John Eldredge, in his little book, Dare to Desire, says, “God has rigged the world so that it only works when we embrace risk as the theme of our lives…All attempts to find a safer life, to live by the expectations of others, just kills the soul in the end.  That’s not how we find life.”  Eldredge then challenges us to choose a path of eternal significance rather than over-analyzing and feeling the need to always take the most secure route.  He says, “Don’t ask HOW-that will cut your desire off at the knees.  HOW is never the right question.  HOW is a faithless question.  It means “unless I can see my way clearly I won’t venture forth.”  I have come to realize that is how I lived the first 40 years of my life.  I played it safe, I didn’t do anything unless it was safe.  Everything over-analyzed and secure.  I know what to anticipate tomorrow because it will be very similar to today.

God is shaking this up in me and I am finding it very freeing, yet scary!  I have hardly had to look at my calendar for years, because I know in my brain what is going on from one day to the next.  Dan is finding this quite annoying at this time of our lives, because I can not keep track of time.  I don’t know when we were where and when we will be somewhere else talking to people raising our support.

On October 4 through the 6 we were at the Steer Conference in Bismarck, North Dakota. This was a new experience for us as we had never heard of STEER before.  Art and Dorothy told us about this great organization.  While we were there we connected with farmers and ranchers who raise crops or cattle to support individual missionaries.  We also got to connect with many different missionaries from many different organizations.  What an encouragement and wonderful networking opportunity that was!  It was so cool to visit with retired pastors, as well as ranchers and farmers about missions and what God is doing out there in our world!  This gave us some great ideas and thoughts about networking with rancher and farmer friends and offering this as a way to support us in our quest to get to Nigeria.

My point for today is this, “If you play it safe, you truly miss out on His blessing for you.  At the end of your life do you want to think, “What if?”