Story #084
Beyond the Bucket List: The Calling List
Max J Miller
It’s been 27 years since my father passed. This morning at 7 a.m., my phone rang, and for a moment I thought it must be him. He often called me at the crack of dawn.
Lately I’ve been remembering a week I spent with my dad in Irvine, California. He had asked me to join him for a five-day program designed to prepare entrepreneurs to sell their companies.
My dad was the classic Type A entrepreneur: driven, gregarious, action-oriented, optimistic, and as “self-made” as any person could be. He built several companies, and he didn’t sense that any of his five children would be willing or able to take them over.
During that week, he confided that he had a dream for his retirement: a movement he called “The American Samaritan Foundation.” He described it with more enthusiasm than I’d ever heard him bring to any of his dozens of business ventures. It went something like this:
“Imagine if each of the churches in America ‘adopted’ one family that was struggling economically. Imagine the whole church community coming together to meet that family’s needs: material, emotional, educational, spiritual. If a fraction of the 300,000 churches in the U.S. did that every year, we’d unravel the welfare state in a decade or two.”
Dad was an old-school, small-government Republican. I was the black sheep of the family, the bleeding heart. I had plenty of questions about his plan. But whatever your politics, or mine, I was moved by the heart of it: neighbors caring for neighbors.
A few weeks after Irvine, my dad called to tell me he’d been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive melanoma. The doctors gave him six weeks. He refused to accept it.
For the next two years, he sought out alternative therapies in the U.S., China, and Mexico. He also sailed across Lake Michigan with family, skied in the Rockies, and started at least two new businesses.
I held my father’s hand on his deathbed, and we talked about his grand dream. He told me, “Three more lifetimes wouldn’t be enough time to fulfill all my dreams. But the point of big dreams isn’t really about what you get done. The pursuit of dreams gives you joy and fire in your belly.”
I’ve been thinking about those last two years. My dad did the kinds of things that end up on bucket lists. But at the end, those weren’t what he wanted to talk about. He wanted to talk about the families he hoped to help.
Somewhere in a drawer, many of us keep a list. See the Northern Lights. Walk the Camino. Learn to tango. The bucket list has become the unofficial curriculum of later life, a syllabus of things to experience before the bell rings. I have nothing against the Northern Lights. But I’ve begun to wonder whether we’ve been keeping the wrong list.
A bucket list is about what we take from life: sights, thrills, memories to collect. A calling is about what we leave in it: the people we’ve strengthened, the wisdom we’ve passed on, the good we’ve set in motion. One fills our scrapbook. The other fills the world after we’re gone.
My father taught me something else at the end. A calling isn’t measured by whether we finish it, and he knew he wouldn’t finish his. As Robert Schuller put it, “Any fool can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the apples in one seed.” My dad planted a seed in a hotel in Irvine, in a conversation with his son. Twenty-seven years later, here I am, writing about it. The harvest is not our department. Our department is the planting.
So here’s my invitation. Keep your bucket list. Go and see the Northern Lights. But beside it, start a second list, a calling list. On it, write the things only you can leave behind: the story your family needs to hear, the skill someone younger is hungry for, the reconciliation that’s waited too long. Then, each week, plant one seed from that list. You won’t see the apples. You may not finish the list. My father didn’t. But you’ll know the joy and the fire in your belly that come from pursuing it.
Shine,
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