Carrying a vision or a dream is like snow skiing. The object is not to just make it to the bottom of the hill. The object is to get as many good runs in before the sun goes down.
I think often times, people give up on their dreams after just one run at it. They don’t prepare for a full day of skiing, instead they show up on the slopes, ride the lift, and cautiously and calmly slice their way to the bottom and allow that first short trip down the hill be the deciding factor on whether to go again.
Truth is, if you are new at skiing, and you wipe out a couple times on your first run, then the odds of you getting back on the lift right away lessen greatly.
Living out a vision can be like this, and is why so many new ideas die before they ever really have a chance to get started. It is fear. But this kind of fear is instead a fear of investing more time in skiing and the people you may ski with. Why? Because we live in a time when we have more choices and less time, and it is easy to begin to think you only have one shot at this and it better be a perfect run.
Often, people will not invest in a vision or people carrying a vision, if their first experience with the vision is a scary unpredictable ride down an icy slope where you engage in intimate relationships with trees. You don’t want those people riding with you anyway, so keep your black diamond attitude that drove you toward carrying your vision to start with. You want to bring along side you other people who live to ski until the sun sets. People who actually help you get up and back on the lift, over and over again no matter how many falls.
The sun is setting on all of us, and there isn’t a great deal of time left to live out your vision. So before you begin, you must decide if you are going to base the life of your vision on the low points of just a few runs. It isn’t an issue of whether you had five bad runs out of ten. The issue is whether or not you keep getting up. That’s how a vision sticks. And that is how you change the world.
So what are you willing to forgo to see your life’s calling come to fruition? How many crashes can you get up from and say, “Let’s do it again.”
Here’s how all this “Ski” talk plays out in my pursuits:
As a pastor, one of my roles is to create a community that is being guided by a vision.
This simply means I want to connect with as many people as I can before I check out.
