“[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
PROVERBS 9-10
1 CORINTHIANS 15:1-32
JOURNAL
Every day is a new day, full of possibility, challenge, and adventure. The question is how I will choose to see it. Will I approach life cautiously, trying to protect myself from failure and discomfort, or will I see each day as an opportunity to discover what God has placed within me and what He might do through me when I am willing to step beyond what is comfortable?
I have been thinking differently about goals. I want to put big things on the calendar. Hard things. Things far enough away that they require preparation, discipline, sacrifice, and growth. But I don't want to see those dates as destinations I am struggling toward so that I can finally arrive and rest. I want them to be targets and tests, something on the horizon that forces me outside the boundaries I have created for myself. There is something powerful about choosing a challenge before life chooses one for me. It teaches me to embrace discomfort rather than continually organizing my life around avoiding it. The goal becomes a reason to train, prepare, learn, sacrifice, and discover that many of the limits I assumed were real were simply the edges of my comfort zone.
And that carries into everything else. If I learn to voluntarily embrace the hard in one area of my life, I become more willing to embrace it everywhere else. Difficult conversations, difficult practices, difficult problems, difficult seasons. Instead of asking, "How can I make this easier?" I can begin asking, "What is this asking me to become?"
But I don't want achievement to become another god. These goals aren't about proving my worth. My worth has already been established by God. That is what makes Paul's words so powerful: "By the grace of God I am what I am," followed almost immediately by, "I worked harder than all of them." Grace didn't make Paul passive. Grace unleashed him. Because his identity was settled, he was free to give everything he had.
That is how I want to live. I surrendered my life to God in Belize in 1989, but surrender has become a decision that must be renewed every morning. Maybe part of that surrender is refusing to waste the abilities, opportunities, and time He has given me. I want to put things on the calendar that scare me a little and require me to become more disciplined today because of something I have chosen to face tomorrow. Not because life begins when I reach that date. Life is happening during the preparation. The target simply gives direction to the struggle.
I don't want comfort to become the destination of my life. I want to keep testing the boundaries of what I think I can do, not to prove that I am enough, but because God's grace tells me I already am. The goal on the calendar isn't ultimately the purpose. The person I am becoming on the way to it is.
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