I had a great conversation yesterday, and it’s a conversation I’ve been having in different forms recently. The theme, the motto, the “gist” of our conversation was that it takes courage to pursue a dream, calling, or passion.
It takes courage to follow what you believe God is calling you to do — whether it is the courage to face the unknown of the timeline, have necessary conversations with people you don’t know, take risks of potential rejection or failure, or be patient in times of waiting — your calling requires courage.
It takes courage to follow the calling a Christian life. Believing in Jesus Christ as Messiah is to follow Him, and that is a high calling because it beckons a lowly position. It is against the world’s wide stream of egocentricity. Whether you’re a CEO in a glass office 10 stories up, or a janitor with a 4 a.m. shift, believing in Jesus Christ as Messiah will cause you to reflect His posture of humility. It’s a high calling, and it takes courage to defy the odds, to dance where you are, rain or shine, because that’s where God has you, and because a life freely given is a joyous one.
God gives gifts, and God made us creatively as His very imprint. We are creative, we are reasonable, we are carriers of things beyond ourselves. The story of the talents in Matthew is a great picture of the all-or-nothing approach we are encouraged to take in the Gospel, where the men who invested the master’s talents were blessed, but he who yielded to the fear of losing the talents was scrutinized and received nothing. I quote Will Smith, of all people, when I say that “God placed the best things in life on the other side of fear.” And to quote my best friend, “God wants to bless us…He wants to give us good things.” But what does this require of us?
Jordan Peterson, a famed Psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto, provides a captivating psychoanalytic criticism of the Exodus story in the Old Testament. He sets the scene where the Israelites have left Egypt, but just like anyone coming out of a slavery or a traumatic experience, are in a desert rather than an immediate promised land. They are reeling from their lived experience. They are trying to regain their identity, all while struggling with trust in God to provide, and so they set up idols for themselves. God then sends snakes to bite them, and they finally cry out, begging Moses to do something, to intervene on their behalf. He does, and in a conversation with God, Moses is instructed to take a snake and lift it high on his staff for all to see, so that when people look at the snake, they will cease to be bitten by the venomous, invasive critters. Peterson references a staple of psychotherapy, saying that God was practically telling them the only way to champion the object of their fear was to look it in the eyes. Peterson goes on to cross-reference the cross, and how the staff lifted up is like the tree Jesus was hung on, wherein He looked death and sin straight in the eyes and championed them in His resurrection. Christ embraced the darkest things in existence in order to bring absolute life and freedom, and as a precursor the Israelites had to face their issues head-on to overcome them. If we really examine life, we find it true that getting past means going through. In Psychotherapy it’s called Exposure Therapy. On an everyday scale, it looks like my fear of intimacy being defeated through my embrace of relationship. My fear of hitting the baseball is overcome in my swinging of the bat, eyes shut tight, with full intention of getting on base.
I don’t intend for this to be an Alpha male mentality to Gospel living, like we are called to man-up and be really tough in life, but rather a truth about the need to face what we hate or fear most in order to heal from or overcome it; to live a full life in the full embrace of our Godly calling. As stated above, I have to have courage just to be a Christian in this opposing world, and part of that is doing what God has called me to do, in the way He has called me to do it. I will write and create because that’s who I am, it’s what I love and it’s what I can best bring to the table in life. It’s my deepest passion. So what’s yours, and how will you use it?