Follow the Leader

{My brother and I, goofing off in the food prep room and studying intelligent things involving lots of numbers}

"We have slipped into an adventure of our own unmaking. We play the game of our lives, indeed, the game of life. And it is meant to be played by exuberant, daring, and fun-loving amateurs."

~Terry Lindvall

This is one of my favorite quotes right now. An adventure of my own unmaking- life, this month, this weekend, today- is an adventure. One that I could not create.

Conference. Cupcakes. Coffee. Need I say more? These three words sum up the last two days, though I suppose you could throw in a heavy dose of Pascal and his lovely triangle and call it good.

I don't really know where to lead smoothly into my idea, so I'm just going to jump right in. Call it a sugar rush, if you like. (Or possibly a crash).

Have you ever played follow the leader?

Let's call that transition a crash...

It's the game every kid plays to make dull walks exciting and every teacher plays to get their students to do what they want. Me? I hadn't played in years, but I wasn't facing another ten minute walk back to the dorms in awkward silence, so I turned around to my girls and said, "Ok, we're going to play Follow the Leader!"

The stares I got were incredible:

"What. "

"I've never played follow the leader...."

"In front of the cafeteria?- In front of all these people??"

"Um, yes. It'll be fun!" I'm not sure my enthusiasm for the game carried over. Regardless, the ten minute walk became more of a 15-minute hop-skip-twirl-fly-like-a-plane jaunt. I'm sure it made quite a funny picture: 13 girls weaving and winding through 100 other people, the movements of the leader slowly disintegrating into bent-over giggles by person 9. No one in the back could really tell what the leader was doing, so we just sort of made it up and stumbled along.

Now making it up and stumbling along in game of Follow the Leader is all fine and good, but what about in real life? Really, if you think about it, life is a game of Follow the Leader. As a follower of Christ, I am supposed to imitate Him perfectly. Just as if I was in a line and the leader was pretending to fly, I would pretend to fly. As I end up 1 person back, 2, 3, 4, 5, I start to lose sight. Movement is slower and sloppier and, towards the end, isn't much like imitation at all.

I heard one conference session this weekend, but the illustration of us as believers Following the Leader- Following Christ- stuck with me. So I come back to my quote: life is an adventure. My life is an adventure of Christ's making.

Exuberant.

Daring.

Fun-loving.

Amateur.

I love these words! They're full of life and color and wonder and grace. We can dare to follow Christ, knowing He provides the grace for us to do so. And as His children, we are commanded to be like Him. It takes exuberance, because sometimes imitation is on the very bottom of our to-do list. Exuberance is defined as abounding in vigor, and following is vigorous work. Fun- loving? Yes, because there are too many surprising twists and turns along the way that I am convinced would sometimes shatter the soul if it were not for the gift of laughter. And because life abundant is a gift of grace to rejoice in! Finally, amateur. This is my favorite. This is grace. We were not chosen for our excellent skills of mimicry. For if it were so, we might as well just do it on our own thank-you-very-much. We were chosen because we were bad followers. Horrible, actually, because we weren't even following- we were running the other way!

Here I am then, full of hope and amateurishly living life and loving it in in a way I hope can point only to Christ. I've tried not following. Not aggressively turning around and running the other way of course, but passively. Slipping behind one person and another until I lose sight. Following doesn't come easy. It doesn't come in a happy cup of feel-good tea alongside a cupcake and sunshine and roses. Sometimes it does. A lot of times, though, it comes with vigor.

It comes with a hard days work where you purposed to wake up on time to get things done.

It comes with setting aside time to learn how to follow.

It comes with an investing attitude- choosing to invest time wisely, choosing to invest in people.

It comes with exuberance and crazy-fun and sleepy-happy and one humongous dose of amateur.

{Hooray for conference, coffee, and cupcakes!!}

Confetti from the Sky

I'm in denial that it's already October. I'm in denial that my mind is currently living in November, and that an entire month became booked in the space of a weekend. There it is though, disintegrating planner and all.

Funny thing though- as full-speed-ahead as life is right now-, I'm oddly detached from it. Not detached from it in a negative sense at all, but a sort of transcendence beyond the chaos. The sort of feeling that comes from the realization that being caught up in all the 'to-do's would just about drown you, and so you just live in the grace for the moment. Not in the grace for tomorrow's 6 am to 11 pm schedule (you don't have that yet), not in the grace for the homework project tonight (because it's only 2 pm), not in grace for anything 4 years down the road (especially since you don't even know where you'll be!)- no, just grace for today. For right now.

It's scrawled on my wrist, 'grace for today,' to fight the constant desire to know- to know more or less how my entire life will work out.

That's ridiculous.

It was phrased once that God doesn't burden us with knowing His exact path in life for us. He has one, for sure, and He's told all I need to know: His will is for me to know Him. To know and love and glorify. So there it is, the grey ink reminding me to not fret about tomorrow. Reminding me to enjoy this moment for all the wonder it holds.

The other night we were reading Jonathon Edwards after dinner. He was talking about time, about our lives, and how, when we stand before God and look back at all we've done, what will we tell Him?

Time. It goes too fast. Here though, I'm going to take that back. Because time goes exactly the speed God wants it to. Isn't it my own flurry of activity and rush letting time slip through tired hands? My own sin filling it with things better left undone? My own in-attention causing me to wonder where it went?

Confetti came from the sky today. Multitudes of clouds un-furled sheets of iridescent, symphonic rain. Earthy, spicy-I could almost taste the clean in the air. A new season was ushered in as stacatto downpours peppered students mad-cap dashing for their classes. There was an awe and wonder in it all. The newness of the rain that caused a few to set aside textbooks and lean against the doorframe, forgetting the dates and names of history tests to revel in the rain. Grace came in the rain.

Those are my 10-to-11 musings. My hopes to stand before God and not have tell Him I missed my life because it went too fast. My prayer to seek grace in the right-now and not always be tripping and falling my way into tomorrow, scrambling for what I can't have yet.

" ...if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? - - Carpe - - hear it? - - Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary." John Keating Dead Poets Society