Adventure is out there!

If  you're anything like me (and if so, I love you to death) then you have read books like The Hobbit, A Wrinkle in Time, Harry Potter, Narnia, and so on, you have wished at some point that you could have an adventure of your own.
Don't try denying it. You have wished that, even if it meant that bad stuff happened, you could go on an adventure.
It's okay. Sometimes life feels a little too repetitive and you want to run off into the blue and be late for dinner.

Actually, now that I've said it, you are now thinking about how awesome it would be to go traveling with the Doctor, or detecting with Sherlock (although I doubt you could do much with Sherlock other than run and open your mouth with surprise whenever he does something clever, which is always).

Adventure is out there, although it might not be in the form that you expect.

You may not have thirteen dwarves knocking on your door or a handsome man in a blue box appear in your sitting room, but if you study God's Word enough you'll realize just how adventurous you're going to have to get.

The definition of adventure, at least in my dictionary, is "taking risks that lead to the unknown".

So the simple act of asking a person about their faith is an adventure.
And that takes quite a lot of bravery to do.
It takes bravery to invite someone to church.
It takes bravery to give a server money to pay for the next person's meal.
It takes bravery to go say hi to the person no one likes.
For introverts like me, it takes bravery just to say hello to someone I don't know!

Bravery is something closely tied with every adventure, fictional (wait, The Hobbit is fictional??? MY CHILDHOOD IS RUINED!) or not.

Another thing closely tied with adventures is strength. Both mental and physical, but quite often the hero of the story will have a point in the book where he or she will think about the comforts of home and want to turn back, or be all alone with friends gone and think of a way to get out of the difficult situation.
It takes strength to tell the truth.
It takes strength to apologize.
It takes strength to admit that you were wrong.

Bravery and strength are necessities for every hero.
For us, our strength comes from God. Our sinful nature wants to lash out and be the knife in the dark, but God can help us be brave and strong. It is the Tookish side of Bilbo, that rises up and wants to have adventures. We like to live in the comforts of home, curled up around a good book and wishing for adventures.

Jump out of your comfort zone and go have the adventures you think you can't have, because you can have them.
But now that you know how to have them, do you really want to have an adventure?
You might think that it's all about goblins and trolls and riddles in the dark, but really, it's all about those everyday acts of stepping out of what's comfortable for us.

The Baggins in me wants to just sit down with a cup of tea and watch another episode of Doctor Who.
But the Took inside me, well...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

***Special thanks to A Hobbit Devotional by Edd Strauss for inspiration.