Let's jump into lakes

Has anyone ever asked you to jump into a lake when you don’t think it’s safe, or told you to close your eyes before they feed you some unknown thing, or asked you to ‘trust me, I know its going to be fine’?Has anyone every just taken you so far out of your comfort zone and all the things you feel safe and secure in and then shown you why it was a good idea to travel so far away. Why it was a good idea to trust them with it all?There is a surety in trusting someone. Knowing that someone has your back 100%, in so many ways that whatever crazy thing they ask of you, you know it will be fine. There is a surety in those relationships: I think that’s part of what I admire in the marriages of my parents, and my brother & sister-in-law (and so many others I know) this certainty in one another that means they trust the other would catch them if they fell blindfolded.I’m in my last week of a two-month break from my normalcy. I’ve spent the past two months traveling to see people, helping my parents pack up their home and generally trying to get my mind, heart, body and spirit rested. If I am honest with you I would say 98% of that time has been spent in avoidance of what I came home thinking I needed to process.When I boarded my flight to London in June I had these romantic ideas of coffee shops and endless notebooks full of my brain on paper, days spent in quiet processing of the past three years and all that I have seen. I wanted to delve deeper into theological questions and find solutions and answers to things that were plaguing my mind. That was what I thought I was jumping into.Those days and coffee shops didn’t happen. I didn’t seek them out and I avoided the idea of them. I instead spent time watching TV and reading novels, sleeping and becoming way to interested in made-for-tv Hallmark channel movies.And then on Thursday evening I had dinner with Becky; a sound solid friend who never fails to get to the heart of everything. She has the ability to draw out the inner thoughts of me that I didn’t know were there simply by asking me the right questions.As I answered her questions and thought about what she was saying I began to see that maybe I had been processing in the past two months. That while I was ignoring my usual focused, determined, coffee shop and moleskin idea of processing, my brain and heart were doing in for me.In this time away, in the simple act of doing something else and breathing a different rhythm I had begun to process the exact things I had wanted to when I left Romania.last night as I read back over the few journal entries from the past month I found this written and circled:"The surety of Gods call and goodness over the safe and secure and comfortable”I’ve never heard God say ‘trust me’ as much as he did this last year, and I’d never been so unsure if I could trust him.However there was something in this idea of being sure of his goodness and call… of trusting him the way Jeremiah does when all is going wrong and he declares that the idea of holding onto and stopping doing as God asks “… is like fire in my bones! I am worn out trying to hold it in! I can’t do it!”It’s like being asked to jump into a big dark lake, or being blindfolded and not knowing what is coming.You take a deep breath and trust the person, you jump and end up in the most beautiful lake you’ve ever been in, with the stars their brightest above you and the lake the freshest temperature. And you breath and you float and you are thankful they took you there, and asked you to jump.This summer I went into it with expectations of big things happening, of God changing everything. Leaving Romania for two months was stepping far away from my comfort zone. And it wasn’t until Becky and her beautiful perfect questioning that I saw that I was in the lake, the perfect one, staring at the stars and the biggest, brightest moon I’d seen in a while. The jump just looked so different from what I had thought it would.We have to be willing to jump, it doesn’t work if we don’t. We have to be willing to jump in friendships, relationships, work, life, growing up. We have to be willing to jump when it comes to God- whether we are deep in relationship with Him or not even sure He exists. Trust that he is going to catch us if we ever fall, and that when he asks us to jump or close our eyes then it will all be okay because He's got this.Because if we don’t jump, if we don’t trust then we get stuck: on the cliff edge, on the heather, comfortable but never knowing the reality of the beauty and experiences that lie beyond it.R/