It's a friday night and I stayed in. Listening to Beirut, eating chocolate cookies, and on my way to finishing up my thoughts on this thing called Adventure.
The past few weeks have been spent looking at grad schools and getting things together last minute for grad applications. Life is becoming more focused, more serious. All this anxiety has left me waking up with back aches and dry eyes from leaving in my contacts all night, it's given way to sleepless nights, and having to catch my breath as I feel my heart beating a hundred times a minute.
While Jesus takes me from my worries and brings me to His feet, I find myself in the midst of people, songs, and conversations centered around this reality of adventure.
The more I enter into the freedom of choosing, and letting my life take its shape, the more the Lord has been revealing to me how sinful it is to live otherwise. I was made for adventure. And we are to live wholly the way we were made, because if not, we are compromising the image of God in us. We are defacing our divine design.
Speaking of defacing, I stumbled on a friend's blog the other day and found a photograph of graffiti sprayed across a building. Its words formed the sentence, "Everyday we live under the violence of normalcy."
How true is this? I heard a story once that models this kind of violence pretty well. There was a Bear. This Bear was taken in captivity for a number of years and put in a cage. Every single day, the Bear would walk along the edge of its cage in a square. When he was finally released into the wilderness, he kept walking in a square, as if he was still confined by his cage.
We are just like this! Our vision is so short, and we cannot see past our nose! We are blind to the freedoms we do have, and our lack of imagination and dreaming have caused us to be bound by our own set of rules and boundaries. We trap ourselves under the systems of this world, governed by our own comforts and our false sense of security.
Howard Macy writes, "The Spiritual Life cannot be made suburban. It is always frontier, and we who live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed." It is an act of holy rebellion to break the mold we have set up for ourselves. I think we guide our lives by other people's expectations and societal norms, instead of paying attention to what actually makes us come fully alive.
There is a greater story to walk into, a destiny that involves "stepping into the current of God's will," as a certain Mister Aaron put it. Everyone has been uniquely designed and wired, and there's a way to marry that with your life's pursuits.
May I live a life that rebels against the expectations of others, and restores the image of God in me. I pray that I may fully submit to the Lord's will so that I may experience a greater freedom, so to get caught in the wind of His Spirit. Like a leaf, I will go where Your wind leads me. Give me grace to do this Jesus. And let me live with peculiarity, so that I may bring glory to the God who has marked me. In the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen and Amen.
