Embarkation

On our magnetic board, my roommate chelsea kept a magnet that said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Often as I was walking into or out of our room, it would catch my eye and though I rarely paused to give the fairly simple idea much thought, those successive glances have piled one atop the other to cement the phrase into my memory.

Think of every story that has ever inspired you. I bet it didn't go like this one.

Once upon a time there was a very good boy who never did anything that would shame his mother or cause his father to sigh. He woke up with the dawn, industriously completed his chores, excelled in school, followed his parents' life plan for him, married his pre-school sweetheart, and settled down to have 2.4 children and 1.3 cars with a job that provided a satisfactory degree of personal accomplishment and a steady income. One day, he died.

We are not inspired by the ordinary, unless we are acting in revolution against it. Who wants to be that boy, sweet-tempered, docile, and entirely satisfied with life? It is in a healthy form of dissatisfaction that we are inspired to attain to the better story. Beowulf's story, for instance, is not a pretty one. He must travel far, fight monsters that no man of normal means should ever have to face, and survive to fight still others. But we find inspiration in his epic quest because he dared.

There are two armies waging a conflict within us. On the one side, there is the desire for safety, comfort, and pleasure. We want to curl up in bed, pull the blankets over our heads, and stay far from hunger, dirt, or despair. On the other side, there is a fierce need to be a part of the adventure that life could be if we but dared to take risks, go out into the cold and the blazing heat, occasionally suffer want, all with the enduring knowledge that the rewards of a life lived on the cliff's edge will always yield more than the life lived in the armchair.

A friend mentioned that among school children, creativity and imagination are on the decline in a correlation with a decline in time spent out of doors. After all, if they don't have to invent situations for their deeds of derring-do, why should they bother?

As we live a life surrendered to God, we are taking the radical path. Sometimes it feels like we are walking by a precipice in a thick fog and all we have is a quiet voice directing us out of the mist. But in trials we are refined, our creativity, trust, and courage becoming formidable tools as we submit them to Another's purposes. The epic quest a thing of mere fantasy? Perhaps not so much.