For those of you who just tuned in, I'm departing from the journal thing and going through a smattering of questions surrounding my tag line, "Live YOUR adventure!"
Q. Foremost (in my mind, anyway) is, isn't it a little vain and/or pretentious to go around saying "MY" adventure and "YOUR" adventure? Sounds self-centered.
Q. Similarly (so we get a two-fer today), is it un-Christian thing to say? Like "I'm going to go do what I want"?
A. One of my favorite verses is Proverbs 16:9, "A man's heart devises his way, but the Lord directs his steps." There is an element of YOUR adventure in this. You get to choose!
Yet, there's a flip side to that verse as well. Don't think that being delegated that option means you're on your own to just run off an do your own thing. The verse refers to the will of a sovereign God who is active in the universe and in absolute control over how this script plays out.
That means that there's also a huge assumption underlying all of this.
Put it this way: If "YOUR adventure" involves running a Coast Guard blockade in a speedboat filled with 2 tons of crack cocaine... well... Let's just say that choosing an acceptable adventure to pursue has a prerequisite of both being in Christ and having a desire to live rightly before Him.
I reiterate: BOTH of those things!
1) You have to live right. You can't chase after avarice and carnal pleasure and hope to live a heroic life. Pause and reflect on the great stories. It's the hero who is caring and self-sacrificial, but it's the villain who chases dreams of money and power at any cost. Of course, actually implementing that is downright impossible without...
2) You can't get there on your own! Without the Holy Spirit of God, where do you get the vision to pursue? Pop culture? Some self-help guru? Daytime TV? Whatever sounds good to you at the moment? All pretty shaky, sir.
In Despicable Me the irritating rival supervillain calls himself "Vector", because "It's a mathematical term. A value representing both direction and magnitude."
Even though we're going for superhero rather than supervillain, I think the same definition applies. We need the right direction to our life adventure, or we might not like where we wind up for all our effort.
It's too big a topic to go into here, but go and read the book of Ecclesiastes sometime. You'll see what living an amazing life without divine favor will add up to in the end. Far, far better to live right before God and fail in your adventure than for the opposite to happen!
More Q&A coming soon. Till then...
Live YOUR adventure!
-E.L. Fletcher
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