Called to Adventure.

Adventure is a subject that weighs so heavily on my heart on a daily basis, and I am sure that I am not alone in this. With all the aesthetically pleasing travel photos that I pin on Pinterest almost hourly, my heart just longs to go to obscure, gorgeous locations more and more. I wholeheartedly believe that this longing is placed in most everyone: to live a life that is different than most and to go and see things that most people are never able to. It absolutely wrecks me sometimes to know that there are places in this world and beautiful creations that I will never have the opportunity to witness and see. This weight of travel and adventure can sometimes get mixed up with my faith in the Lord and become so overwhelming. I can feel guilty for my desire to see things for my own personal gain and to have an adventurous life in comparison to a life of service and simplicity that I believe a lot of Christians think is the only calling we have received. As I was talking to one of my dear friends, we realized that this is not the calling that Christ has placed on our lives. Christians are not called to ordinary, boring lives, and believing that our calling is bland is taking away from the weight and bigness of the Gospel and even our God in general.I was doing my Bible study the other day, and Kelly Minter wrote about how our calling as Christians is to be adventurous. This may not have even been her overarching point, but it was the one that stuck with me the most. I wrote this quote of hers in my Bible: “In holiness, we’ve been set apart for an unrivaled privilege and adventure, unfettered.” This completely rocked my world and skyrocketed my desire for adventure, but perhaps a different kind of adventure. You see, because of the holiness that we have received from Christ, we have an overwhelmingly higher opportunity for adventure than if we ceased to follow God’s calling altogether. He has blessed us immensely with the ability to wake up every morning ready for adventure. There are people in every corner of the entire world who need to hear about His glorious holiness, and we are His messengers. He created this world to be seen. He wants us to enjoy the beauty, vastness, and gloriousness of this world. We are not meant to live unexciting lives, and even for those of us who do not have the opportunity to go and do crazy incomparable things, He still gives us the adventure that we long for because the people we meet and encounter every day are desperate for the adventure that is the Gospel. Praise Him that we have that adventure in us to share with those people! Every day is an adventure because we don’t know what to expect.It is a crazy life that we live and all of our adventurous desires and longings come to fruition when we get to see Jesus face to face in Heaven, after we have left this earth. This earth is a beautiful place full of so many opportunities, but Heaven is indescribably more than anything we could ever imagine seeing here. How cool is that? We have the incomparable opportunity to adventure here on earth and then see even more glorious things when we finally go home to Jesus. That should be the desire of our heart; that the Lord would push us farther than we could ever imagine while we are living here on earth and that He would give us so much variety and craziness in our lives that we completely capture and take hold of every single moment so that when we see Him, He is able to tell us, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” This gives me so much excitement for the rest of my life to see where the Lord will take me and the things that He will allow me to see. It is my prayer that I would take advantage of every moment and never forget that it was Him who created this beautiful world, and that as I see these things, I would be even more marveled at His beauty and glory. He has so much more planned for us than we could ever imagine, and I cannot wait to experience the adventure that is the Christian faith even more.“If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.”C.S. Lewiswords by Camryn Reeves and photo by Cate Willis