“The Call to Adventure”
Justin Jones / Executive Pastor of Spiritual Formation and Strategic Development
Recently, my wife Janelle and I started working out again. For whatever reason, she and I are both the sort of people that don’t get motivated by gingerly walking into something. Instead, if we commit to something we decide to go all in. About fourteen years ago, when I first moved to Buffalo, I had done this video workout program called p90x. They are intense workouts that work all parts of your body and last between 40 minutes and an hour. We decided to find these videos again and start up the three-month workout program.
Now, I had gotten a little out of shape and flabby over this winter. And I have aged a little bit since the last time I did the program. It was painful for that first week. But after the first week, we started to crave waking up early and doing these workouts together. Our bodies, minds, and hearts started to become more ready to face the day by God’s grace.
So why do I bring this up? Well, before we started doing this, Janelle and I were stuck in terms of our physical fitness. It’s not that we were completely sedentary or were not doing some healthy things, but we were just going through the motions each day and doing what was necessary to keep going. Because we were not faced with a physical challenge or adventure, there was nothing calling something deeper and greater out of us. We were stuck in a pattern of apathy in terms of our fitness.
But things started to change. Why, you might ask? Well, I forgot to mention a really important tidbit – the reason we felt compelled to start working out in the first place. Once every seven years we as Wesleyan pastors get the chance to go on a month-long sabbatical. This May is my sabbatical and we, through the help of some generous people, are planning a trip out west to visit four national parks: Yosemite, Sequoia, King’s Canyon, and Death Valley. I am getting the chance to cross something off my bucket list: standing next to a Sequoia tree. As we considered our physical fitness and realized we were about to hike mountains as a family, we felt compelled to order our lives differently. God used “the call to adventure” to challenge us to keep growing physically.
This principle is not just about physical fitness. God uses adventure to grow us in every way: spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically. And when I say “adventure” I am not just talking about travels and trips. I am talking about the adventure of life. Every day, you can either measure the world by your story or God’s story. If you measure it by your story, it’s pretty lame (no offense). You see, if we judge the world by “our story” and our vantage point, our world is small, and life becomes about survival most of the time. We just go from day to day with no greater passion or meaning.
But if we understand the world from God’s story, then everything changes. God is writing an amazing story, an adventure with no comparison, and you and I get to be part of it. You have a part to play in this grand adventure. If we truly understood this and received it from the Lord, then every day would be infused with a deeper purpose and meaning than what our apathetic lives often look like. And that story ultimately culminates with our eternal destiny with Jesus in heaven if we know Him and follow Him.
It reminds me of the last book of the Chronicles of Narnia, “The Last Battle.” These books are meant to be allegories and in the last book it is an allegory of the end times and entrance into heaven. The lion, Aslan, who is a representation of Jesus takes the characters of the book to heaven and it says this:
And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this, the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. – C.S. Lewis, “The Last Battle”
God is calling all of us into an adventure … the grand adventure … the only adventure that truly matters. You and I will have an eternal destiny – either with Him for all eternity in heaven or apart from Him for all eternity in hell. He has done everything possible for us to be in relationship to Him, through Jesus’ death and resurrection. Now, we must respond to the call to adventure. It is time we leave behind apathetic and disordered lives and start every day with the end in mind. Remember God’s story every day and your part in it, and every day will be infused with grand meaning and purpose.