Lost in Ambition

                                                   
                                         "You just gestured to all of me"

A very good friend of mine once told me that I'm a lot like Hiccup.  I've got the hair.  I definitely don't have the voice.  But regardless of physical characteristics, I feel like Hiccup a lot: ambitious but feeling incompetent and significantly smaller than life.  I like to think of How to Train Your Dragon as my life story and I just happen to be stuck in the beginning: Toothless is still an angry beast, Astrid is still suspicious of me, and I have no reason to think that anything I'm trying to do is going to make a difference.  I also believe that my circumstances will change.

When I think of people that felt significantly smaller than life, I think of Amos.  Amos was a prophet of God, and yet he wasn't always.  Once he was a nobody.  As a matter of fact, he always considered himself a nobody.  After the king rejects Amos' message and insists that he leave the country, Amos says "I was no prophet, nor a prophet's son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs. But the LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, 'Go, prophesy to my people Israel.'"

Hiccup wanted to train dragons.  I want to change the world through writing.  That's a pretty big task.  It's obviously unrealistic.  It's unbearably childish.  But you see, Amos and I have something in common.  I'm a kid from Orleans, Indiana: home to 2,000 residents and one lonely stoplight.  I'm a nobody.  I'm a nobody that serves Yahweh.  That makes this a whole different ballgame.

Ephesians 3:20-21: " Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen."  God works in His servants.  That brings two things to mind: first that I'm not allowed to say "I can't."  Second, that I have a responsibility to be the kind of person that He can work with.  A friend of mine once said that there are two kinds of people in this world: those that submit to God and those to whom God says "Have it your way."  I know which one I want to be.

So am I Hiccup?  I have no idea.  But if I can spark half as much change, I will consider my life to be well spent indeed.

"It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this." - C.S. Lewis