My Greatest Fear

Have you noticed the blowup in my blog posts lately?

There is a reason for it.

If you remember our family's life blew up in January (Life Blows) and from there came an onslaught of different excuses.

One being the total lack of motivation to write due to just plain busyness. My life was cram packed every moment.

Until I started to pray.

I flooded God with request that he remove the things in my life that were keeping me from pursuing my calling. Have you ever been caught in the middle of daily responsibilities and pursuing a calling? Because of this my calling became blurred. I have a couple of close friends whom I would talk with about it. I couldn't keep from losing it on them. It felt like everyone needed something from me and there wasn't enough of me to go around. I didn't know where or what I was supposed to be doing.

One way that God answered my prayer has been that our church hired a full-time youth pastor, which relieved me from my position of volunteer youth director at our growing church. This in itself has freed up hours of my time.

God also opened up the opportunity for me to take a different position within the school where I work.  In doing so, I have been blessed with spending my days with the best group of students a teacher could ask for and being teammates with my best friend, my wife. While it seems strange to a lot of people that a husband and wife would want to spend their entire day together, both of us teaching the same grade in rooms right beside each other, but it has turned out to be an awesome opportunity!  I don't know if eating pizza, whole kernel corn, and peas together in the teacher's lounge counts as a "date", but some weeks that's as close as it gets!

So, in the last two months, I have been able to do things I've never had time to do.  I read my girls to sleep every night without rushing out to do something. Tears fill my eyes when Ellie Grace, my five-year-old, still asks me out of habit, "Daddy, do you have to do work tonight?" In two months, I've been able to spend time sitting on the couch with my wife and finally figured out what all the buzz about 24 was about. I'm learning how to sit outside on a cool night with a cup of hot tea listening to the crickets along with a little Mumford and Sons. For the first time in my adult life, I'm learning how to rest, something that God said was good to do. Something that you might need to do as well.

After a two months of rest, I'm ready to get back to blogging. Back to connecting with you.

But with that comes fear.

God clearing my schedule has left me holding my greatest fear. The uncertainty of exactly what's next is both exciting and terrifying. But that's where faith comes in. We rarely are given the destination, just the direction. Abraham was told to walk, so he did so without a travel agent. David was told he'd be king, instead he began as a fugitive. And Jeremiah was told to open his mouth and nobody liked him for it.

It takes a lot emotionally to write and then put it out there for the world to see. Often I think, "No one is going to read this. They'll think I'm a closed minded bigot. I'm wasting my time. All it is is a little blog." Negative thoughts reveal my insecurities and I fear people rejecting my heart.

My greatest fear is that my writing is shallow and leaves you unaffected. My heart's desire in writing is to love you with my words, hopefully connecting you with God and others. That's why I try to make you laugh. That's why I want to be transparent and vulnerable, because if we are willing to do those two things then we can build community and hardened hearts can be shattered.

So this little blog that my fears are wrapped around is one way that I can intentionally live out the gospel and pursue my calling. I'm really not sure what I'm doing, but I'm taking steps in the right direction following after Jesus.

Question:
What's keeping you from following God's calling for your life?