The Epic Life

We are going to see our kids today. I love being with them because I really love them. It is one of the great plasures of my life to watch my granddaughter. I loving just watching her live life. She lives life to the fullest. Everyday for her is an adventure (she has made life for her parents that way too) and nothing ever seems ordianry to her. She is one of the most passionate people I have ever been around.

So because of going to see the kids and because I have been reading a new book by John Eldredge called The Way of the Wild Heart. God has got me thinking about living an epic life. This began as I was reading the book and Eldredge makes the statement that to capture a boys heart, his focus, something has to be epic. I looked up the word epic and it means bigger than life.

As I read that definition I realized that when I was about 18 to 19 years old that is what God did in my life. He showed me that Christianity was not about just going to church and trying to be good. Christianity was about following this epic, bigger than life, God. It also answered a question that has been in my spirit for years. The question is what did my wife, Jan and I do as our son was growing up that helped him establish a real and passionate realtionship with Jesus. You see, every time I ask my son what we did that helped him know Jesus, he says you guys made it real. He tells us that we lived it out. I now understand that through our passionately seeking Jesus everyday in all things and in allowing our lives to center around Jesus not religious stuff we passed a view of God that was bigger than life, epic on to our son.

Some of the things we did to others seemed crazy and downright over the edge. But to our son they seemed big, risky, and that captured his attention and directed him to Jesus because if Jesus didn't come through on what we believed that He was telling us then we were sunk.The world and even some of the church thought we were crazy, but our son thought it was cool and though it he learned to know that God is real and epic.

I have an ordianry family, but we serve an extraordinarily epic God.    
                               Joe