Hey everyone!
I hope this blog finds everyone well. As for me final exams are finally over and in a couple weeks I’ll be leaving for one of the 7 wonders of the world – the Great Barrier Reef! I’m not one to throw around the word “epic”, but there’s potential in this trip. This blog is not the usual update, but hopefully this will add another gear of inspiration from this long vacation down under.
I recently read a book called “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” by Donald Miller. This guy is pretty inspiring, he’s written a few other books I’d like to read but apart from his writing he also serves on President Obama’s taskforce on Fatherhood and Healthy Families and started “the Mentoring Project” a while back building a team to mentor tonnes of kids throughout churches in the U.S. This book is essentially about two movie producers who come to Don wanting to make a movie about Don’s life, taking pieces of it and making the best story possible with the core characteristics of Don himself. Of some of the books I’ve read by Christian authors I’ve got the response that at times there too much tendency to try and re-create the Bible and before you know it you’ve got a two hundred page “Jesus loves you” fridge magnet from the guy handing them out in front of DQ. Don’s perspective is none like I’ve ever read and challenges us to look into our lives as he wrote about his, unsettled, unedited, and without the church infomercial that your life will be perfect when God joins in.
What a book has are thoughts, thoughts that the reader can relate with, to expand the imagination and create your own sense of meaning, but in a movie it’s all in the action. This book tells a story and a story of a movie, but it’s also about story itself; the structure, the roles of characters, the ups and downs, the climax, overall the quality of story and how to start picking away the layers in determining the motives for moving forward. As a reader, you soon realize that this book is a mirror into your own life and the question of “what kind of story are you living?” starts nagging on you. It starts making you appreciate and remember more of the little things, the seconds that pass, why this and why that...At least for me it did.
This adventure I’m embarking on is not the same as everyone else’s, but as I continue to bring these blogs to you guys, I can’t help but challenge everyone to get out there, or keep staying out there and do something with the working limbs, brain and creativity you were designed with. As Don writes it’s all about the “inciting incident”, breakthrough’s sort of speak, that acts as a door you go through, a moment of quality meaning, but it also means you can’t go back, not that you would want to. Quoting Don, “The most often quoted commandment in the Bible is ‘do not fear’. It’s in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn’t let fear boss us around. Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us safe, or more important, keep us from getting humiliated. And I guess it serves a purpose. But fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life. “
I’m 5 months into my stay here already and life definitely has not been boring, but I also know that there wasn’t a pause button to hit when I left and I know things are changing. I just really want to encourage everyone to keep looking to create memories with everyone you can, take a risk, and put in that extra effort so when you look back, it’s memorable.
Some fun ideas come straight from Don’s book, from a Canadian friend who provides these men’s events to help with bonding. Put these on the bucket list...
“I asked him once how he got the guys to bond like that and Kaj said he believed the key to getting men to bond was to have them risk their lives together. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, so he explained he was talking about rock climbing and swift-water kayaking and that sort of thing. But one night I went to one of their men’s events, and they didn’t exactly sit around beating drums. Instead they played capture the flag, but instead of flags they chucked little bottles of gasoline across fields into each other’s campfires. The team whose campfire burned down last won. I honestly thought somebody was going to die. And then another night they made knights’ outfits and rode bikes at each other with javelins made from long sticks with rolled up towels on the end. Only the towels had been dipped in gasoline and lit. I looked over at Kaj as though to say he was crazy, and he reminded me that men don’t bond unless they risk their lives together, and that Canadians enjoy free health care.”
As my good friend Jeff is always saying here... “When crazy is staring you in the face, you just gotta stare it right back!”
Take care homelanders, now get off your computer and go do something!
