The Schizophrenic

I want to see my life as an adventure (if you have not picked up on that already).

I've found that to live an adventurous life you must do something like the following:

Change your lens, let that lens shape your reality, choose to exist in that reality, and respond in active ways. 

It may sound like the actions of a schizophrenic to choose a reality to live into. Yet truly we all live this way already. Every person who has ever lived has chosen a reality to buy into whether it is definitively something or not. 

The overall reality we ought to buy into is the reality of a God who loves his handy work, mankind, so much that he would miraculous become a man only to die on a cross that mankind might be in perfect relationship with himself again. 

The story of God and how he has pursued us since the dawn of creation is an incredible adventure. To buy into that and to follow Jesus is to choose an adventurous life. Let us open our eyes and see that. Let us look at what we already have before us in our lives, and choose to see each thing, moment, and relationship as an opportunity to experience a resonant life. 

I think this shift I babble on about can be initiated by simply recognizing the value of our lives on earth in light of the fact they end. Every story comes to an end. Every song has its resolve. Every journey has a destination. 

I love what the Psalmist writes in Psalm 39:4-6:

Show me, LORD, my life's end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is. 

You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you.

Everyone is but a breath, even those who seem secure. 

Surely everyone goes around like a mere phantom; in vain they rush about, heaping up wealth without knowing whose it will finally be. 

The Psalmist had the audacity to ask God to remind him how fleeting his life was! It was not out of a depression he asks this. He asks that he might be motivated to live more fully than those around him. People live like "phantoms" making a more secure life that is never securely theirs in the end anyways. 

Let us ask God that question. As we put our eye up to the looking glass, let us courageous see how short life is and fill it with dense beauty and fullness.