Stephen King wrote in his memoir that for years he
approached his craft wasted, treating his vocation as
competition with the rest of life. At the pinnacle of his
success, and in the depths of his addiction, he bought a
desk. A possession he had always dreamed of, the desk was
“the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a
room”^9 —he placed it in the middle of his study where he
tirelessly went to work every day.
After getting sober with the intervention of his family,
King got rid of the huge desk and replaced it with a smaller
one, which he put in the corner of his office instead of in the
center of the room. His children would regularly come up to
the office, which was now more a living room than a retreat
center, to watch sports games and movies and to eat pizza.
He never complained. What he learned from this tale of two
desks and his struggle with an addiction that nearly cost him
his family was that “life isn’t a support system for art. It’s
the other way around.”^10
This was what Sam in Uganda reminded me of and what
Jody Maberry did so well for his family. Life is not an
inconvenience to the work we dream of; it’s the reason we
do it in the first place. A calling does not compete with or
even complement your life. Your life, when lived well,
becomes your calling—your magnum opus. And just like
Mr. Holland, we won’t appreciate this until the end.