Now far ahead the road has gone, and whither then? I cannot say. - Tolkein

The last movie I saw in the theater was Julie & Julia. I really liked it. I enjoyed seeing a movie where women played the lead roles rather than just accoutrements or the romantic interests of a leading male character. I also enjoyed how the film delved into their attempts to discover and live out their vocation.

Take Julie. What she really wants to do is write. Instead, she works in a cubicle, answering phone calls from distraught and angry family members of those who died on 9/11. It is an exhausting and thankless job. She has another thing she really wants to do: cook. So she decides to, even if it means doing so in the little free time she has left over after work. She sets herself a daunting goal that combines both of her interests: to cook through Julia Childs' cooking book in one year and blog about it. That's 524 recipes in 365 days. To meet her goal, Julie has to carve out space and time, set goals, and deal with the challenges and friction this new "hobby" creates in the rest of her life, particularly in her marriage. She is sometimes discouraged and misunderstood, but working towards this goal is more satisfying for her than anything she did before, because she is finally simply doing what she loves. In the end, much to her surprise, this little project becomes the ticket to her dream of becoming a published writer.

Take Julia. She is living in France, the wife of a diplomat, listless, looking for something to do since she cannot fill her days with the role she longs to take up, that of a mother. Her husband, looking to steer her towards some new pastime, asks her a simple question: "What is it you really like to do?" She tells him, "Eat!" And with that, Julia begins to discover her love for cooking as more than just a hobby; she determines to learn how to cook just as well as the men studying to become professional chefs in Paris. She takes up her newfound purpose despite the significant opposition and discouragement that she encounters along the way. For much of the movie it looks as though her success will be limited; the moment when she discovers that her book will be published is so exciting precisely because it seemed that such a moment would never arrive.

Both of these women had to swim upstream as they chased after their vocations. They weren't handed their vocation in a kit; each one had to patch it together in unexpected and unconventional ways. Who would advise a young aspiring writer to start a blog about her cooking endeavors as the way to get published? Who would have ever predicted when Julia first took cooking classes in Paris that she would become a household name with her own cooking tv show? Not a soul. Not even Julie or Julia. And yet that is what happened to these real-life women. And one woman took her inspiration from the example of the other, which adds so much beauty to this movie, as it interweaves these two stories, showing how the first story ripples outwards until it sets the second off on its way. Julie puts it more dramatically: "I was drowning, and she pulled me out of the ocean."

I find much in this movie to learn about how vocation unfolds in a person's life. I see in these two women's stories how unpredictable and uncalculated that process can be. Calculation should not be abandoned, but it is so rarely the deciding factor in the best stories out there. The stories of vocation to which we find ourselves drawn are often told by folks who say, I didn't set out to end up where I did, but by grace I ended up there nonetheless. And they are grateful they ended up where they did, even though it was not their intended destination on the day they took their first step over the threshold of the familiar and out onto the way. I for one am encouraged by how, for these two women, the whole picture became something greater than the sum of the parts of their lives. I take comfort in the way that for years no one could see that whole picture, because all the parts were busy arranging and rearranging themselves until they finally fit into a beautiful mosaic. I reflect on which stories have have sent out ripples that nudged me out onto my own path, and I wonder where this path will lead - if it ends up being a good story, surely it will lead somewhere other than where I expect.