The Adventure of an Unknown Destination
By Steve Gahagen
When my wife, Jane, and I packed up our belongings and set out for Kentucky from Minnesota, we didn’t exactly know where we were going to live. We were just focused on packing our house. The whole thing reminded us of when we first got married and moved to Kansas City for my graduate school. We headed west from New York and assumed we would figure it out.
I’m reminded of a biblical story in which God instructs Abraham to move somewhere, but he doesn’t tell him where. He’s just supposed to figure it out. It would have been a tough conversation to go home and tell his wife that they were moving to an unknown destination. On a lesser scale, that’s what Jane and I did. We knew we were going to help our daughter and family with their children because one of our grandsons has a spinal cord injury, but other than that, we were short on details.
There is something liberating about getting rid of most of your stuff and heading to a new undefined adventure, trusting you will figure it out and it will all come together. I think it made our adult children nervous and somehow worried we would permanently end up living with one of them. It was unusual for them to see their parents in this place of uncertainty. We joked about jumping around from place to place and living with them (our four kids live in four different states). They didn’t think it was that funny.
What new adventure awaits you in 2023? You don’t have to move somewhere new. But new stories are often birthed when we are willing to do something new - when we step beyond our comfort zone and find ourselves in a place of vulnerability and risk.
Questions to Consider:
What holds people back from embracing something new?
What new adventure would take your life to another level?
How could you leverage your strengths to potentially write a new story.