Dream Big with Bob GoffSample

If you’ve had ambitions for years and you haven’t rolled them out into the world, it would be worth asking yourself why. Jesus never told anyone to play it safe. You were born to be brave. Act like it. Live in this truth. If you want some of your ambitions to take a leap forward, get out of the green zone in your life and take a couple of risks. If you’ve built some pretty high walls, you don’t need to tear them all down; just build a door or two through them and get on the other side.

Mogadishu is a tricky place. It’s full of beauty and hope and violence and bullets and explosions. When an attempt is going to be made on someone’s life, their car will be cut off from those who are providing protection. Then bad things happen. Twenty minutes into our drive, as we were winding our way through Mogadishu, we turned down a narrow street and a car cut us off. The driver of our car turned to me and said with no small amount of terror in his voice, “This is really bad!” Now, there are two things you do not want to hear in Somalia: “This is really bad” and “I’m the captain now.” I wasn’t expecting what happened next. The guys with the machine guns protecting us in the truck in front started shooting. Never short on words, all I could muster in the chaos was, “Yikes!” 

I know it doesn’t sound big, deep, and theological, but it’s big, deep, and theological. Here’s why. I’ve spent my whole life becoming more and more comfortable. I have a house, a car, a boat. Heck, I have a dog I don’t even want. What I’ve discovered is that comfortable people don’t need Jesus and don’t chase their ambitions—desperate people do. If we’re going to get after our ambitions, God doesn’t want us living right in the middle of comfortable anymore. He wants us living on the edge of yikes.

Living on the edge of yikes can be scary and hard, and it’s sometimes even painful. That’s okay. Keep breathing. Stay after it. Move toward your edge where Jesus is waiting for you. God’s not leading us to the safest path forward, but to the one where we’ll grow the most.