‘Are you sure this is the right way?’ 🔄

‘Are you sure this is the right way?’ 

‘This doesn’t look familiar.’

I’m sure like me you’ve uttered those words on countless journey’s in the car or walking around a city. 

We associate the familiar with the right way. However does that stack up when it comes to the journey on route to seeing our vision become a reality?

When what you meet on route to your dream doesn’t match up with expectation the result can be confusion. 

Over the past several years both me and Leanne would have set planning days. A planning day sounds like it should be fun, like it should be about blue sky thinking and dreaming up new ideas, but for us it was painful. 

Why?

We both carried convictions but combined they felt like a contradiction and incompatible. So did one of us have it wrong? Based on our experience only one of us could be right. However, what was happening was the formation of a third way. A third way is an innovative new route that isn’t based on what we’ve seen but is birthed out of a tension of two convictions. 

On route to releasing the future we were carrying I would often say to myself…

‘If this is the right way I shouldn’t be feeling like this!’ 

‘If this is the right way I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing!’

‘If this is the right way then I shouldn’t be doing it this way!’

The contradiction we carry is a chrysalis. The caterpillar enters a place where it becomes trapped and in the place of being stuck it goes through a necessary metamorphosis. The chrysalis which looks like a prison becomes the place of new birth and a new future. The caterpillar surrenders to the process in order to become the butterfly.

What do I need to surrender in this moment of feeling stuck? 

A moment of surrender is not quitting but giving up something that is preventing us moving forwards.  The dead end requires us to adopt the disposition and humility of a child. We have to be  willing to enter our own chrysalis and unlearn some of what we’ve known and be driven by a renewed hunger to learn all over again. 

Jesus famously said in ‘unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’

The Kingdom of heaven was a new way of thinking and new way of living being introduced. It was so counter culture that only those who were willing to embrace the contradiction could allow it to carry out its work to creating the new way of living and a new set of outcomes. 

The process of unlearning is humbling, it can be painful but let me tell you it is not only worth it, it is so necessary. 

When you feel like you’ve hit a dead end let me encourage you, if you adopt the disposition of a child your dead end can be your new beginning.

Cheering you on! 

Gareth