how would you know if it showed up before you were ready to hear it?
Shine,
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