Staying Safe

Yesterday as I flew home I listened to podcasts. They have quickly become one of my favorite things...and with so many to follow, it's a perfect way to kill hours of time sitting on an airplane (mind you, only if the people next to me aren't chatty. I love meeting strangers on airplanes :)). One of the podcasts I listened to was from Relevant magazine and it was a conversation between Donald Miller (author of my favorite book - A Million Miles in a Thousand Years) and Bob Goff (the author of Love Does and someone I greatly admire). One of the things that Bob shared that has really stuck out to me was this:

Pick your life, backfill your career.

If I'm being totally honest, more and more I find myself wanting to sell everything I own and go down a completely different path. I'd love to be doing something that is making an impact and not care if it's making a lot of money. I don't want "stuff".  I want to see the world, I want to explore the outdoors, I'd love to move to the mountains and have SNOW in the winter, I want to live in community, I want to live a life of purpose and meaning and further the kingdom. I want a family. I have no desire for a big house or fancy cars. Give me simple, give me freedom, give me quality over quantity and I'm in.

I think oftentimes people choose a "lifestyle" and then a career to pay for it, but how many of us choose a life and make a career work into that? For instance, Bob Goff realized at some point in his career that he wanted his life to be more about his family than his job. He realized that he wanted to have stories to share with his kids when they were grown and the best way to do that was to spend time with them. So, although he was a lawyer with only a few weeks paid vacation, he went into the office on a Friday and said, "I'm taking the summer off to spend it with my kids." As you can expect, it was not well-received and the response was basically "uh, you can take a sabbatical in like, 15 years." So come Monday morning, he just didn't show up for work. He took the summer off and chose to invest in his family rather than growing his career. As you can imagine, it did change the trajectory of his job, but because of that experience, he decided to start his own firm so he could have the freedom to make those kind of choices...and it ultimately led to him being the Honorary Consul to Uganda where he began Restore International in 2003 to “find daring, productive, and effective ways to fight the injustices committed against children.”

Recently my church had a sermon titled "Failure > Success" and one of the things that he said that continues to stick with me is that "we always calculate the cost of risk, but fail to recognize the greater cost of staying safe." I have been chewing on that for the past several weeks. How much of my life am I wasting by "staying safe" by just living a life of predictability and false security? I often wait for some kind of writing on the wall or major moment to happen before I take any kind of step forward, but what if God is asking me to step out in faith first? I would love a clearly laid out plan, but where would the faith be in that? If Bob had stayed safe he would still be at that first law firm, he would have missed out on countless memories spending the summers with his family and thousands of children would not have been rescued in Uganda. All of that (and more) happened because Bob chose to step out in faith and not show up for work that Monday morning so many years ago.

So the question becomes - if you got rid of everything, if you didn't require a salary to cover any expenses, if you could just live the life that you dream - what would that be? I don't know the answer to that yet, but I do know one thing: I'm no longer ignoring the price of staying safe.