Hi Emily

At Beulah this year I met a teen who I seem to meet over and over again, Emily. Apparently I always seem to think she is someone else. She told me she reads my blog so I'm using my blog to say "Hi" and hopefully make up for thinking she was someone else.

While I was at Beulah my nephew asked me a tough question. We were talking about my move out west and my teenage nephew looked up at me and asked. "Uncle Dave , how come you always have to move so far away?"

I had to step back and think, "What does take me to so many distant places?". What makes me wanna travel to Virginia, Zambia, and soon British Columbia? Why aren't I content to just live in the same house I grew up, while ministering at my home church or to go to Nova Scotia for my Masters?

Mark Buchanan's book The Holy Wild helped me answer this question for myself. He also wrote Your God's too Safe and both of these books are very John Eldredgish in their subject and approach. The book is a pretty good read. It didn't revelotionize the way I see God or my relationship with him, but it did help strengthed both. Now to how this book helped me answer my nephew's question.

In the final chapter of his book Buchanan uses Bilbo Baggins from J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit as an illustration. Buchanan writes about how Bilbo's mother was a Took and his father was a Baggins. The Baggins were homebodies who played life safe, while the Tooks were adventurous. Bilbo struggles with being a homebody Baggins and an Adventurous Took and ultimately follows his Took nature and has the adventure of a life time.

Buchanan uses this to ilustrate how we all have a Baggins and Took persuasion inside us. This isn't an illusion to a dual-nature of good or evil, more so how we all have a desire to play it safe and to live the risk taking adventurous life. Most of us have found our place on the Baggins-Took spectrum, without realizing it. I have found my place on the spectrum with the Tooks. I love to try new things and if no one's done it before I'm more likely to do it. However, my Baggins forces me to look before I leap .These risks or adventures are only taken after thinking it over and trying to look at all thepossible scenarios,

In life we tend to embrace the Took or the Baggins in ourselves, on which side of the Spectrum do you find yourself?