How Far…

Recently I watched Disney’s hit movie, “Moana,” and if you have not seen it, I highly recommend it.  The movie centers around Moana, the young, soon to be queen, fighting the tension between her own culture’s expectations for her, and a stirring she feels inside that tells her she is something more.

I have felt the tension too.  There are cultural expectations explicit or implicit about each role that I have in the world.  This summer I am reflecting wondering what have I been created and designed by God to be?  Let’s be clear I am not on some philosophical discovery, that I can write a book about all I learned of what a Pastor is, or what a husband or father looks like, instead this is an intensely personal journey.  The answer is not in a generic answer about pastors or father or husbands, but instead who has God made Bill Flavin to be?  When I am most human, most living into my God given design, what does it look like?

Now let’s be clear, I love the life God has blessed me with.  I have been blessed with a sabbatical from a loving, supportive church.  I have two wonderful children, and a wife who I can’t say enough about.  And yet I have this sense that there is more beyond the horizon, more inside of me that God still is uncovering.  So I continue the journey that God has already started within me with great excitement and hope, wonder how far this will take me.  Praying that I will have the courage to keep leaning in, keep wondering, keeping hoping.  And I pray for you, that you take time and space to wonder deeply what God has created you to be that you wonder, pray, and take solitude so that the creator of the universe, who knitted you and I together in our Mother’s womb, would continue to reveal to each of us more fully the epic live that God has for you and for me.  That our lives would be filled with wonder and adventure, driven by who our creator made us to be, instead of held captive by whatever expectations keep up boxed in.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPAbx5kgCJo[/embedyt]