August is American Adventure Month, which makes it the perfect time to start thinking about injecting a little adventure into our lives. Now is the time to take that road trip you’ve been putting off or to fly off to some exotic land for a little thrill and some new experiences.
As any of us who have spent too many long months working without a break can tell you, life needs variety. When we fall too long into routine, we often forget to challenge ourselves. We forget to learn more about ourselves and our neighbors. And, we forget to place God first in our lives.
This is the real meaning of adventure. Although we associate the word with Indiana Jones or James Bond, or maybe Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, those Hollywood-style movies really have nothing to do with adventure as we see it in our everyday lives. Adventure doesn’t have to be chasing down long-lost ancient treasures or flying off to outer space. Adventure, for a Christian, doesn’t need to be anything more than finding a means to disrupt that routine in our lives that is keeping us from seeing ourselves clearly. That kind of adventure can be as simple as driving home by a different route, stopping by a new restaurant or shop, or taking on a new hobby.
Try that just once this week and see what you come across when you do it. God loves to put a sign right in front of us but just out of view from our daily experience. Taking the long way home can put you in the way of all sorts of adventures: new relationships, new purpose, new opportunities. There may be someone just waiting for you to turn right instead of left when you leave work next Monday, a person who is waiting to connect, to get some help, to find Christ with you.
I’m not making this up. The meaning of adventure is, in fact, just that humble. It is nothing more than an “exciting or unusual experience,” according to dictionary.com. Adventure starts small, but the results skyrocket from there.
As summer winds down and we head into the fall season, we need this kind of shaking up in our everyday actions. When we don’t break our habits, we can get addicted to living by routine, and we can get very crafty at avoiding the exciting and unusual in life. It just feels easier to come straight home from work, to stay in on a lazy Sunday morning, to take in a movie on the weekend with the family instead of reaching out for something that will challenge us.
Those choices can be a real comfort when life is stressful, but they take away much that is fulfilling and enriching in our experience, and they remove the chance to connect to our world as we are meant to. Because of modern technology, our world is increasingly becoming isolated and divided. People are starting to look at their neighbors as complete strangers, and worse sometimes, as enemies. People aren’t interested in “love your neighbor” these days (Mark 12:31), they are interested in telling them to knock off the noise so they can hear the TV better.
This stuff isn’t idle talk. There are consequences to our fear of adventure. Recently, I wrote about how critical it was for us to act as the peacemakers in these tense times. And part of our duty as emissaries of peace is to go out into the world and extend ourselves in the search for unity. Essentially, if we want to “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation” (Mark 16:15), we have to adventure out into that world, taking on new situations, in order to spread God’s message to everyone.
I’m sure you get along well with the people in your house and in your church. I’m sure you also get along well with the people at work and in your neighborhood. But, as Christians seeking peace in the world, we have to do better than that. We need to venture further, taking in what is “unusual” to us, what is “uncomfortable” and new.
We need to “go into all the world,” just like Paul and the other apostles did, so we can teach and learn peace with all those around us.
In 2 Corinthians 11:26, Paul says, “I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false believers.”
Paul knew something about adventure. We’ll never know all the trials he survived to act as an emissary for Christ. In our time, we don’t have to live up to that incredible standard, but we have to be willing to follow its spirit. We simply need to fill ourselves with a sense of adventure for that which is a little farther than our comfort reaches. We need to go into the world, even if it is just a few blocks farther than we normally walk, and try to make a connection with the adventures we find.
Modern life, with all its conveniences, has left us detached, left us on islands to ourselves. This leads to the sort of ugliness we see on the television these days, where our own countrymen and countrywomen don’t understand our perspective, where no one can seem to agree, even on simple solutions.
We have to remember what English cleric and metaphysical poet, John Donne, said several hundred years ago:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
We have to be brave and sail out a bit from our safe harbors, adventure out at sea, until we can see where we connect with the mainland. We don’t have to live dangerously like Paul, but bravely enough to face whatever challenges are in the city or in the country, in the rivers or on the sea.
It is only by such effort that we can heal and find comfort with the world. Because if we don’t, if we continue to let our tectonic plates shift away, well, to paraphrase Donne again, America will be very much the less for it.
