I do not like to go to the grocery store by myself.

If there is not someone to go with me on an errand, I do not go on that errand.

But something wild has come awake within me.

I love being at home.  I prefer being alone with a good book and driving somewhere new gives me anxiety.

I am in love with strangers but they perturb me.  I much prefer my close friends and my family for company.

But something wild has come awake within me.

I’ve recently been posed with an opportunity to go somewhere far away from my hometown to live and serve among strangers for a prolonged period of time.  Two years ago, I would not have even entertained the thought.  It would have been dismissed as craziness.

But something wild has come awake within me.

Maybe it’s always been there–this dauntless desire to do new things.  Perhaps it’s laid quiet and hidden, tucked away somewhere underneath fear and self-inflicted perimeters of what I am capable of and what I am not.

Looking back, I see how I’ve always had this craving to step outside of what’s safe and experience something other than what I see right in front of me.  But I knew–it is always safer inside the box.

But something wild has come awake within me.

I have found myself saying “Yes” to that which I would not have even considered before.  I have shocked and amazed myself.

I took that opportunity.

Long and far, living day-by-day with people I do not know.

Maybe I am not as afraid as what I once thought.  Maybe my capacity for adventure is a lot bigger than what I originally estimated.  I always thought my dreams were too wild and too big.  But maybe, just maybe, they’ve always been much too small.

I have realized that home is inside me, and it’s something I can take anywhere.  Safety and security are an internal grounding.

I long to know where I can go, what I can do.  I am tired of having myself convinced of what this vessel is capable of doing.

Who am I to define where I can go and where I cannot?   Who am I define what I can do and what I cannot?  My perception of myself is much too narrow.

God is a light, a guide–he himself my very path.  And yet I choose to let fear take me on shortcuts.

What do I miss of this great and lavish God, what peaks and valleys of his landscape do I not see because fear keeps me tiptoeing farther and farther away from the edge of faith and trust?

His character is my terrain, his love my landscape.  His favor is my companion, his essence my guide.

My entire life, fear has looked to my spirit of adventure and said, “Ha.  Do you not know she is afraid?”

But today it is my spirit of adventure that rises up in the face of fear and says, “Oh, but do you not know she is brave?”

I’ve assumed fear, ineptitude, and inadequacy as identity and have looked to anything outside of them as treacherous, preposterous, and incredulous.

But today I step outside of the skin of fear and self-imposed barriers, stepping into a new light of brave and bold new thinking and living.

Maybe I am having a spiritual epiphany–or maybe I’ve just been reading too much poetry.

Either way (if they’re even separate ways at all), I am going on an adventure.

I’ll be gone for the summer, riding down a path I’m sure was set before me all along–a path I’ve chosen to ignore.

I am not alone, that much I know for sure.

Okay, God.  You and me.  Let’s do this.