Thrive!

Flicker, flame, fire — conflagration!

That’s how it goes.

You have the flickering of an idea —  in the car, in the bathroom, in a conversation, in the night.

“Hmm!”

“I could go back to school.”

What if I start a business and market my passion?”

“I’ll start a blog about my struggle with my struggle.”

I’ll lose weight. I’ll have a baby. I’ll retire and start a nonprofit. I’ll reconnect with my dad. I’ll change the organization I work in.  I’ll change my attitude.”

A passion for such illuminations can seize you, overtake you, inspire you! Then out you rush to tell others, to formulate a plan. You boldly ask others to go along with you; you work your bushy, smushy, tushie off  — and boom!

Kaboom!

Kazoom!

Life, is different!

That is how we renew our lives, how we get to the good future, how we have no regrets. We do what falls into our heart to do, and we do it hard.

I wrote my first article for publication after the flicker and flame of an idea about the value of children smoldered in me for a few years. I switched careers in the middle of my life on the flicker of an idea that a pastor wasn’t that different from a professor. “It’s all mind control,” quipped my zippy, quippy wife. I helped renew the church I now pastor on the flicker and flame and fire of the ideas that beauty, humility, integrity and authenticity and God matter — most!

I’ve seen a bunch of this lately. A woman becomes a professional gardener in her fifties. Another begins a new marketing career in her seventies. Another, at eighty, takes on a volunteer pastoral care role at her church.

A disabled woman moves to a new neighborhood that is much safer and yet cheaper than where she lived!

A young woman becomes a youth group leader when she has never done anything like that before.

A girl moves to another city to see if her long-distance relationship with her boyfriend will work out. It does!

They are getting married this spring.

Think it up, get fired up, do it!

Flicker, flame, fire, explode!