Since we've been thinking about the possibility of joining Journey Canada on a full time basis, one thing my wife and I have started to realize is the enormity of what we're proposing. People generally don't upend their lives and careers in their middle years with three teen or preteen kids. These are the prime earning years, our plates are full enough, we should stick with what we know. We should probably just fall into bed each night grateful to have survived another day (which is what we pretty much do anyway).
I've been thinking a lot about scripts over the past few years - the standard ways we tend to approach life that is largely handed to us from the world around us. The standard life script in our society is that you party hard when you're young, meet the person of your dreams, get married, establish a career, buy a house, have kids, work hard, retire, play golf, die. Somewhere in there you raise the kids to do the same thing you did. As it goes, it's a pretty good script. It forms the basis for a decent, hardworking life.
But the script doesn't have any provisions for a mid-life career change - especially one that sees a pretty significant loss of income and future stability and that has a strong fund-raising/entrepreneurial element to it. I don't know anyone who has done this, so all the advice and ideas we've been getting from friends have been very welcome - we're figuring this out and we need all the help we can get.
The whole business is a bit scary, and there's only one reason to do it - because I think it's really important. I think a lot of us would have to admit that the world around us feels like it's going crazy. I think Jesus wants to help His followers find some sanity, but it's getting harder and harder to do. It's really difficult to carve out the space to talk to Him, to ask Him for His help, and to listen to what He might have to say. It's even harder to connect with other people and have really HONEST and open conversations. Journey makes a space for that.
Jesus has a unique path that He wants each one of us to walk. The script I mentioned above never goes quite the way we plan - there are always bumps along the way, and some of the bumps can be pretty terrible. If we're going to walk the path successfully we need Jesus beside us, but almost as important are other people, helping to usher us into His presence, helping us talk with Him and helping us along the path to which He's called us. That's what Journey is about.