Taking Risks

It's been a while since I've posted, and while I could use the busy holiday season as an excuse, it would be just that--an excuse.  While I often figure things out as I write, I have been restless and unfocused and, quite frankly, I just haven't known how to get started. Once or twice I've actually sat and stared at the computer, something that has never happened with this blog before.  Over the last 24 hours, pieces have come to me.  I still don't have a clear picture but I have enough to get started and feel my way along. 

Last night at midnight...I actually looked at the clock, and it was straight-up 12 a.m....I finished watching a movie I'd been given for Christmas.  It wasn't a great movie, but not a bad one either.  What clicked last night was that several plot lines in the movie said the same thing: you're never going to get what you want if you don't stop doing what you've always done and risk doing something completely different. 

That wasn't the first time I'd stumbled onto that theme this week.  I've actually been proofing The Game Called Life before it becomes available as an eBook.  I have been reading my own words, or more appropriately the words that moved through me a dozen years ago onto the screen of my computer.  Three of seven steps to what the book describes as "living a prayer" are to: ask for guidance, follow fearlessly and risk greatness. 

I haven't been so good at getting guidance recently, not because I think God has stopped handing out guidance, but because I think I've been afraid of what I'd hear. I've stopped asking.  When I've followed fearlessly before, I have thought that I lost and lost big time.  However, all I lost was money, retirement savings, other assets, and a business that I loved.  It is true that I was homeless for a while, but thanks to the grace of a couple friends, I never slept on the streets.  And while I was down to my last $300 with $600 in "must-pays" due, that was very moment that I got a job that made the situation moot.

From a very human perspective, I was terrified when I'd followed fearlessly, but I was really never in harm's way.  I was so terrified that I have been unwilling to go there again. I stopped asking. It hasn't been a conscious decision, not one I even recognized until today, but a decision nonetheless. 

What I was feeling before I watched the movie last night was that 2014 had been a fallow year.  In the farm country, where I grew up, a fallow year is one during which the land has been plowed and harrowed but left unsown in order to restore its fertility.  Several places in the Bible, we are told to allow the land to be fallow, usually every seventh year.  For much of the year that is about to end, I've felt a restlessness.  I've written about it here.

As I watched the movie last night, it became clear to me that until I was willing to let go of my security-focused existence and really turn my life back to God, I would probably continue to be fallow.  In fact, I think I've fallow for much longer than 2014, unwilling to risk following fearlessly. 

This morning our pastor seemed to speak directly to me.  He said that God promises maximum support but minimum protection.  He said, "There are no Kevlar vests," when we follow God's path of growth. He was right.  I had had maximum support: I never slept in the streets and a job came when I absolutely needed it. (And not one second sooner.)  But I'd also had minimum protection: my material assets vanished.

The pastor continued to say, "Growth is necessary.  If we are not growing, we experience distress."  It is our responsibility he said to create situations that require learning and growth.  Just the kind of thing that happens when we "ask" and "follow fearlessly."  Just the kind of thing that happened when I gave up my unsatisfying, minimum-wage teaching job to come to Washington to find consulting work that I had long loved.

The pastor talked about growing in our relationships.  That was actually a theme in the movie as well.  It suggested that we each have to give up how we've done relationships in order to grow into more satisfying and more rewarding ones.  At this point, I am unwilling to risk losing my home and retirement again, although that day may be nearer than farther.  However, I think I am willing to risk doing relationships differently.  I don't really know what that means, but I am "distressed" at lying fallow any longer.  I am certain that if I am willing to "ask" again, I will find out what it means.