BE BOLD

This blogging thing is hard!  I thought it would be so easy to write posts, but time gets away from me so quickly. Hopefully I’ll get into the rhythm at some point.  I recently (September 22^nd) celebrated my 27^th birthday and decided to steal a page out of my sister Tricia’s book and pick a word for my 27^th year of life.  For the past three years she has picked a word to focus on for that whole year—I’ve seen her be sassy, edgy and now fearless.  I love this as a simple goal for the year and spent several months leading up to my birthday trying to decide on my “word.”  I picked BOLD.

Dictionary.com defines bold as:  

Bold: adjective, bold·er, bold·est.

1.   not hesitating or fearful in the face of actual or possible danger or rebuff; courageous and daring: a bold hero.

 

2.   not hesitating to break the rules of propriety; forward; impudent: He apologized for being so bold as to speak to the emperor.

 

3.   necessitating courage and daring; challenging: a bold adventure.

 

4.   beyond the usual limits of conventional thought or action; imaginative: Einstein was a bold mathematician. a difficult problem needing a bold answer.

 

I picked BOLD for three reasons: I want to be bold in my faith (as in not hesitating or fearful), I want to be bold in the way I love my husband (as in not hesitating to break the rules society has put around the husband/wife relationship) and I want to be bold in pursuing my dreams (as in being imaginitve in what my dreams are and courageous in following them).

BE BOLD IN YOUR FAITH.  Along with this word, I picked a verse from Revelations. 

Jesus talks about how it is better to be hot or even cold than lukewarm.  Indifference, apathy or “lukewarmness” (Gennaism) is the equivalent to not caring.  He wants us to be passionate for him, but if we are not passionate for him at least be fully against him—this state of lukewarm is the worst place you can be—in faith, in relationship and in life.  It means you are basically going through the motions.  I don’t want to go through the motions and I DON’T want to be against Christ.  I want to be passionately, BOLDLY FOR Him.  And I want people to know that about me.  I have always hidden behind sayings like “well I would rather show my beliefs in my actions instead of talking about them” or “be the Jesus people see in the world” or “people are turned off by evangelical Christians.”  No more.  We are called to make disciples, we are called to spread His name and His love.  If I truly believe what I profess to believe, how can I stop talking about the One who saved me?  The One who has made my life so much better?  The One who has turned hard situations in my life to good?  Yet I am meek in my faith—I am scared of what others think, of offending anyone, of turning someone off from Christ because of my sins and imperfections.  NO MORE!  This year I will be bold.  Another way I want to be BOLD in faith is truly trusting and relying on Christ.  It’s so easy to say we do this and so hard to actually execute.  In the last year I have seen how much I really control situations and how little I surrender to Christ.  Control is a huge sin-struggle for me and I am committed to working on that this year.  I pray that I will have stories to share over the next year of how I have acted BOLDLY in faith.

BOLDLY LOVE MY HUSBAND.  Newton is my biggest blessing, and I really do believe if we want to have a marriage that lasts a lifetime, we need to invest in our relationship daily.  That doesn’t mean we have this perfect relationship because we don’t, but we really do work at it.  We work at listening to each other, encouraging each other, communicating well, fighting well and extending grace to one another.  While we fail each other in little ways constantly, we know that our marriage is grounded first in Christ, second in love and respect for each other and third in a non-negotiable commitment.  I pray that we always have this attitude.  It’s so easy to get caught up in the world’s definition of relationships, especially marriage.  It’s often depicted as overbearing wives, lazy husbands, little romance, little fun, and even less sex.  I want to break these stereotypes that society has created around marriage and BOLDLY love Newton.  I never want to stop encouraging him, showing him how much I admire and respect him, having fun with him or just enjoying our life together.  We don’t spend every minute together, we do fight, we do get on each other’s nerves, we do complain about each other sometimes—but the point is we work at it every day and I know this man is committed to loving me, despite my imperfections and faults, for the rest of my life.   

BE BOLDER IN PURSUING MY DREAMS.  I have lots of ideas, lots of dreams about how my future will pan out.  This is one place I need to BOLDLY trust Christ, yes; but I also don’t want to let these dreams fizzle into “what could have been.”  While I’m not ready to outline exactly what all those dreams include right now, I can say I am taking steps towards acting on them.  It may be years from now, but at least I’m doing SOMETHING about them.  I’m also working on being BOLD in pursuing opportunities and going after things that I want—including one recent opportunity at my current job; which I’m happy to say worked out!

I can’t wait to update periodically over the next year in the successes I’ve had in being BOLD!