Initiative

I am reading Erwin McManus’ book called Chasing Daylight:  Seize the Power of Every Moment. 

He begins the book by calling us to chose to live.  “Somehow we all know that to play it safe is to lose the game.”  The emphasis is on opening our lives up to God through Jesus, and in so doing we can live our lives wide open.   Lives wide open one moment at a time.  Don’t get stuck in a moment, live beyond a moment and make this moment a choice.

Be like Caleb from the Bible, who in a moment of truth for his life says (Joshua 14:10-12):

Today I am eighty-five years old. ¹¹ I am as strong now as I was when Moses sent me on that journey, and I can still travel and fight as well as I could then. ¹² So give me the hill country that the Lord promised me. You will remember that as scouts we found the descendants of Anak living there in great, walled towns. But if the Lord is with me, I will drive them out of the land, just as the Lord said.”

In the second chapter, we hit the thought of initiative.  Don’t be passive, but be passionate.  Don’t live in neutral.

This is the point at which I sat up (actually I was riding my exercise bike!), as McManus made the point:  “To put it crassly, when you are madly in love with God, you can do whatever you want.  I am convinced this may be the best contemporary translation of Psalm 37:4” (p. 50).

“There is a direct relationship between passion and initiative.  The more passionate you are, the more proactive you will tend to be. . . Here’s where the dilemma lies:  this can actually be paralyzing for a sincere follower of Jesus Christ.  You don’t want to passionately do the wrong thing.  You desperately want to do what’s on God’s heart, not just on your heart.  Here’s the liberating reality:  when you are passionate about God, you can trust your passions.   God uses our passions as a compass to guide us.” (p. 50)

Now, I can hardly wait to read the rest of the book!!