“Let your life speak.”
As I enter 2025, I'm spending a moment with this beloved Quaker phrase. It's one I come back to time and time again and its meaning for me has changed over the years.
On an initial reading the phrase 'let your life speak' invites us to look to our day to day lives, our activities and vocations, our way of engaging with the world - our life taken as a whole. It invites us to ask: how can I make my life a testimony to my ethics and my values?
And that makes sense within the rest of the passage that this quote is pulled from:
“Live adventurously. When choices arise, do you take the way that offers the fullest opportunity for the use of your gifts in the service of God and the community? Let your life speak. When decisions have to be made, are you ready to join with others in seeking clearness, asking for God’s guidance and offering counsel to one another?”
We’re being invited to contemplate how we can live our lives fully, to think about how we use our gifts in the service of what matters to us. At times it can feel like a big existential challenge: am I living my life fully?
But there's another layer we can add. One that can bring in a more gentle line of enquiry.
Let's try replacing the word 'life' with 'Light': let your Light speak. We're then invited to ask: how do I listen to the Light within me?
It is very easy to let our own Inner Light, or our authentic voice, be crowded out by the demands of living in the world and living up to what life throws at us. It can be buried under layers of people-pleasing, self-criticism, socialisation, and other people’s ideas of how we should live our lives. Underneath all of that, I can find a voice within me that is looking out for me and guiding me for my own sake, so that I can live more fully and authentically within the world.
That is how I try to embody that last line in Advices & Queries 27, ‘When decisions have to be made…’
When life-changing decisions have to be made, how do I come back to what is alive and true within me?
How do I let what is alive and true within me speak?
How will you let your life speak in 2025?
Written by Caitlin Curtis