Miracles are out there waiting for us to move on

​One of the biggest dangers of being stuck in the past is we come to live in a place where life is always old.

Ancient.

It's why we often stay there. Even if it's hard. Even if it's unhealthy. Because what is ancient and old is known. It is predictable. And our brains love predictable.

Predictable feels safe. It feels secure.

To move forward is to move into something new. The unknown. And nothing says run louder than the unknown.

Esther de Waal says, "Insecurity makes certainty attractive, and it is in times like these that I want to harness God to my preferred scheme of things, for it is risky to be so vulnerable. Yet it is this vulnerability that asks for trust and hope in God’s plans, not mine."

I spent a lot of my life with my hands over my eyes. Sometimes over my ears. I lived in fear of seeing or hearing something new. Something that would challenge me to become someone different than the me I'd settled into. A me I didn't often like but a me I could comfortably live with.

Because it was the me I knew.

These days my hands are more prone to be out in front of me. They are open. Open to possibility. Open to new. Open to the God who has always been calling me away from the ancient.

To see the new that has often been blinded by the old. To find hope often buried inside the hopelessness. To discover that miracles aren't always the miraculous. Sometimes they are simply what wide open eyes find when they have the courage to move forward.

I spent several days with 12 amazing humans in Honduras. My story now is theirs, and theirs mine. There are moments in the midst of that - in the midst of 12 strangers in a country a relatively small portion of the world will ever see - when I ask myself:

How did I get here?

It can get to feeling miraculous, really. As I hear the stories of how others came to be in that moment with me and all that they will take back with them. The layers of the stories are many; and they are all new.

They are hope and possibility.

There is nothing old about a moment like that. Nothing ancient.

And as much as I truly believe God's hands are in a moment like that, it's important to see - so are my feet.

The feet beneath me that walked out of the old and into the new. Hands open. Heart inviting. Vulnerability leading the way, not holding me hostage.

The miraculous is there for us all. God's hands are waving us into it. Like a ground marshal calls a plane to the runway. Arms waving and directing us on.

But we have to respond to the marshal.

We have to move away from where we are parked to where we are called.

We have to abandon the ancient to explore the new.

We have to trust in the miracles that are waiting there. Because they ARE there.

And they are beautiful.

So move on. Hands open and ready for the new.