Safety

With the exception of about six months, I’ve spent most of my life being safe. I wasn’t a daredevil of a child. No backwards skating for me! As a teenager, I made good grades, and was {usually} a good girl. What few risks I did take involved small amounts of alcohol, wasted gas and aimless miles (no, I wasn’t driving!). In my twenties, I was the ultimate people pleaser. Nothing says safe like tiptoeing across eggshells. But at the age of thirty, I threw caution to the wind and lived carelessly for a few months. Destructive had become my new adjective. But that didn’t last long, and soon I was right back into my safe zone…a little deeper than I’d ever been. And that’s where I’ve been up until the last eight months or so.

As a wife and mom, it’s been easy to be safe. It’s been easy to ignore my own passions and gifts, and invest the sum total of my life into my husband and children. Investing in other people, especially family, is valuable and worthy of our time. However, when we use others as an excuse to be safe, we lose some {if not all} of our effectiveness. In the process, we lose joy because we aren’t using the gifts and passions God has given us.

I was recently looking at some photos a friend took of me about a year and a half ago, then looked at some from a few months ago. I thought the same thing about both time periods: I was living in the safe environment I’d created for myself. Taking care of a household is time consuming for sure, but I took it to the nth degree. What better way to ignore the fear of taking risks?

But then something happened. I started seeing a counselor to help me through some issues I couldn’t deal with on my own. Through those sessions, I started discovering an inner strength. Before I knew it, I was training for a half marathon. Now, two months after crossing the finish line, I’m in over my head with something I am passionate about. Safe is about the last word I’d use to describe what I’m doing. Scary is more like it.

Some wise words made their way to my ears recently: Safety is a possible strategy of the enemy to keep us passive. If we’re in our cozy, comfortable spots, we’re probably not using the passions and gifts God has given us to creatively touch hearts that might otherwise remain untapped. While He certainly doesn’t have to, God chooses to use us. If we’re too busy being safe, we miss out on the fullness of joy, and others miss out on the gift that God has uniquely qualified us to give.