HAVE WE MET?

Yes! We’ve met before! My name is Possible!

You are a lot like me, and not unlike a lot of others I have encountered along the way. I have met you in many situations as many different people. You are one of the many pursuers! You are a “never say die” life seeker!

You are the one I met at a bookseller’s convention in Colorado. You told me that the last five years you have been on an expedition to discover what your last job couldn’t find in you. You felt there was a sort of glass ceiling you couldn’t penetrate and that you had so much more to offer, and you have set out to reach the “here –to-fore” unreachable.

 I was shoulder to shoulder with you on that little plane flying out of the local airport. Neither one of us wanted to get into a deep conversation, but you found out I was a pastor and you shared your heart about your daughter who was diagnosed with a dreadful disease and you were reading a book about the effects of the disease. You told me you just knew your daughter had so much more to offer and this condition would just have to wait for you and her to live out dreams.

I shared a pew with you at a worship conference. You told me your passion was to write music. To pen a song the whole world would want to sing! You have a briefcase full of melodies, and no one has yet shown interest: but another new tune is already forming in your head!

You are the fifty four-year-old lady who came to the book table at a national meeting. You swallowed your misgivings and blurted out that you felt you had a book in you but just didn’t know where to begin!

You’re the one whose children play ball at the fields near the street corners of Ashlan and Locan in our city. In the stands at a “T” ball game you shared that your mate is talking of bailing out and your together dreams are smashing against the rocks – breaking to pieces. It seems she is dimming the lights that have been shinning on your potential but even through an impending separation you are determined not to let that happen.

I stood with you at the cemetery – we were looking at the dash between the dates on the tombstones. That dash, like the black strip on the back of your credit card, will catalog a lot about your life: and you know if life ended right now the dash on your headstone wouldn’t have the complete information that your potential has the capacity to produce.

You, like all of us, when you lay your head on your pillow at night, know there’s more, there has to be – and the potential you hold in your possession hasn’t lengthened as far as your mind has imagined. But you are not nearly ready to throw in the towel!

You’re the butterfly with wings still wet having just shaken loose the cocoon. You’re the chick that has leaped to the edge of the nest and are ready to try your wings. You’re the rose bud waiting to respond to the first light so you may open and reveal your true inner beauty and intricacies. 

You are the one for which the passion of Jesus Christ cleared the way so you might reach your full potential and you must be told that your potential is His passion. God has spoken through His prophets to tell you that, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.” He challenges you to assess your natural talents, to stir up your spiritual gifts and do all things for which Christ strengthens you: reach for the outer limits of your potential!

The works of the Devil keep us from being who we were made to be. Our nature automatically connects with that of the fallen – the Devil’s works – and that’s where we would remain if it weren’t for the purpose of Jesus to destroy those works and set us free to reach all He has for us in the boundaries of time and in the emancipation of eternity.

Now I would not suggest that Christ’s Passion was limited to only allow you to reach your human potential. It seems sac-religious to even suggest. His passion is much more complicated than that. Theologians can’t begin to explain it. Book after book has been written and none have even come close to what His passion is or what it really means.

My purpose in writing this is not to capture the complexity of The Passion. I don’t have to and I don’t need to. God has already taken care of the complexity and on the other side of it He leaves us with the simplicity of that truth. He took the complex – the incomprehensible – and made it simple – the explicable. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity this side of complexity, but I would die for it on the other side.”

So, who ever you are and wherever you find yourself be assured that the doors of opportunity are always open somewhere around your life. That God is at work around you should fuel your determination to find those doors.

We live in a time like no other. The possibilities are limitless. The global travel, the instant internet, the satellite feeds that transport us across oceans and deserts to anywhere we choose using a digital language that has become our universal tongue. They all help each of us to create a pool of potential to sink our labors into.

And there you are on your way to your pool of potential, but you have found as someone once said, “the roads to the pool of your potential are guarded by the dragons of fear.” What qualities does it take to overcome those dragons? What are the limitations and how do we go about preparing to engage them?  These are some of the questions to which all seekers of potentiality must eventually find solutions!

Why? Because just as sure as to Jesus “your potential is His passion,” to the devil, “your paralysis is his!” And paralysis is what fear brings.

 Some will never meet up with the dragons because they will never discover the roads that lead to their potential. They are living life looking backwards. The past is haunting them and the anxiety that the past might one day catch up to them is enough to keep their glance forward but their gaze backward. 

There are those who will discount the fact that they have never even begun. Like a runner that ignores the pop of the starters pistol they are at ease in the starting blocks and are content to have just been one of the contestants chosen to run: they never intended to contend so they just hang out around the starting line. Just getting to the starting line is reward enough for them.

But you aren’t numbered among these types. You have this unshakable desire to move forward through the doors to face whatever fear might presently be controlling the road to your full potential. So it is to you that the words John penned should jump off the page into your heart. Jesus’ purpose was “to destroy the works of the devil.” And one of his greatest works is to introduce fear into everyday living! Those threatening dragons you see down the road that are capable causes for panic are nothing more than fabricated paper dragons serving as fear tactics from a totally defeated foe.