How many times do we choose not to do something because we’re afraid to fail?  In my case, sadly, countless.

It’s not just failure I fear, though.  It’s the part where everyone sees me fail.  That’s oftentimes what keeps me from stepping out.  (Ah, hello, Pride!)  God forbid I appear a fool to everyone.  

But really, how bad is that?  So we fail at something.  Or appear to, anyway - God knows the end of our story, not us.  So there’s a big chance that pride will be hurt, or that we will lose faith in ourselves.  Ok, so what?  Having pride and faith in ourselves is a big misdirection, anyway.  The fact that we are going to fail sometimes is a given - if we never failed, than we would pretty much be God, wouldn’t we?  But we’re not.  He is.

So, say we finally get up the guts to step out and do something, and it doesn’t work.  Now what?  Are we going to decide never to step out again so we don’t have to go through that humiliation or heartbreak again?  And - here’s a thought - is part of the issue that we think we’re entitled to succeed from the beginning?  Maybe that’s why we had to learn to walk when we were babies.  Babies don’t know enough to get embarrassed.  They don’t say to themselves, “I have fallen down enough, I deserve to walk now or I just won’t try anymore.”  Nope, they just have this little drive inside that makes them want to learn to walk, so they do.

And if something doesn’t work out how we wanted, how do we know it was a failure, anyway?  We’re not privy to the whole story.  We don’t see all the intricate workings, where all the little streams go after we pass them.  What looks like failure to us may be producing something beautiful a ways downstream.  Maybe from above it’s another tiny (and deliberate) brush stroke in what will be an amazing work of art.  We just need to remember to have patience, AND the faith that God really does have our best interest at heart.

I think just as parents are sitting and rooting for their little one to keep trying, take that step, don’t stay down just because they fall, God must be rooting for us, too.  If He put something in our hearts to do, it’s up to us to put aside the fear (and laziness, maybe...?), and do it.  Just because we fall down doesn’t mean He means for us to stay there.  It’s a learning process.  So we fall.  So we just get back up, maybe even having learned a little something new.

There’s freedom in that, isn’t there?

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”  Most of us are familiar with that line from the poem The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost.  What a wistful, beautiful, but almost painful poem that is!  It’s about choices, big and small, and how they affect our future.  It’s about where we’ll eventually find ourselves in time, and how we never really get the same choice twice, because paths just keep going, and splitting, and going again.  Away and away....

But sometimes the choice isn’t which path to walk, but whether we’re going to walk at all.

I have days where I wake up with my hiking boots already on - I’m ready to hit the trail, climb the rocks, and leap the scary potholes in a single bound.  Those days are awesome!  But those days, for some reason, are also few and far between for me.  Mostly I find I have to fight myself and my reluctance to walk anywhere, my fear of failure and of being mediocre, and the often unexplained heaviness that is waiting just outside my peripheral vision before I can even think of getting my hiking boots out of the closet, and by that time I’ve already lost half of my Umph.

So instead of it being about which road to follow, it ends up being about making the basic choice to either let today slide away into ambiguity again, or to tap into a Strength that is beyond me and just focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

Have you found yourself there too?  It’s not fun.  It sometimes makes me want to question whether what’s at the end of the road is worth the fight just to walk.  But you know what?

It’s worth it.

It’s worth it on the days when you feel like you have winged feet and it’s easy to visualize the End Zone.  But it’s also worth it when you can’t see through the fog and you just have to go on the faith that this road really does lead somewhere.  It’s worth it when the only thing that drives you is the hope that what’s up ahead is what God created you for.  It’s worth it when you’re tired and all you can hear is the continuous tromp-tromp-tromp of your shoes on the road, on and on and on.  It’s worth it when you get through the bracken and you catch a much-needed and refreshing glimpse of the reward ahead.

Don’t lose heart.  Please don’t give up.  Make the choice to keep walking.  And look for the little beautiful things along the way, even if you haven’t reached the fulfillment of your goal yet.  And if all you have the strength for sometimes is to keep walking with your head down against the wind, it’s ok.  Even if right now it’s lonely, or difficult, or painful, or discouraging, or tiring, it’s worth it.

God is molding you into a beautiful person, and every time you make the choice to walk the road, you get that much closer to the goal-line, which, really, is about becoming who He made you to be.  And it’s going to be beautiful.  It’s going to be so much more fulfilling than you thought possible.

It’s worth it.

I am convinced that the majority of us have no clue what that really means - the idea of The Bigger Picture.  It’s a little evasive.  It oftentimes ends up being a source of both hope and discouragement.

I’m gonna bunny trail for a minute.  Yeah, right at the beginning.  Why wait, ya know...?  But I promise there’s a point.

The movie Noah comes out today amidst a lot of controversy about whether too much “artistic license” was taken in the making of it, whether it strays too far from the real story.  As I was reading up about it the other day, some of the descriptions of the movie made me go back to Genesis to reread about it in more depth.  And I was very interested to find some things I hadn’t noticed before.  And I was thinking that, even if the movie strays away from the actual facts of the story, maybe it will at least cause people to go check the source.  God can use anything He wants to...

Anyway, I was kinda shocked to not find any place in the account where there were people jeering and making fun of Noah as he toiled on the ark.  And yet, that’s the picture I’ve had in my mind for years.  People surrounding him, laughing and taunting as  he slaves away for YEARS on this crazy massive wooden thing in the sun.  Haven’t we all been taught that?  And not to say they weren't.  But, after reading and rereading Genesis chapters 6-9, and doing a search of Noah’s name throughout the Bible, none of the places in the Bible that alludes to the incident ever mentions anyone directly laughing at him, that I could find.  It does say they were living their normal lives, not being aware of impending doom.  But isn’t it funny the interpretations that sometimes get taught as fact...  Does anyone know of a place in the scripture where it describes that scenario?  If you do, let me know - I’m really curious.

It also was amazing to me to remember that Noah was 600 years old when the flood finally happened.  That’s a long time to have lived before something that significant happened in his life.  And to spend as long as he did on building that boat, day after day, year after year, working by the faith alone that God had commanded him to do this.  I realize people lived longer during those days anyway, but really, think about it: if we cut that down to a tenth, which is about how long our life spans are today in comparison, that would have had him being almost 60 before God came to him with the warning and command to build the ark.

And here we come around to the point.

It got me thinking about how fast and full we have come to expect our lives to be.  How many significant things we plan to accomplish.  Especially here in America, we’re so used to seeing immediate, or very nearly immediate, results on things we do, work for, or want, that if we don’t, we fight discouragement and even anger.  I tend to think part of the reason God had people living so long at the beginning was because He knew things took time, and since the world was so new, there were a lot of things that were going to take a lot of time to figure out.  Patterns of weather.  Patterns of crops.  Patterns of the human body.  Patterns of social relationships.

I was reading with Jasmine during homeschool a couple weeks ago about Samuel Morse and the telegraph.  It took him his whole life to first have the idea that maybe communication didn't have to move so slowly, then to figure out that sound and electrical impulses could travel, then inventing the machine that would harness it to make long-range communication possible, and THEN convincing other skeptical people to give large amounts of money towards his work so he could keep building it.  He didn’t see it really start to be fulfilled until he was much, much older, and he was pretty poor the whole time.  But he kept going, often alone and without immediate significant results.  Without being able to see the serious impact it made, the huge technological gate it eventually opened.  He just had a vision, a drive, a passion, a belief, and he simply built his life around it.

There have been countless people over the ages that have begun things and have not lived to see their success.  And yet they were extremely significant things that ended up moving history and humanity forward.  And then I compare that with my very shortsighted views of starting, and continuing, projects in my little corner that I feel that God has put in my heart, and the discouragement that threatens to make me quit during the times it seems too hard.

Puts a few things into perspective.

The Bigger Picture.  The one that God has seen since the beginning of time.  All I have to do is keep going with what is in my hands and heart today.  It may end up being significant, it may not.  But all I have to worry about is doing it, and not quitting.

We gotta start somewhere.  Just do the Next Thing.