A Year of Major Change Lies Ahead

I face big decisions in the upcoming new year. In May I will get my law degree. In July I will take and (hopefully) pass the bar exam. Then it's on to another major chapter of life -- one I have prepared for over a long period of time, and yet am still so unprepared for.

What exactly I will do with this degree is the major question with which I am wrestling. It seemed so simple five years ago when I started thinking about this: have a way to make a living so that I am completely free to live out and model the simple church life. Yet now the complexity of the simplicity is mine to wrestle with.

When I was in my teens and twenties I though nothing of making major life changes that involved diving off the deep end into unseen risk. It was what living was all about. Perhaps that's why I moved from Indianapolis to Cincinnati to Colorado to New Jersey to New York to Las Vegas all between 1989 and 1999 -- and all in pursuit of a dream of what missional community could really be about when fully lived.

Now, at age 36, with two kids and the lessons of the downside of taking risks (balanced with the payoffs also) well learned, I am slower to take the dive. Yet a dive of some kind I must soon take. At least that's how it feels to me.