If I had courage…

If I had courage I would make a decision.

If I had courage I would abandon all material comfort right now, today.

If I had courage I would let people in.

If I had courage I would talk to my brother about his faith.

If I had courage I would pick up the phone.

If I had courage I would speak my mind.

If I had courage I would share my story – even the ugly parts.

If I had courage I would tell him he’s pretty great.

If I had courage I would have a heart to heart conversation with my dad.

If I had courage I would lose a mask or two, for good.

Your turn. If I had courage…

You know you were born in ________ if…

I’ve worked with kids in some capacity for the last 7 years of my life. I remember the first time a child told me their birthday was something 2000 when I was volunteering with an inner city after school program. That was crazy to me then, and for some reason it still is a little bit. Those children were born into a world that I grew into.

The other day I was working with a couple of kids and we were acting out some imaginary story. I said something about them not being able to get their (imaginary) horse back because they didn’t know where I was. A little girl, 7, responded as she lifted her hand as if holding a small box like object “That’s okay, I’ve got my GPS, just give me your address and I’ll find you.” I laughed…hard. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t have even imaginary GPSs when I was a kid.

Last night around 10pm I saw a meteor/fireball type object fly through the sky as I was working outside on my patio. I tweeted about it because it was so amazing. It didn’t take long for someone to respond telling me they had also seen it…in a different state…and that they had read someone else who had seen it on Facebook and lived near where it landed. By this morning, less than 12 hours later, that meteor controls 7 pages of Google search results and has a Facebook fan page with nearly 1,000 fans last time I checked.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering “what’s the point?”

My point: I honestly wonder what kind of world my kids (if the Lord blesses me with some) will grow up in. Television is today’s “evil turn the mind to mush” medium…I wonder if it will even exist as we know it when my kids are growing up. The speed with which information can travel across cyberspace still amazes me, and I hope it always does. The speed with which technology is advancing still amazes me, and again, I hope it always does.

We’ve all seen those lists, right? You know you were born in the 70s if…or the 80s if…or the 90s if…and so on. Today, I’m wondering what that list will look like for my kids, for children born two generations from now.


Life is calling. How far will you go?

I’ve been doing some cleaning lately. The sort through things & throw them away kind of cleaning. I found a Peace Corps ad that I tore out of an issue of Time Magazine sometime during college. I put it up on the wall by my desk every year. I can still picture it hanging. I kept that ad and found it the other day. It depicts a thatch roof hut type dwelling somewhere in a desert mountain region. And it reads:

Would you stop to give someone directions?

If you were walking that way,

would you guide them?

What if it was out of your way?

One mile.

Two miles.

Two thousand miles,

directly inland from the Skeleton Coast,

to a one-room schoolhouse in the foothills of Namibia.

What if you were the teacher in that schoolhouse?
Would you travel that far to teach someone?

To learn something yourself?

Peace Corps.

Life is calling. How far will you go?

Something about that ad struck me then and sticks with me now. I think it’s the challenge it poses: “How far will you go?”

I know for me, that’s a question I have to push myself on everyday. I am by nature not a risk taker. I am a play it safe rule follower type of person. But, when it comes to God’s calling on my life, I need to learn to go farther, to leap out of my comfort zone, not just dip my foot in the water on the other side.

I don’t know what exactly that means right now for me, but I know it’s a challenge I’m renewing for myself – go farther.