I’ve always enjoyed journaling for private use, but I’ve been away from it for some time, and it’s a part of my life that I miss. Consequently, in this present chapter of my life, my desire is to build consistency and intention into everything I do, and this blog will be one facet of that effort.
So often a thought, inspiration, or revelation will come to us in a moment, and we’re quick to lose it if we don’t cage it between the bars on a page. I can’t count the number of promises I’ve made, dreams I’ve had, quiet lessons from God that have been whispered, or the treasured advice of friends I’ve kept in a series of brown, leather-bound books with yellow pages. All of them have trees on the cover, and most are water-spotted and streaked with barely dried ink. They’re my favorite, and every one of them is sacred to me. I am a literal tree hugger. And please, don’t knock it until you try it. There’s an impressive exchange that occurs when you wrap your arms around the rough bark of an old tree. But I digress, so I’ll come back to that.
Journals: I often thumb through them to remind myself of answered prayers and perfect solutions. A journal has a way of condensing months or years–even entire chapters of your life–into single moments. It offers fresh perspective and draws you outside the realm of time and space. It helps cultivate a more eternal eye through which to view the world.
Consider this: the summer after my freshman year of college I decided to ask God for something I didn’t fully understand. I had a growing desire for truth in my life and for a more intimate knowledge of God’s person and nature. I wanted the reality of his presence in my life, and I had a hunger for greater things I had never seen before. Something was stirring in my heart to ask for the fullness of his Holy Spirit. In that moment, I sealed the thought on paper, released it to heaven, and turned the page to the next day’s thoughts. Nearly six years later, I’m shedding myself of earthly goods and possessions, sorting through paperwork for passports, visas, travel, and dreams, and preparing myself to cross the Atlantic to begin life anew as a missionary. What I am not doing: I am NOT crossing on dry land with the sea piled up on either side like Moses and the Children of Israel, despite making my own exodus. And I am NOT walking on the surface of the deep as though the 4,405 mile journey to another continent could be made entirely on foot. A plane is sufficient to get me there for now, thank you.
What I AM doing: I’m giving my life away for the gospel I believe in to a people that doesn’t understand its need for Him, the One. The Love of my life and my Only. Six years ago, if you had told me that I would be putting my dreams as a performer on the back burner and moving from one first world country to another to shed abroad the Love of God in a city that has everything it could possibly want and then some, I probably would have tried to fight you. With my fists. To the death. Or at least verbally crippled you with some intellectual nerve gas of a response for why I was created for the arts and not the missions field and why I’d stay where I was as I was because I’d being doing a lot more good there. Effectively leaving you in the fog and me in the clear.
But hearts change, and God has a way of softening us. I am not the same as I was then. And today, I feel so privileged to step beyond the edge of myself and redefine how I use the gifts I was created with. And in this moment, I am reminded of another promise planted when I was just thirteen. Sitting in the fellowship room of my home church on a Wednesday night, I sat listening to a mission team that had just gotten back from working with an orphanage in Fortaleza, Brazil. The youngest member was 18, and as she described how the experience had changed her life, I felt it. That insatiable grip of the hand of God around my heart and the stillest whisper of a voice that said, “You’ll do that someday.” Many sleepless nights and solitaire games played by Vegas rules ensued.
When you’re reduced to playing Jesus best three out of five over the call on your life, two things will happen. You will despair, and you will also lose. Fair warning.
All of life in Christ is the undoing of life outside of Him. And like the trees that I hug or that grace the covers of my old journals, growth takes time. But contained within the kernel of every seed is the promise for any number of forests waiting to be born. The only requirement is that that seed lay down its life in the right soil of this world only to find it multiplied an infinite number of times over. So for the forests ahead of me, I gladly take up that promise knowing that the journey will take years, and I may never see all the fruit of it, but I’d choose this path over any other without a moment’s hesitation again and again, forever amen. Hence the journal. Though this adventure may cost me the rest of my life, there will come a time when I can look back to this very entry, see the seed planted and watch the forest bloom in the bredth of a moment. And that really excites me.
Incidentally, I named this blog after the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken, which ends with the lines:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
ichosetheone 