From the other side of the world I sit down to my laptop to try to sum up to all my friends and family what has happened this last month. It’s actually kind of a healthy life practice for me, to have these mile markers along the way telling me what I have been doing with myself. I wish I could have this same accountability for the rest of my life.
Because while I may not always be on the mission field, I would hope that the life I would be living would be noteworthy. The best stories are the simple ones, where our faithfulness to love people meets their brokenness and God does a work in their life.
I am currently on the update list of a handful of people who are quietly heroic deeds back in the united states. I hear testimonies of youth returning to Jesus, of the homeless being saved, and of bodies being physically healed. I wish I could sign you up for some of them.
If you had to write an email update of what has happened in your life in the last month, what would you include? No, really? I would love to receive the email update of your life if you take the time to put it together.One thing about documenting my days is that it helps me to think ahead of time about the life I want to live. I don’t go out and do things just because they would look good in a newsletter, something I think many missionaries struggle with.
But one thing that does pass into my mind is ‘am I living a life worth taking the time to tell people about’? This is less about me and my greatness and more about the amount of space I am giving to God in my life. When I make room for him and obey his leading, awesome stuff happens.
One day I took a piece of paper and drew a line down the middle. On the right hand side I titled the column “the Nathan I want to be” and on the left hand side I titled the column “the Nathan I am currently”.
I started with the right column: goes out of his comfort zone, shares Christ boldly, plays worship music in the park.
Actually the last one I only ended up doing because of this list. Donald Miller talks a lot about this when he talks about making life goals that are worthy of a good story. Many times these types of goals will require us to go through a lot of pushback and conflict to get to them. They don’t come naturally.
Because the left side of the sheet included things like : spends excessive time on facebook, walks around Granada and talks to no one, sleeps in. Not quite as impressive.
One of the best exercises you can do is to pray and fast and seek the Lord and write down in a notebook the type of person you would like to be, then go out and live it. Don’t just say you want to be rich or married or drive a tesla. Think of the passions that God has built into you and then follow them.
Hasn’t everybody had their dreamjob in the back of their minds? This tells you something about yourself. It tells you that there are audacious glorious things in this life that you are inspired to do, but afraid to because of failure. Have you seen the movie Rocky Balboa? Failure is a normal part of life. We rise and rise again until lambs become lions.
God wants you to know your purpose, to get in touch with why you are here. Then he wants to lead you through the brutal process of fighting for that even in the face of impossibility. You will get beat down, but your life will be so much richer than if you take the easy way out of giving up on your dreams and staying where it is safe.
One of my favorite bands, House of Heroes, has a line that says:
“If you add up all the risks not taken they’re all misses,
Think I’d rather live with the knock down drag outs and the stitches,
Because you’ll never find out till your body’s been broken on the canvas,
If you belong with the ghosts and the has-beens,
Or if you live on like a little piece of greatness”
What are you doing with the beautiful 24 hours you are given a day?
