Summer overlooking the challenging route up Crestone Needle in Colorado
Over Thanksgiving on our way to Minnesota, Summer and I stopped by The International House of Prayer. And one of the songs that deeply resonated with me sang, “I wanna trust in you so much that if you don’t come through, I fail.“
Life isn’t to be easy. I think we were meant to experience risk so great that we don’t have any way through where God is leading us. We were meant to die to ourselves to live this life as if it could end at any time. All great epics seem to have a point where there is no hope; we feel that despair is the only option. At the end of the Battle of Helms Deep in the Lord of the Rings – Two Towers, Theodin and Aragorn make their last stand and face certain death against an army of thousands of Orks. And in that moment as they choose courage knowing they have little time on earth left, Gandalf the White arrives just in time as promised with an army to defeat the enemy destined to destroy humanity.
Movies like these resonate within us, but we must live out these desires in this life! The adventure of these epics can be our own lives if we’re willing to move beyond the comfort of our living room and live real life, yeah?
All around us we are inundated by “guaranteed” paths to success. If we only find our security in a good-paying career, get all the right insurance, worry about retirement, then we might avoid the pitfalls of poverty. But should poverty of money be our biggest concern? Or rather poverty of our hearts? Is it possible that our stress often comes from the meaningless pursuit of trying to achieve our standard of living most of the world will never see? Or do we want to risk the God-given desires of our hearts at the expense of failing because we can’t to it…only God can?
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly…who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat.”– Theodore Roosevelt
