a journey of heroic proportions

"Every great story involves a quest. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins ran from the door at a quarter till eleven without even so much as a pocket handkerchief and launched on an adventure that would change his life forever. Alice stepped through the looking glass into Wonderland; Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter stumbled through the wardrobe into Narnia. Abraham left his country, his people, and his father’s household to follow the most outlandish sort of promise from a God he’d only just met, and he never came back. Jacob and his sons went to Egypt for some groceries and four hundred years later the Israel nation pulled up stakes and headed for home. Peter, Andrew, James, and John all turned on a dime one day to follow the Master, their fishing nets heaped in wet piles behind them. The Sacred Romance involves for every soul a journey of heroic proportions. And while it may require for some a change of geography, for every soul it means a journey of the heart."

"The choice before us now is to journey or to homestead, to live like Abraham, the friend of God, or like Robinson Crusoe, the lost soul cobbling together some sort of existence with whatever he can salvage from the wreckage of the world. Crusoe was no pilgrim; he was a survivor, hunkered down for the duration. He lived in a very, very small world where he was the lead character and all else found its focus in him. Of course, to be fair, Crusoe was stranded on an island with little hope of rescue. We have been rescued, but still the choice is ours to stay in our small stories, clutching our household gods and false lovers, or to run in search of life."

                                "The Sacred Romance" - Brent Curtis & John Eldredge
 
 
Surviving for a homestead and small story, or pilgrimage on a journey of heroic proportions? Journeys can be dangerous. Journeys often require great sacrifice. For some, the sacrifice seems to require the very essence of their being, their heart, their dreams, and anything that may be a semblance of life to them. Ah, but there it is; there is the note worth high-lighting right there. Semblance of life.
 
Most people who have grown up in church could tell you the answer to what life is and who provides it. "I am the way, the truth, and the life."  But the reality, because we are imperfect and will never be fully cured of our sin nature this side of Christ's return, is that we all  [unconsciously] hold or look to other things or people as a false sense of life. We run after broken cisterns that never satisfy.

Things have been stirring and brewing within me. My spirit gets restless when my mind begins to travel down roads of complacency and ease. My soul yearns and stretches in the directions of the life-giving, sanctifying, adventurous journey. Again I build an altar. This life is not my own, it is meant to be given away. The road of ease and "safety" leads to dormancy. I choose God's artistry in His adventure and creativity. I choose His story... a journey of heroic proportions.

With each ache and pang of severing roots, opening white-knuckled hands, departing from cisterns, and flinging wide doors to chambers of my heart that were once locked away, I embrace hope and joy knowing as each is cast upon, and burned on, the alter, the promise of the beauty that will be crafted from the ashes will be far more than I can comprehend.