Into the unknown is often where we will find our best life

​When life changes, life can get scary.

Or - life can get exciting.

When life changes, life can feel hopeless.

Or - life can feel suddenly alive with possibility.

The beautiful thing about change is, we get to choose. Hopeless or possible.

Being stuck in life often comes from needing to feel life in some predictable way. Where we are and how we are living may not leave us feeling alive - it might leave us feeling quite the opposite - but if it's a life that doesn't leave us guessing what comes next, it's a life easy to settle into.

We are a people who find comfort in knowing what comes next.

I've learned that what I know is not always the same as the best life I CAN know. I've learned that comfortable and predictable are traits better at concealing the real me than they are at helping me discover him.

When I was a kid, I'd lean against old rusty farm gates. On the other side of the gates were these wide open pastures. You can dream forever when you look into a wide open pasture.

Any time you'd open those gates and step into the world on the other side of them, the hinges would harshly squeak. I wonder as I write this morning, and reflect back on those days of dreaming, how much more friendly those gates would have sounded if they'd more often been opened to the world they were guarding me from.

It's easy to start leaning on the gates of life. Looking out at the other side. Feeling safe in the "I know where I am" - protecting myself from the "I have no idea where I am going."

I've conformed to life enough to know that conformity is often where one loses life. I've settled into comfort in life enough to know that's often where life gets unbearably uncomfortable.

I've also experienced a fair amount of opportunities in life to go where I had no idea where I was going. Not always by choice, but I've been there. And it's been there that I've often found the life I had no idea I needed. It's there I've found the oil that makes opening the gates to the world not just more tolerable - but desirable.

It's there I've found that the dreams of a kid weren't really dreams at all. They were invitations. Invitations from the unknown.

We all get them. We get them as kids; we get them today.

Sometimes the known is exactly where you need to be. It IS where you find life.

But sometimes the known is where we rust. And being willing to go where we have no idea where we are going isn't getting lost, it's coming alive.

It is oil.