There was a woman in Korea who passed the bar exam at 20 years old, the youngest in the country's history. She went on to spend eight years at one of Korea's most prestigious law firms, doing exactly what everyone around her said was the right thing to do, the smart thing, the successful thing. And then she quit. Not because she failed, not because something went wrong. She quit because she looked she looked honestly at her life and realized this isn't mine. Her name is Pak Chi Wan and she gave a talk recently about what she calls her own formula for happiness, and I've been thinking about it ever since. So she makes a distinction in her talk that I think a lot of us need to hear. There is extrinsic motivation, the rewards that come from outside, such as money, status, other people's approval. These things are real and they matter. She doesn't dismiss them, but there is also intrinsic motivation doing something because the doing itself is enjoyable, because something inside you comes alive when you do it. She says honestly you need both, but the right balance is different for every person. And here's what struck me when she looked back at her years as a lawyer, she noticed something. The work she actually came alive doing, it wasn't the high stakes litigation, it was the communication, the translation reviews, the moments when language was alive in her hands. She had been carrying a clue about herself for years, she just hadn't known hadn't known how to read it. She calls this building a database of yourself. You have to actually try things. You have to live it, not just think about it. No one else can do that for you. Now I want to sit with that for a moment because I think there is something true and something incomplete in it. The idea of knowing yourself is ancient. Pak Jiwan mentions Socrates, know thyself and that's a good place to start. But the wisdom tradition I come from presses the question even deeper. The scriptures, and the teachers who have faithfully read them have always insisted that self knowledge and knowledge of God are bound together. You can't fully have one without the other. When you look honestly at yourself, your limits, your emptiness, the things you cannot fill on your own, something happens. That honesty doesn't just give you better career data, it moves you. It opens something and it leads you toward a need that only God can meet. The hollowness Pak Jiwan felt, doing everything right and still feeling like something was missing, that's not just a vocational problem. It's a deeply human one, and the gospel speaks directly into it. Our identity at the deepest level is not built from what we achieve, it's not built from the title on our business card or the path our parents chose for us. Even the path we chose for ourselves, well, it's given actually, our identity is given, and it's in Christ. And from that foundation, that settled, unearnable identity, we're free to discover vocation, the calling, how we are particularly made to love and to serve, and what God has wired into us that the world around us needs. And that's a different kind of self discovery. It's not a project for your own benefit, it becomes quietly a form of worship or a life of a worshiper. Pak Jiwan ends her talk with a distinction that I keep returning to. She says if running toward a result is achievement, then what she's describing is growth. Achievement is visible, growth is the process of bec coming to know yourself while finding joy along the way. And she says something else that stayed with me. She might have to go back to being a lawyer someday for financial reasons. She doesn't know. But if she does, she says it'll be different because this time it would be her own choice. The bitterness would be gone. There's something quietly profound in that. The same path walked with agency and self-knowledge is a different path. Not because the circumstances changed, but because she changed. So I want to leave you with a few questions not to answer right now, but just to carry with you. Where in your life right now do you feel most alive and where do you feel your breath tighten with stress? Is the path that you're on? Is that the one you've chosen or one that was handed to you, uh expected of you, and that you never quite stop to ask whether it fits? And underneath all of that, when you look honestly at what you cannot fill on your own, what do you find there? And where does that lead you? Well, that's it for today. Thanks for joining us once again. Now these aren't easy questions, I realize. And I think they're pretty good ones. The good news is that you don't have to answer them alone. Godspeed.