Like most American Christians, I'm loathe to pray and discover God's will for my life. I mean, all that work! I'd much rather give someone else money to tell me God's will for my life.

So it was with only mild irritation that I signed up for Multnomah's required career-placement class last semester and paid $25 to fill out a sophisticated, multi-page, connect-the-dots puzzle so a computer could read it and tell me God's will for my life.

I was disappointed when I got the results back. They were in a little booklet called an "Aptitude Summary"--a list of jobs I'd be good at and skills I would need in those jobs.

The list of possible jobs contained no surprises: reporter, editor, novelist, advertising executive. The list of skills was similarly unenlightening: writing, copyediting, using computers.

The booklet reminded me of those psychic call-in shows where a group of women sitting on a couch charge people lots of money to tell them things they already know:

"You're looking for a relationship, aren't you?" asks the psychic, hazarding a guess that the caller did not break off a hot date to go home and call her at 10 p.m. on a Saturday.

The caller says, "Yes, but I know that. I wanted to know if--"

"Isn't that incredible?!" gushes the hostess, disconnecting the caller. "That will be $572, please!"

I was about to give up when an item at the bottom of the list caught my eye: "Animate matter preserving duties." I looked at the job skills listed: "The restoration and preservation of once-animate matter: taxidermy, human organs and the like."

I began to feel a bit less cheated. After all, God's will sometimes does seem to come out of left field like that. And even if the aptitude summary was wrong, $25 isn't too much to pay for a good laugh.

Computers don't lie, though, so I began wondering if I'd ever seen a hint that my life's ministry would involve dead animals and human body parts.

I couldn't think of much. My only experience directly related to human body parts involves the time I worked for my uncle for a week when I was 16. I won't go into a lot of detail, but I will say this so you may benefit from my hard-won wisdom: If it's at all possible, I recommend against discovering your uncle has a glass eye when he takes it out to clean it during lunch.

I probably wouldn't have reacted so strongly if I hadn't been eating grapes for lunch when my uncle took out his eye. And I suppose a previous experience, which happened when I was 9, didn't help much either.

My father invited me along when he went to a friend's house to help him work on his car. I wandered down some stairs behind the garage while my dad and his friend worked and ended up in a large, gloomy workroom. The workroom smelled funny--a clue, but I missed it. I saw, sitting on a workbench, an interesting cabinet with several dozen little drawers. It looked like an old card catalog.

My dad's friend didn't look like the type to have a home library. In fact, he looked like a stunt double for the movie Deliverance. But I ignored that clue as well, and yanked open one of the card catalog drawers to see what was inside.

My dad and his friend came running when they heard me shriek. I didn't feel much better when they arrived, because my dad's friend flipped on the lights. I saw that after backing away from the workbench until I hit the opposite wall, I now stood at eye level with a moose head hanging on the wall over my left shoulder and an elk head hanging over my right shoulder.

Except the moose and the elk didn't have any eyes. Their eyes were probably still somewhere in the cabinet, in a drawer similar to the drawer full of glass bobcat eyes I had opened. Around the cabinet on the workbench were other dead animals--a dog, a raccoon, the aforementioned bobcat--all in various states of disassembly.

I assume my father's friend had a basement full of dead animals and a cabinet full of eyeballs because he was a taxidermist, but he never said so. I didn't ask, either. I edged around him, went outside, and spent the rest of the evening in our car. With the doors locked and the windows rolled up.

I wouldn't go so far as to say this was a traumatic experience that scarred me for life, but I will say I have considered taxidermy a dirty trick ever since.

Take the bear my wife, Sarah, and I saw on our honeymoon. It's a dead, stuffed polar bear at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, and it's 13 feet tall. They say that when a bear charges, you should play dead. If that bear charged me, I wouldn't need to play dead--I would give up the ghost the instant I saw it.

The 13-foot-tall bear is, of course, mounted on its hind legs, its front legs raised and its mouth frozen open in a terrifying roar. I think we're supposed to believe this is what it was doing when it was killed, but I really doubt it. I wouldn't shoot that bear if it were towering over me like that. Even a bazooka would just make it mad.

No, I bet the hunter who bagged that bear snuck up on it while it was asleep or drinking out of a water hole. If the museum were honest, the bear would have been stuffed lying down with a surprised expression on its face.

Anyway, I'm just not sure how writing skill and animate matter preservation skill are supposed to work together. Am I supposed to work in a coroner's office and write scintillating toe tags or something?

So although I got a good laugh from the aptitude summary, I suppose I'll have to buckle down and pray to find out God's will for my life.

It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.