Better Life Adventures Are Ahead – Maybe?

By Deana | June 14, 2021 |

Adventure

We all say we love a good adventure, but do we really? If we’re truly honest with ourselves, and others for that matter, it would be more accurate to say, we love to choose our own adventure.

As a kid I loved reading those types of books. Remember those? You’d go to your school’s library (because it was required of you) and pick one of the “choose your own adventure” books.

because it counted as a book your teacher would approve of and
you would actually finish it- well, sort of.

More truthfully, you’d become obsessed with all of the different scenarios. You’d start reading (skimming really) until you got to your first opportunity to make a choice.

It would go a little something like this: If you want to choose to open the door at the end of the hall, go to page 35. If you choose to turn around and go back downstairs instead, turn to page 27. Oh, the suspense and excitement of what would unfold next and what choice you’d be faced with next!

The best part of these books were that if you weren’t happy with where you ended up, you’d just go back and choose one of the other options!

Wouldn’t life be so grand if we had the option to go back and make a different choice?

But life is not exactly the choose your own adventure that we wish it would be. Funny how we want so much control over our lives that are so intermingled and part of those who also want control over theirs.

This is probably the exact reason we either give up on choosing any adventure or stress over choosing the “right one”. It becomes a struggle between:

if we can’t have full control, why bother? And
let me try that again, differently.

When we give up, one of two scenarios takes place:

we get jealous of those we see as “out there” living a life of such adventure and we grow bitter.
Or we’re back at it obsessively trying to control the outcome of our story.

There is one key factor that we often miss when we get to the point of obsessing over the control, our control, of a potential outcome and it’s there’s only One that has the ability and authority over outcomes, and that’s God.

Mad Libs

If choosing your own adventure is the picture of what we want for our lives, then I’d have to say that Mad Libs is probably closer to the actual reality of our lives.

Mad Libs is another fun and fond memory of my childhood – okay, and my adulthood…

There is something about the participation in creating these insane and mostly hilarious stories. That is, unless I’m the subject!

According to our friends at Wikipedia, Mad Libs is a phrasal template word game which consists of one player prompting others for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story before reading aloud.

Now I don’t know about you, but that sounds as close to real life as anything!

Don’t agree? Look at your own Life – you have the template, you know the idea of what you want in and for your life. Yet, there are some missing parts that you aren’t quite sure of or how to navigate. So while you’re trying to figure out what would make the most sense for those blanks…BAM! someone else comes along and fills in the blanks for you!

And they are nothing like what you would have chosen. Not so funny now, is it?

Mad Libs living happens in your faith and your business too. You have the loose framework of what you want and think should happen, but there are some blanks that you just aren’t quite so clear on, yet. The next thing you know, someone comes along and fills them in FOR you, and NOT in a way you would have wanted. Isn’t that the way though?

You may not know exactly what the blanks should be, but you’re pretty certain it’s not THAT!

Others may think and even be brave enough to tell you how they think it makes your story better, more interesting or worse…funny. Now I don’t know about you, but when you are seriously planning out your BIG FAT SCARY goals, the last thing you’re thinking is…funny.

But…if you live long enough to recognize that life happens FOR you and not TO you, then those past, unfortunate and unwanted Mad Lib episodes, may just be pretty laughable now. Hindsight has a way of doing that to us.

Magnetism

We all want to attract. The right people into our circle, the right opportunities to our endeavors, and yes, even the introvert desires attention at some point.

Lots of time is spent on being or becoming attractive to and for those things mentioned. If you are in business there’s a whole learning curve to be mastered that is known as attraction marketing. And yes, it’s designed to attract the right demographic to your offer.

Here’s the thing – how much time do we spend on repelling the wrong things? Think about it, a magnet has two capabilities, one to attract and the other to repel. You do remember that when you try connecting two magnets, they push against each other, right?

Everyone’s out there focused on being “attractive” by improving their magnetism.

But most fail to take into consideration that by repelling who you don’t want to attract, can be just as effective!

One of the most successful people to do this even thousands of years after his death is JESUS!

Talk about magnetism! That guy STILL attracts people to him today and just as many are repelled by who he is, what he represents and those who are attracted to him and follow.

And here’s the kicker, Jesus’ focus and goal is to attract – so who’s the one pushing away?

All I know is that aside from being the master of magnetism, he has the right answers to the blanks in your seemingly Mad Libs kind of life and talk about adventure, you’d never see as much on your own as you do with him. The kind you can’t wait to see what’s next! You can’t believe what’s next!

That’s the kind of adventure I’m sure all of us wouldn’t mind choosing as a part of our histories and our legacies! So what do you say, let’s choose adventure the way God had intended us to!

prioritizing focus on that kind of living right there with ya,