Dare To…Obey When It Hurts

I don’t understand why God does what He does the way he does it. I don’t always understand what my part in his plan is. Often times I doubt that I could be of any use to his purposes but He amazes me time and time again by using me.

Sometimes, like right now, I don’t want to listen. I want to tune him out. I want to shut him up. Not this God, you can’t have this. You don’t understand. Surely you can mean it the way I’m hearing it. Surely you wouldn’t give this to me only to ask me to give it up. Where’s the meaning in that? Where’s the purpose? Why would ask me to do this? I don’t get it.

Sometimes the burden on our hearts is just too heavy for words. Sometimes the pressure of the decisions we face is so real, it hurts. And oftentimes this cant be explained, cant be expressed fully no matter how hard we try. Sometimes the only thing to do is cry out to God. I think sometimes we’re afraid to be honest in our prayers. Sometimes I just have to say ‘God, I don’t understand this. Can’t you see that this hurts me?’ I think sometimes we need to voice our doubt, voice our hurts. I don’t think that means we aren’t trusting God, just that we are being honest in telling him how we’re feeling.

Sometimes I want to ask God why. Sometimes, it seems like, if he really cared he wouldn’t be doing ….. whatever it may be. Sometimes it feels like God has let me down, and I know he hasn’t, because God knows what he is doing, God loves me, and God works for my good and His glory. I know all this. But still, sometimes, I just have to ask….why God? why? I asked you to lead me, so why do I feel lost? I asked you to strengthen my relationship with you, so why do I feel so alone? I asked you to protect my heart, so why is it hurting like this?

Why?

The comforting thing is that in these moments, when our hearts hurt so badly and we feel very much alone in the world. In these moments when our burdens and heaviness are too great for words and it seems no one else could ever understand….in these moments, we can sit and cry out to God, without words even, and be confident that not only is He hearing, but He is holding us in his arms. He is wiping the tears from our cheeks. He is crying with us. He is whispering in our ears words of encouragement and hope. He is sustaining us and telling us to go on, to keep pushing forward, to make the decisions and take the actions and just keep believing. Because it’s for our good, and even though we can’t see it right at this moment, there is a reason for it.

Tonight my heart hurts. A lot. Tonight I’m facing the fact that God wants me to let go of something very dear to me, something that is a very very good thing, but something nonetheless that He wants me to let go of. And I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all. And its hard. Very very hard. And I just don’t know how I’m going to do it. I’m not that strong. I’m not that faithful. I’m praying ‘God I want to listen but I’m afraid I’m not going to.’ ‘God take this from me, because I can’t pry my fingers from grasping it.’ ‘God steady my heart, because it hurts.’

I’m comforted in the fact that He is faithful when I am not (2 Timothy 2:13), that He has promised to see me through, that it will all be worth it in the end……

Maybe that doesn’t make any sense. Knowing what you need to do, knowing how to do it, knowing that you yourself can’t do it, asking God to help you do something you don’t want to do. Maybe that doesn’t make sense to you, but I have a feeling that it does. Because we’re all human, and we all deal with the same issues, and God challenges us all in the same ways although it may be different details. We all have things we are holding on to that God asks us to let go of. And we all must admit that we, in and of ourselves, are going to have a hard time letting go.

Pray for me. That I would be wholly devoted to the cause of Christ. That I would let go of the things that are distracting me from focusing and giving my all to Him. That I would be strengthened and able to push through the hurt of stepping away from certain things, certain people, and that I would be fully satisfied and complete in Christ. Pray that I can do this, that I won’t quit until it’s done. Search your own hearts and ask what your holding on to that you need to let go of. Dare to ask that scary question, dare to listen, dare to follow it through. Dare to obey, even when it hurts.

Thanks friends…

Dare to….Be Bold

Dare: to have the necessary courage or boldness for something; be bold enough

Today we’re going to look at the word bold. What does it mean? What does it mean in the context of daring? As I was studying the definition of ‘dare’ I noticed that ‘bold’ or ‘boldness’ is in almost every definition so I figured getting a better understanding of bold might aid in my journey to get a better understanding of what it means to dare.

(Bear with me for all this defining words stuff, when you break it down and unpack it, it makes a difference.)

Bold: 1) Not hesitating or fearful in the face of actual or possible danger or rebuff.
2) Not hesitating to break the rules of propriety (established standards),
3) Beyond the usual limits of conventional thought or action

There are so many thoughts that come to mind that I want to share, its hard to sort them out and organize them and pace myself but I think we’ll start here: Boldness isn’t easy. For me at least, its a struggle. Boldness conjures up a sense of ‘I know what I’m doing, I’m confident in this decision’, whatever that decision may be. And I’ll be very honest, 90% of the time, I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m not completely confident in the decisions I make.

Most people tell me this is a problem, I mean, it sounds like a problem right? You need to be sure of what you’re doing and you need to be confident in your decisions. Right? Stick with me while I: 1) make a very odd sounding statement, and 2) try and explain without sounding completely insane.

You don’t need to be 100% sure of what you’re doing and you don’t need to be 100% confident in your decisions.

I think we’ve taken the word bold, just like the word dare and so many other words, and we’ve given it our own personal definition, forgetting to look and see what it really means. The very definition paints a picture of risk, of struggle, of un-sure-ness, of daring.

In our world, specifically my generation, we place such high value on good decision making. Before deciding what school to attend, what job to take, who to marry, where to live, we have this system of standards that we consult. ‘This is the most logical option, this makes sense, I think I can handle this.’ We (for the most part) want to map out a plan, figure out the most practical option, decide what we believe we can and cannot do and then put the plan into action. We’re expected to know and seek out the answers to the unknown’s of our lives until we have it all known. Until we are confident in our decisions and know exactly what we’re doing.

My good friend Jordan gave me a book, Just Do Something by Kevin Deyoung. Click that link, buy the book, read it, be challenged. One of the things Kevin hits on in this book which I think is brilliant, is the fact that our generation is afraid to ‘move’. We are so caught up in making the right decisions that we spend all our time weighing the options and considering and trying to make sure we can handle the situation before we will make the decision. We are too afraid of making the wrong choice and so we don’t make any choice. Think about it. We are a generation that can’t ‘just do something’.

We are afraid of making the wrong choices. We are afraid when we don’t know. We are afraid of trying something that everyone says is crazy and then looking dumb when it doesn’t work. We are afraid of failing. And so we play it safe. We stick to what we know we can do and what everyone tells us is a good idea.

I think God calls us to a whole different level of living. If we have life mapped out, if we know exactly what we want to do and how we want to do it, and if we are 100% confident in our ability to accomplish it, then why do we need God? I think there is this whole other level of life that we could be experiencing but aren’t, and it’s because we wont move unless we are 100% sure of what we’re doing and 100% confident in our decisions.

I think we all have areas in our lives where we are playing it safe. These are the areas that we need to ‘dare’ in, and daring means that you have the necessary boldness to _____.If you are 100% confident in your ability in a certain area, then in my personal belief, you need to push yourself further.

I think we mix up boldness with confidence. We say that if we are bold that means that we are sure of ourselves, of what we are doing, and we are very confident in our decision to _____(whatever it may be). That’s not the definition! If we are bold, it means that we are ‘not hesitant or fearful in the face of real or possible danger or rebuff.’ Catch the difference there?

The true image of boldness being lived out is ‘I have no idea what I’m doing, I have no idea if this is going to work, but based on what I know, I’m willing to take the risk, here we go.’

Proverbs 28:1 “The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.” Why are the righteous bold as a lion? Is it because they are more informed on life and have consulted professionals and come up with a sure-fire plan for their life? Hah. I wish!

Ephesians 3:12 “In whom (speaking of Christ) we have boldness, and access with confidence through our faith in Him.” We have boldness…IN CHRIST. How? In Christ we are promised to never be left or forsaken. In Christ we know that we have been bought, that we have been ransomed for His purpose which means that we have a purpose. In Christ our lives have value and meaning. In Christ we are loved and cherished above all creation. In Christ we are made righteous, we are adopted as sons and daughters of the living God. In Christ we are made heirs to the kingdom of God. Conjure up some boldness?

If we dwell on these things- on who we are in Christ, then we can be bold. We don’t have to be 100% confident in our ability, because we are 100% confident in his. We don’t have to be 100% sure of where we are heading, because we are 100% sure as long as we are seeking to follow in His steps we will get where we are supposed to be. We don’t have to be 100% sure before we try, because if Christ is our foundation, even if we hit rock bottom we will find ourselves in His arms, being held steadfast, and being stood back up to go at it again.

This DOESNT mean we sit and wait to be handed the answers, or wait to be given the right decision, or ‘pray about it’ a little more. And this DOESNT mean that we just jump into action without considering what we know. This means that when we don’t know, we can still act.

And this is important because we were never told that we would know in every situation. We are never promised all the answers in life. We are rarely promised to know the result before attempting something. But in Christ we have boldness, and we can say confidently ‘I don’t know, but we’re about to try…’

Dare to be bold.

Dare To….Dare?

Yes. Dare…to dare. Confused? Keep reading…

I apologize for the delay in posting, I’ve been feeling really bad the last several weeks. I’m on a bunch of antibiotics and my body hates antibiotics so I can’t eat, feel dizzy, headaches..all that fun stuff. So, I haven’t really felt like sitting down and writing, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. In all honesty though, and I’m just piecing this together, it just happened to be a really convenient good sounding excuse to procrastinate and not write about a bunch of things that I need to dare myself to do but am too scared to approach.

When the idea for this blog first came to mind it was really cool, really exciting, really ‘this will be good for me’. All these things are still true, but as I’ve gotten to the close of the ‘My Story’ blogs and started to think about the actual ‘dares’ and what to write on next…well…it’s taking on a whole new meaning. I thought this would be easy, I thought the dares would be something challenging, but something I could readily handle. I forgot that growth and progress and pretty much anything worthwhile comes only through struggle and being uncomfortable and pushing yourself farther then you feel you can go.

Dare. What exactly does the word mean? We seem to take words and give them our own personal meaning a lot of the time. I wanted to know what it meant on its own, without my input or my thoughts or preconceived ideas of what it meant.

I thought I knew what it meant, just like I thought I knew what it would be like writing on this blog over the next 12 months, but once I started digging (and blogging) both took on a whole new meaning…

Dare:

1) To have the necessary courage or boldness for something; be bold enough.

2) To have boldness to try; venture; hazard

3) To meet defiantly; face courageously

4) To challenge or provoke a person into a demonstration of courage; defy

5) An act of daring or defiance; challenge

Courage? Boldness? Defiance? Facing courageously?

That’s not really what I signed up for here. That’s not what I was thinking by accepting ‘dare’ as my word for the year. That’s not the type of thing I was planning on writing about on this blog. Challenges? Yes. A few struggles here and there? Well sure, no biggie. That was dare by my definition. I could handle that word. This ‘dare’ thought, defined this way, it seems a little…a little too….daring.

I think we all have things we are willing to deal with, things we know will be tough and a little scary but we know we need to deal with them so we push ourselves into it. But then there is this whole other level. A deeper level of things that need to be dealt with, the real things, the roots of the problems. But those hurt, those are deep, those are the sensitive spots that just thinking about having to face makes us shudder. So we avoid those. We trick ourselves into feeling good about ourselves by addressing the fist level of issues so we never have to get to the second. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone else, but I have a feeling it does. I have a feeling that if you think about it for a second it will hit you and hit you hard.

There are tough things that we have to face that we know are in our best interests and so we just suck it up and face them. These things are hard but these are things we can handle, we just don’t like them so we tend to avoid them. Re-read those definitions above.

This isn’t daring.

Daring requires boldness, courage, defiance. Just doing something that you don’t really feel like doing is not ‘daring’.

It’s like someone who really needs to lose weight but they cant push themselves to exercise because its inconvenient, it takes time, it takes effort, it hurts. So instead they eat a salad for lunch instead of a cheeseburger. That’s a step in the right direction right? Yes. That’s something healthy, that’s something that will help them lose weight, that’s a great choice, that’s something that is necessary and needed. But it’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough. It’s just a small, easy step that makes them FEEL like they are making progress without actually having to put forth any effort. Without having to hurt and struggle.

If you really want to attack the problem, you have to hit it hard, where it counts most.

You have to dare, in the most basic sense of the word. The real definition, not the personalized tweaked definition.

This is where I am right now. Daring myself to dare. To push past that first level and get down to the real things, the tough things, the things that hurt, the things that I actually have to ‘dare’ myself to face. We’ll be looking at the definition in more detail in the coming weeks. What does it mean to dare? To be bold? To be courageous? What do these words really mean?

Dare to ‘dare’. To really dare, by the definition of the word. Think about it.

 

My Story (Part Three)

Well, like I left off saying last time, you would think things would have gotten easier from there, but they didn’t. In fact they got worse, they got hard. Really really really hard.

When you’re eyes are opened to that kind of truth, everything is different. You see everything in a different way, a different angle. All the things that I ‘knew’ for years about God, the Bible, etc suddenly came true. Suddenly it was all very alive and real to me and that’s something you can’t ignore.

There’s a lot of stuff that happened in between these paragraphs. A lot. So much struggle and effort and confusion and trying and failing and tears and heartache and hopelessness and then striving again and then more struggle and then more trying and then hope and peace and then more struggle. I’ll spare you all the details, but eventually, through an act of God (a super cool story I’ll hopefully share in the future), I got back into ‘church’. God put some very wise, very loving, very ‘real’ people in my life who loved me for me, accepted all my doubts and questions, genuinely cared about how I was doing, and didn’t require me to have everything figured out beforehand. I had a place to go, where I was encouraged to search the Word, talk to God through worship, and wrestle, a LOT, with things I couldn’t understand, things about the Bible I didn’t like, things that I was mad at God for, things that still hurt.

I wanted to go back to life as normal, just with a little more peace of mind. But that wasn’t happening. I wanted to believe that there was still hope in ‘church’, I wanted to believe that there were honest people with genuine motives who really got ‘it’. i wanted to find something that I could pour into, something that I believed was worth my effort. And above all of this I wanted my life to count. I can’t even express how overwhelming of a fear it was for me at the time- that my life wouldn’t count, that I had nothing to offer, that my existence was unnecessary. I had this desire to make my life count, there was this constant tugging that said ‘Rebecca, there is more than this.’ But the fear….the fear that it wasn’t true kept me from trying. The fear of trying and failing kept me from trying at all.

Don’t we all deal with this? This ‘does my life matter? Am I going to count?’ In our world that constantly bombards us with the message that we are one of billions, that we are just part of the system, that only a few of us are worth anyone’s time and the rest are average. Isn’t this a fear that we all have to face? Daring to listen to that tugging that we were made for more, that our lives count, that we can change things.

That was a fear of mine. And every time I would feel that tugging that said there was more for me I would get angry. How could God be so cruel as to poke at the one thing I was most afraid of? Knowing that I couldn’t change things, knowing that I was just one girl on a planet of billions with no hope of ever making a mark…How could He continually get my hopes up with these feelings and thoughts and dreams? So many prayers went like this ‘God I want to, but I cant. God I want to count, but I don’t know how. God I want to change things, but you know I don’t have what it takes.’

I’ve been wrestling with how to some up this post, because this is still a struggle of mine. This is an on-going continuous daily struggle. And I think it’s one that a lot of us face. And I think most of us stay right there, at the end of that last paragraph, wanting desperately to count but knowing ourselves and knowing that we never will. We want to hope for more, we want to believe in greater things but we know that’s not realistic, we know it will never happen, we know we cant do it.

That’s not where my story stops though. Praise God, He doesn’t leave us when we stop, but He stands right there and He cheers us on with love and encouragement and instruction. And if we don’t get it the first time He yells it louder. And if we still don’t get it He yells it louder. And He continues to shout it out until we get it. Until we GET IT. ‘I love you! You count! You’re life has so much meaning that is waiting to unfold. Let’s go! Come on..I’ve got so much planned for you. Let me show you! You! I Want YOU.” And we can yell back all we want ‘I tried! I can’t do it. I don’t have what it takes. I can’t. Look at me…I’ll never count.” But He is still going to stand right there and keep saying ‘ I love you. You count in my story.’

We count in His story.

I’ll never forget the day I stopped shouting back ‘I cant’ and finally just surrendered to the fact that He could. I realized I was making the mistake that many of us do. God was calling me out of complacency, out of an average life where I was an average person among millions whose life would never count for much of anything. He was calling me a life following Him, a life in His story, a life that had a very specific purpose filled with huge things that I could never even conceive as possible. But I had to trust Him, and I had to jump in with both feet. My mistake was that I wanted to put one foot in and test everything out before I fully committed. I was comfortable with my life, with my friends, with the way I was living. I knew I could handle that life. So before I was going to leave all that comfort and confidence, I needed to slowly ease into this trusting God thing. I needed to give Him a little bit of me and see how he handled it and if all went well then I would trust Him with a little more. I was afraid to trust Him. I was afraid to believe. I wanted to ease into it. I didn’t want to risk. I didn’t want to dare.

But if there is no risk is it really trusting? Trusting means that you aren’t quite sure and you know you could be wrong, but you have confidence in the person that you are trusting- that they wont let you down, that they will come through for you. You believe in them, and so you are willing to risk being wrong. You have to choose if that risk is worth taking.  And every time there is a risk, there is a dare, and every time there is a dare, there is a huge fear that you have to face.

For me it all came down to trust. God hit me in the face with the question ‘Do you trust me?’ And that led to ‘If you do, then dare to give me everything. Stop straddling the fence, stop trying to ease into things, stop trying to test it out and see if I come through for you. Dare to jump in with both feet.’ You can’t trust halfway. That defies the very meaning of the word. Either we trust God or we don’t. Either we follow or we don’t. Realizing that changed everything.

I decided to jump, with both feet. I decided to trust even though it hurt. It hurt. I decided to dare, to face that fear and to put everything I had into following Him. It was a huge risk. What if He let me down? What if I was crazy? What if people were right and I would never amount to anything? What if I tried and failed? What if? All of our ‘what-ifs’ can be summed up in one word- ‘FEAR’. Fear is an enslaving, life extinguishing force that so many of us are caught up in. It sucks every glimmer of hope and confidence and meaning and joy out of our lives and leaves us weak and alone and unable to move. The biggest, most important lesson I’ve learned in life so far, and I’ll leave you with this…

The only way to extinguish fear is to dare.

My Story (Part Two)

My Story (Part One)

Ok, I want to give you a good understanding of my story and my background, everything that’s contributed to make me ‘me’ up until this point. However, I don’t want to give you a biography of Rebecca Wattier, nor is that necessary. So, I’m going to keep this short (or shorter than it could be), skip over a lot of the not so important’s, focus on the important things, and if you have questions or would like to know more about anything just leave a comment or shoot me an email at rwattier2003@yahoo.com cool? Cool!

Here we go:

My name is Rebecca Wattier, I just turned 23 years old, I was born, raised, and am still stuck (haha) in Mobile, Al-not quite the belt buckle to the ‘bible belt’ but pretty darn close. When I was 13 my parents felt led to the mission field so the family sold most everything, packed up the rest and moved to Jinja, Uganda, East Africa to work at Good Shepherd’s Fold Orphanage. We were there for about three years and then moved back to the states. A year after moving back, the family felt led to Oaxaca, Mexico where they served for two years. I stayed in the states to start college. I first enrolled in culinary school where I studied for a year but decided that it wasn’t the career for me. I then enrolled at the University of South Alabama where I studied Political Science, Journalism, and finally found my niche Interpersonal Communication.

Christianity has been a major part of my life. I’ve been in church since they let me leave the hospital. My parents provided us with a great Godly environment to grow up in and I’ve always been surrounded by great, encouraging, inspiring Christian mentors. When I was eight I did what all the good Southern Baptist kids did and walked the aisle, prayed the prayer, ‘accepted Jesus as my personal savior’ etc. Was I genuine? Very much so. And for years after that I found a ton of comfort and fulfillment in studying the bible, learning about theology and sharing with those who didn’t know.

Things changed right before I turned eighteen though. I had several setbacks that year, a lot of rough stuff, a lot of stuff happening to people around me that I cared about. Starting college, entering the working world, encountering a bunch of stuff I’d never been exposed to…a lot changed that year. I guess I wanted something more. I guess I got tired of the same old stuff. I guess I out grew the Sunday school lessons of ‘love your neighbor’ and ‘stealing is a sin’ and all those things we learn. I had bigger questions that I wanted answered. Was this really all there was to life? Did my life count? Did I really have a purpose and a role to live out and if so how did I know what it was? Why did God allow bad things to happen? Why would God let stuff like ‘this’ happen when I had been doing everything right? Why wouldn’t God answer my prayers and relieve this burden from my friend or deliver this person that I cared about so much from their situation?

The more my questions went unanswered, the more I started to take notice of things. Why is it that every time I ask a question I’m told that ‘God loves you and has a plan for your life’? That’s great, but I know that already, what about the question I asked? Are all these people here at church hurting like me and just covering it up? If they are then that means that we are all just a group of fake people. How can I trust a group of fake people to help me understand life?

And from there it turned to frustration and anger. These hypocrites! How can you judge the way people dress in morning worship? How can you preach one thing and do another? How can you raise your hands and sing about how God has set us free and then condemn others with your glances and your words and your social systems?

One more little piece of bad news that year and I had it. I told God I wanted to be left alone. I vowed to never go to church again. After all the years of believing in this God, in this system, I was devastated to think that it was all tainted by this sense of hypocrisy, false-hood, fakeness and judgment. I knew God existed, I still loved him very much, but I felt like I couldn’t get to Him. I felt like He was up there somewhere and in between Him and all of us was this giant mess of confusion and hypocrisy and people’s opinions and theories. I couldn’t get to the real God.  I guess I felt like I had finally been awakened to the real world, the way things really were. I thought that was all there was too it. So, I quit. I ‘quit’ God, I quit church. I quit believing. I became a cynic. I lost hope. And I moved on.

Or so I thought. I love how we think we can ‘tell God he doesn’t exist’ or choose to walk away from God as if he isn’t holding our entire existence in the palm of his hand. How exactly do we think we can live life apart from God when there is no life apart from God? I don’t know. But I can tell you now, as I look back, I quit God but God never quit me. And it wasn’t like people say ‘God lets you walk away, but He’s always there waiting if you will just turn around and go back.’ Nope. God never left my side. He pursued me all the way. He was right behind me, even though I tried to tune Him out in so many ways. He ran after me and He kept running as fast and as long as I did.

And let me tell you, I ran. And I ran. And I kept running and kept tuning Him out and this went on for about two years. A lot can happen in two years, especially when you’re intentionally trying to run from God. A lot did happen in two years, and we’ll leave it at that for now. But after two years of running, I couldn’t tune Him out any longer. He was there, in such an overwhelming, overpowering way. I could feel it, I could sense it. I could almost taste it if that even makes sense.

I had no idea what I believed anymore. I had no idea who ‘God’ was. All that was in my mind was these facts and stories and lessons that I had learned throughout my whole life, and then all these new facts and theories and logical arguments as to why there’s no way the bible could be true, there’s no way a God like that could exist, there’s no way what churches teach can be fair or valid. It was such a jumbled mess I didn’t even know where to begin but I knew for a fact that I couldn’t trust someone else’s word or opinion, that whatever I was going to believe and decide was going to have to be mine- my own research, my own logic, my own conclusions.

So, December 6^th, 2006 I decided to spend 30 days (Christmas break) studying, researching, thinking, writing- whatever it took- and at the end of those 30 days whatever conclusion I had reached is what I was going to go with. If I couldn’t find something that encouraged me to believe and gave me hope, then I was going to block out that little ‘voice’ once and for all. I was going to walk away for good.

So, what happened? I’ll save that for the next post

What This Blog Is All About

What This Blog Is All About…

First off, I want to say that if you don’t know me, don’t know me very well, or want to know me better, you probably want to read the post ‘About Me’. (It might not be up yet, check back). I’m going to run through the last couple years of my life and all the things you need to know to be able to understand where I’m coming from the best.

Now that we have that out of the way…this blog is called A Year of Daring. You’re probably wondering why. The last couple years I’ve picked a ‘theme word’ for the year. It’s something that I pray about, and when I finally decide on a word its one that defines my year. That might sound crazy, but try it. The word will continue to pop up again and again throughout the year. It will be emphasized in your life somehow, whether it be a challenge, a goal, something to cling to, etc. So my word for this year is dare.

Dare? What does that mean? How is that a theme? How do you put that into practice? Exactly what I’ve been asking myself the last two weeks. I had an idea of what it would mean for me and for my year, but as I sat here this morning studying, writing, reading, thinking…its taken on a whole new meaning, and a lot more power then what I originally thought. To be honest, I’m a little scared.

I’ll get into more detail about what daring really means, the definition, why its needed in my life, etc. But first I want to explain why I’m blogging this, why I made this site, why I feel like I should share this.

I have other blogs, I post a lot of notes on facebook, but as I was thinking about this word and this year I really felt like this needed something different. Something special and focused. Everything on this site is going to revolve around one theme for the most part. Basically, as I go throughout this year, there are going to be a ton of situation and things that I am going to have to ‘dare’ to do. How do I know that? Cause I decided on that word two weeks ago and have already been challenged to ‘dare’ to do something four times. Now I don’t mean ‘I dare you to go skydiving’ or ‘I dare you to eat this super gross thing’. I mean dare to face a fear, dare to face opposition, dare to dream, dare to try. Serious dares. Dares that we all have to face in life. Dares that are hard, scary, life defining.

My plan is to take each of these dares that I encounter and journal them. Write down the challenge, write down how I struggle through it, write down how I conquer it, write down what I learn. My plan is to share every challenging moment of 2010 with you.

Why? Most importantly, to glorify the name of Jesus. In my weakness he is made strong. And you’re going to witness a lot of this if you follow this blog, but Rebecca is weak. Rebecca is scared. Rebecca fails. Rebecca runs. Boldness, confidence, abilities, endurance, conquering, facing fears, challenges, standing strong-this all comes through Christ in me. I want to testify to the power of Christ. I want to proclaim the truth that if anything good can be formed out of my life, if anything can be accomplished through me, then the same is true for you. Christ can do miracles in our lives, he can bring about changes that we never thought were possible. He can use us to accomplish things we’ve never even dreamed of. I want to be an example of that. I want to be an on-display experiment. Fail or succeed, I want my life to count, and one way our lives can count is by being an example to others, sometimes of what to do, a lot of times what not to do.

I want people to be encouraged, to realize that just because things are a certain way doesn’t mean they have to stay that way. It’s never too late for change. It’s never too late for improvement. It may not be easy, but it’s waiting for us to stand up and take hold of it. Most times, we are the only thing standing in the way of us changing things. We are the only thing holding us back. More on that in future posts.

And lastly, I want people to be challenged, to be inspired to do some daring of their own. We’ve all got things that we are running from, that we are too afraid to try, that we are too hurt to face. It may not be the same things that I have to dare to do, but I have a good feeling we will have a lot of things in common. We’re all human, we all struggle with the same things. We all can stand to do some daring.

Let that sink in. Dare to think about it. I hope you’ll decide to follow me this year, as I attempt to follow Christ wherever he leads, as I dare to make some changes, as I hope to grow and improve, as I learn and fail. I hope that you can find some good through this journey, that God will challenge you as He is challenging me.