At a lunch with two veteran obstetricians fifteen years ago I asked both if they still enjoyed their practices. "I love delivering babies," Jim said with a joy-lit smile. "It's what I was meant to do."

   Ed, his partner for twenty years, shrugged his shoulders. ""I'm an OB because it was something I could do, not because I love it," he muttered.   

   Jim lived his passion until he died two years ago. Ed, burned out, quit delivering babies the year after we spoke & became increasingly bitter over the failure of a doctor's union he tried to form. 

    In his 1946 book, The Doctor and the Soul, the legendary holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, M.D. ,wrote "man [sic] should not ask what he may expect from life, but should rather understand that life expects something from him."

    Frankl believed that we must celebrate the meaning life offers us. The ultimate soul questions are whether we discern our calling & honor it as our destiny. When we do, our spirit aligns with its best energy. When we do not, we risk the continual, soul-killing crisis of meaninglessness.

   Dr. Frankl would diagnose Ed as soul-damaged because he thwarted his destiny. He drained meaning from his practice by treating his profession as merely task work. Jim succeeded because he saw helping new life into the world as soulful work he could celebrate. 

   "The finiteness of life…does not make living meaningless," Frankl wrote, "…death itself is what makes life meaningful."

   The thrill of life's meaning flows to those who live what they love – every day & night. 

-Erie Chapman

Thank you to Daniel Barton, M.D. for sharing this book signed by his father, David Barton, M,D., co-founder of Nashville's renown Alive Hospice.