Search & Rescue: A Map for a Warrior's OrientationSample

Day 9 Larger Than We Can Imagine Now if you’ve stayed with me this far, then it is my hope that you have landed at overwhelmed . John Eldredge in his book, Waking the Dead writes: If you’re not pursuing a dangerous quest with your life, well, then, you don’t need a Guide. If you haven’t found yourself in the midst of a ferocious war, then you won’t need a seasoned Captain. If you’ve settled in your mind to live as though this is a fairly neutral world and you’re simply trying to live your life as best you can, then you can probably get by with the Christianity of tips and techniques …. We need God intimately and desperately. When did we begin to believe we could control the Larger Story and all the elements within the Two Realms and Two Kingdoms? There seems to be a gravitational pull for me to attempt to control my life. You probably know the feeling I’m talking about: To be in charge, call the shots, keep it all together and, like the old commercial says, Never let ’em see you sweat. As I often like to ask folks who are still on the self-help treadmill, how’s that working for you? We cannot control these Larger Story variables or the characters that war and fight over us. Rather, we are subject to them, we contend with them and are invited to choose again and again which to align with and which to fight against. Choose unwisely and, well...just look around; casualties are everywhere . Choose wisely, and there is One who promises to guide us safely home. Truly, this earth is not our home. The day I stepped into this reality was a very good day, one that set up many more good days to come. I didn’t say they were easy; there still can be hard days, but they are good. I have to let you in on a little secret, one that I didn’t discover until walking in this Larger Story for a few years. The more I saw, the more my orientation grew, the more FREE I became. The more God took me into my own story, my personal history, the more my history was rewritten. The more God took me deeper into study and understanding of any one dimension or component on the map, the more the whole story expanded. And that is exactly how it works. Explore one part, discover it is more, and the whole terrain shifts . In other words, you can’t gain ground in knowledge and experience in one element without it affecting all the others. I see it all the time when I teach about this message, each person listening hears something a little different. Individual hearts pick up on different things. Listeners collect the dots, then they start connecting them. Some hearts discover a battle they’ve been oblivious to. Others catch onto the mission of Christ and confess they’ve had Him all wrong. Where is God moving your heart in the Larger Story today ? What is He awakening you to? We were having dinner with some friends and the conversation shifted to the map and our hearts place in the Larger Story. Our friend said, “it seems a little selfish, all this attention on our hearts and our parts in the story.” This particular friend is a dietitian, an expert at nutrition. I wonder how she would have reacted if I had said, during a discussion on food,  “Feeding yourself and exercise sounds a little selfsh, don’t you think?” Just like eating right and a little exercise can help a person live better , recognizing and engaging in the Two Realms and Two Kingdoms are extremely helpful and significantly equips us to experience Life as God intended… abundant and full.