Dreaming Big, Starting Small

 

Our daughter has a saying about curtailing overeating that goes something like this, "There will always be a last bite, so I decide my last bite will be within healthy eating boundaries."  Stopping something enjoyable or habitual is one kind of hard.

There is another kind of hard that has to do with starting.  Beginning.  Made harder perhaps by my love of quick and instant.  My desires seem unattainable or take too long to realize.

The days, months, or years between making changes and getting the results I want seem dull and long and hard.  And perhaps the result of my work will not be as I imagined. 

So I stay where I am. Where it is safe. And a month from now, a year from now, I will be exactly where I've been.  Longing. Dreaming. Wondering. 

When I was training for a marathon five years ago, I remember how my sweat sisters and I celebrated shaving seconds... yes, seconds... off our time.  We celebrated tiny indicators of growth in speed and endurance.  We did the daily, mundane work of training and our bodies strengthened.  Twenty weeks later we finished a marathon! 

I have begun another adventure following a nudge from God.  The invitation wasn't written in big, bold letters. It feels risky to me.  I am releasing comfortable rhythms of work and life.  I am changing up familiar routines of  prayer in my relationship with God, exploring new-to-me spiritual practices in relating to God.  These practices involve listening and being with Him.  I'm back in a formal learning environment, taking classes in spiritual direction.  I'm a fifty-something wrestling with technology to do it.  I feel awkward.  Clumsy.  Vulnerable.  I wonder what in the world I am doing?

I celebrate small successes.  Things like successfully uploading assignments to Box, an internet site used by our facilitators to gather our homework;  the joy of reading words that show me this journey I'm on is one taken by many before me.  I notice my growth.  I listen better to my people.  I am more aware of my impact on others.  It's slow going, this trail I am on.  And if I hadn't started I'd still be where I was. 

 

I remember the brush tangled creek bank on our property twenty years ago.  I had a paper bag full of daffodil bulbs from my grandfather.  On a hot August Saturday, my husband and I cleared the bank and using a digging iron, made holes for the bulbs, dropped them in the rich soil and waited.  Summer.  Autumn. Winter.  Spring.   Science can explain the biology of daffodils.  We simply placed the bulbs in an environment for growing and trusted the process of growing things. And in the Spring, we had a glorious bank of sunny blooms!  Bountiful beauty!  They reproduce themselves and multiply!  It's called naturalizing.....it happens naturally.

And so I step out in hope of realizing a longing of my own.  I plant myself in an environment for growth.  I trust the Gardener, my beautiful, dangerous, tender God.  And we will see what He does with my seed of faith.  It is risky business, stepping into realizing dreams.  It is also exhilarating, opening an expanse of grace that is refreshingly freeing.

What nudge are you experiencing?  What small beginning are you being invited to?

For those of you interested in what I am up to, in September I began a two year certification process to become a spiritual director.  I quit my nursing job in December of 2011 after months of processing a prompting I sensed from God.  Not sure where I was going next I focused on taking care of our pastor (my husband), homemaking, being intentional about relationships, and growing in intimacy with God.  I started this blog and have been writing in fits and sputters.  In February of 2015 I learned of this training being offered at Kavannah House by Sustainable Faith.  After praying about it with my husband, my spiritual director and a dear friend, I applied and was accepted to the program.  The journey has been rich and scary.  Some weeks I feel as though I am drinking from a fire-hose, the learning coming at me crazy fast.  Other times I am overwhelmed with my own inadequacies.  Mostly I have a sense of being in a wilderness, somewhere between where I was and not sure where I'm headed, in an exhilaratingly liberating way.  It is as mysterious as that last sentence! 

 

I've been invited to contribute to the Kavannah House blog and I am grateful for the opportunity and the vote of confidence in my writing skills.  It will provide some accountability for this procrastinator.  God is working on redeeming my perfectionistic, controlling tendencies.  I am hopeful that as I worry less about getting it "right", whatever "it" happens to be, procrastination will be less a problem for me. 

Thank you for taking time to stop by and check in with me.  I hope I am an encouragement to you to step into all the color God has for your life!