Perseverance

On a day when the dream that you've put your entire life on hold for seems to be falling apart, there is not much that you think could make you smile.

My phone rings, and I look down at the name. It's someone I look up to, and hold in very high respects. Someone I had SMS'd an hour or so ago informing him that my student visa to Brazil had been denied. I clear my throat trying to find a semblance of strength in my voice, but I'm pretty confident that he'll know I'm crumbling. I'm falling apart on the inside.

"Hello?" I sound like I don't know who's on the other end of this call, and I don't even know why I did that. I'm now speaking to the guy that introduced me to the Holy Spirit. The guy that first sat me down when I decided to become a missionary and talked me through all the logistics of this decision. The guy that I spend every year with making plans to serve the youth, and to run mission trips. And here I am pretending I don't know who he is.

"Hey man. You ok?"

Why does he have to ask that question? If I say that I am then I know that I'll be lying to him. If I'm honest, and say no, then I'll probably crack in my voice and sound like I'm in puberty.

"I'll be okay.." It's not a lie, I guess.

After all, I'm sure it's just the shock of now having no way to get into Brazil that is playing with my emotions. Besides, it's only a visa. I'm still doing okay. But it was my way in. It was my plan. My plane ticket still says December 2nd, but now I have no way of passing the border. How am I supposed to stay there to help be a father figure to these street kids when I'm not allowed into the country for more than three months?

The conversation continues as I explain my dire hopelessness. I make it sound much worse than it probably is, but right now, all my mind can think of is the complete collapse of everything I have been building over the last three years. He just listens.

"Look, you've had a really smooth road up to now. Almost too smooth. You've had no reason to have any faith up until now."

He's right, you know. Everything has been going exactly according to plan. Something I've thought of often before, but shoved it into my subconscious. He then reminds me of the many mission trips we've gone on and how the ones that have been filled with the most impact were the ones with the biggest challenges before hand. He poses the question of the significance of doing something for God with no resistance.

"God does sometimes close doors to guide you, but He has been opening doors for this. The Devil also attempts to close doors, but he does it to stop you. It's up to you to bash through those doors. It's time for your faith to persevere."

This conversation suddenly becomes a lot more difficult for me, because I know he's right. Besides, what do I want to tell my kids one day? That in the days where everything seemed to fall apart, I fell apart with it? Or that I was able to stay strong and rely on my faith in God when there seemed to be nothing else to hold on to. I remember the words of my pastor from Sunday morning, "Look for opportunities to exercise your faith." I need to put these words into practice right now. Nobody ever achieved anything great by giving up.

"I have to go now, but we must get together soon just to talk through everything."

I thank him for the chat, hang up the phone, and pull away from everything I was doing. I close my eyes and begin to pray. I begin to worship God, knowing that He is still worthy no matter what happens to me. He is still in control, and He is still my greatest reward.

And because of that, I can persevere.

The Career Adventure

As I wander through a bookstore that I visit often, I find myself in the children's section. It's interesting to see the creative ideas that you find in children's books these days. Almost none of the books are simple text and paper books. All of them are interactive. From colouring in, to adding your own identity to the adventure. From pop-ups, to little sound bytes, all the books approach more than one sense of their intended readers. I continue through to the "adult's" fiction books. All of these are now void of even illustrations. The extent of image creativity is found in the covers, many of which themselves are pretty plain.

Somewhere in between there and here, between then and now, between that time of life and our adulthood, we are supposed to drop our interaction with life and depend on ourselves. This has had me thinking over the last little while, and opened my eyes more and more to the conditioning of our lives we experience through this aging process.

This world is set up to teach all of us to become independent. We are all to build ourselves as a career. A career and life of self. I must go to school, and I must then go to study and slowly build up more experience and knowledge all aimed at one single, essentially unattainable, target. Once we get near there, we are taught that life will be more fulfilling and easier. After this? Well, after this we then wait until we have kids, so that we can encourage them to do the same. But what about that self that I've been building my whole life? Well, I guess that must just wait to die. And those kids will then repeat the cycle. Preserving our class, and pursuing our career.

No interaction with the world, or even our neighbours. No pop-ups, sound bytes, or colouring in. Just text and paper aimed at the one sense, the one objective and the one end result.

I must admit that this was one of the incentives that was behind my ease in leaving my job. I had been aiming my whole life at a career for the sake of me. Not for any other purpose. This led to an ambitious friend of mine to ask me, sincerely, "Gavin, don't you feel like you've wasted...the last 9 years of your life?" (referring to my studies and work experience.) I replied, "Not at all, because life isn't a career. It's an adventure."

If I had one regret, it's that I put so much emphasis on myself, that my career was a career life. If I had realized that there was more to life than just Gavin, then I could've built, from the start, a career adventure. Now I at least have the opportunity to use my experience, exposure and growth to live an interactive life. Where I can work for more than just self. I can, God-willing, be an asset to a global dream of compassion and love.

Because, let's face it. This isn't the Truman Show. Life is about more than me. It's about God, and He is all about interaction. That's why He gave us five (5) senses!

Dream of Dreams

The author Leonard Sweet posed a very interesting perspective when he asked, "Have you ever had a dream in which you sat and read for an extended period of time?". He expands on this idea in his book, The Gospel According to Starbucks, but his point is that dreams are visual. They are dynamic images and they are vibrant. They don't consist of black and white text, just like the text you're reading now, they come from the deeper desires of our souls and involve our imaginations with actions we couldn't perceive doing in reality, most times.

Over the past weekend, I was with a family that moved to South Africa from Argentina. On Saturday afternoon we visited the Argentinian Association and were visited by a family that is literally travelling the world in a 1928 Graham-Paige car. Herman and Candelaria Zapp always had a dream to travel from Argentina to Alaska, however along the way on their first adventure a few things changed, and their dream became somewhat more elaborate. Today, 12 years and 10 months later, (and four kids later, to boot) they are still travelling to countries across the world on an incredilbe adventure. Listening to them talk so passionately about their dream was one of the more inspiring moments I've had in the last couple of months. They spoke about how they had no idea how this was going to work out, and they had no idea exactly where they were going to go next, but all along the way they came across wonderful people who just wanted to help them fulfill their dream. On the back of their book, Spark Your Dream (a rough english translation from their original Spanish version), the Seattle Post-Intelligent comments, "...Forget the monkey meat, the thrashing crocodiles, the wrecked axle, running out of gas, running out of money, going into labor. The hardest part of the journey from Argentina was simply starting it... ...The Zapp's advice for would-be dreamers: 'Begin'..."

My dream is now two months away from beginning and there are so many opportunities to pull out that come across the 

way, not to mention the incentives to follow suit. However, I have put my head down and stubbornly decided that I'm not going to give up the one opportunity that God has given me to follow His calling to Brazil. I won't get an opportunity to "save money" in this life, and use it for whatever God has called me to do in the next life. This is it. This is my vapour in the wind that I choose to use for His will, no matter what the cost. 

I hope that somewhere along your journey of life, in your own car of choice (because, to be honest, that 1928 Graham-Paige didn't look the most comfortable), I hope that you get inspired to drive off the beaten track and go to a place that you'd always wanted to venture into. A place that not many people had the courage to veer into. A place that you had only before seen in your dreams.

:)

I feel like I often end my posts with a Braveheart-esque finale. I should stop that.