This past Sunday afternoon, someone dropped off the belongings of my friend (codename: the Pearl). My wife and I agreed that we would store some of her stuff while she is living abroad. As I was moving boxes, containers, and belongings into the attic, a small, deflated balloon fell out.

As I read the writing on the balloon “Spirit of Adventure,” I became increasingly amazed at how well the balloon described my unassuming friend. To the natural eye, one would not expect this polite, warm, gentle, and angelic woman to be an adventurer. If you didn’t know the pearl very well, you would wrongly assume that she is content with a simple, contained, and careful Christian life. But my friend, the Pearl, has the tendency to say “YES” quite often to God in the little things, which leads her into big adventures! For instance just six months ago, the Pearl was a student studying counseling, but today she is learning Arabic and is living somewhere in the Middle East.

In many ways, the pearl is like a Jedi in Star Wars,

“Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things.”

It is not this grand Spirit of Adventure that propels her to do this, but her seemingly small and affirmative responses to the Holy Spirit in the ordinary and everyday aspects of her life.  The Pearl isn’t one to just fly to the Middle East on a whim to satisfy some need for Adventure in her life. In fact, I would say that the Pearl didn’t know that at the beginning of 2009 she would be engaged and living in the middle east with her fiance. As we start to live more in Christ, relinquishing our agenda and our mission, we are raptured into the mission of God. The pearl reminds me of Bilbo Baggins,

It’s a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where you might be swept off to.

It is indeed a dangerous affair when we relinquish our lives to God as a living sacrifice. It is a dangerous affair when we offer all our seemingly true and false ways of living to the Lord as an offering. It is a seemingly dangerous affair when we no longer seek to save our lives, but freely lay them down so that we may abide more fully in Christ. It is indeed dangerous, but I do not know any other way for a Christian to exist in Christ. Saying “yes” to God resulted in my seemingly “ordinary and normal”  friend, the Pearl eventually spending her engagement somewhere in the Middle East with a lice infestation ; ).

Where will saying “Yes” to God in the seemingly ordinary trials of your present life end up leading you?