randalevan's blog

Overcoming conflict (More on "A Million Miles...")

Donald Miller is a master story teller. He can make you laugh (check out the story about the girl he notices and wants to impress so he tells her he is going to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu - Kindle location 1276), and, he can make you cry (for example, the story about his friend Jim who lost his wife of twenty-seven years to cancer - 2382.) In each, Miller hits home the definition of a story worth telling: "A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it." (670.)

I can relate to overcoming conflict. For the past five or six years, I have been asking myself, my friends, family, and God Himself for wisdom about how to live the only life I have to live. I have this sense that I am going to continue to be a pastor, but, that it will look very different than it has looked over the past twenty some-odd years. But what will it look like? That's where my conflict comes in.

Is there more to life than owning a Volvo?

Jacquie & I have some of the greatest kids on the planet. Last year for my birthday, our son Nathan & his wife Meredith (aka: tmbdilitw), sent me an amazon.com gift card so I could purchase Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life for my Kindle. They knew that I had been thinking a lot about my life and how best to live it and thought this book might help. Well, in two words: It did.

I am not sure how many posts I will do, nor how long it will take me, but I have a few ideas from the book that I would like to share with you. Maybe they will help you. Maybe you will start asking yourself some questions. Maybe it will provide some answers for your questions. I hope so.

Dealing with Fear

 

 Man, it´s been a long time since my last post! Life has been wonderfully busy...career change, triathlon training, fulfilling prerequisites for a bilingual teaching credential program, life coach training, continuing my seminary education, starting a new business...hmmm, did I leave anything out?!

Anyway, let me get to something I have been working on...before it does its work on me! That "something" is fear.

One of the things that will always be true of life - at least this side of heaven - is we have to choose how we are going to respond to the things that scare us. Will we fight, or will we run for the hills? While sometimes it is wise to run as fast as our fat little feet will carry us, there are other occassions when we need to recognize our fears...and then do what we really want to do anyway. While I could write about many areas of my life right now where I am having to face a multitude of fears, let me focus on triathlon training today.