On September 11, 2007, I spent FOUR hours talking our adoption social worker through the details of my 20+ years on this planet. I must have set some kind of home study interview record because my husband’s chat with Stacie only lasted two hours. After I unraveled every possible thread of my life across the Starbucks table where we sat, Stacie shuffled her notes, shook her head, and asked me in all seriousness,
“Are you an adrenaline junkie?”
You would have to check her notes for my exact response, but I’m pretty sure it sounded something like, “No!”
In other words, I totally lied to her.
I mean, kind of.
The truth is that just below my mostly calm (and sometimes even collected) surface, there has always been a plucky undercurrent of urgency. Perhaps you’ve noticed this about me. I’ve always rolled with a let’s-boogie-through-some-minefields-before-we-lose-our-legs approach because life just isn’t that long, you know?
So, yeah, I love me some adrenaline but I wouldn’t say I’m a junkie, regardless of the evidence in my story to support it. What I am right this second, and what I have been every time God has brought me to the leading edge of a new and pivotal season is…
Restless.
For a while now I’ve had some new dreams stirring inside me, but they are all kinds of tangled up and possibly in conflict with a bunch of other, already-established realities playing out in my life. So a couple of months ago, when I felt the familiar adrenaline begin to surge, I suppressed it by asking, “God, is this selfish?”
Then, out of nowhere, came this book trailer (and a hot mess of tears down my cheeks)…
Restless Book Trailer from Jennie Allen on Vimeo.
Restless released today and will be delivered to my house in a few minutes. I’m crawling-out-of-my-skin anxious to read it, not because it promises answers but because it stands to be a reverberation of my own dreaming and untangling and sensing that it’s possible to get past my insecurities and my excuses and spend the rest of my life “running my guts out after God’s purposes.” [page 7, Restless]
So I’m restless today for that echo, for other voices in the minefield shouting and affirming, “There’s more! What if the things you love to do collided with God’s will? There’s more. Pick up the threads of your life from that Starbucks table…and go live like it!”
To living like it,
Kristen