Stepping Onto the Road

For me, this has been a year of new things. Some might
argue too many new things, but new things nonetheless.

I have a well-established history of being afraid to make
mistakes. After all, as Bilbo famously said to Frodo, “it’s
a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door.”
There is comfort and safety in the well-trod paths. In the
familiarity of the predictable; doing what we’ve always
done.

I can’t remember it being a singular, conscious decision. I
woke up one day and found myself fed up with the
knowns. Feeling a pull toward the adventure of the
unknown. An unwillingness to stick with the status quo.

Beginning of a Journey

It actually began in December of last year (2025) with a
desire to revisit what I was carrying around with me in
my pockets; my “every-day carry,” as it’s called. Every so
often I’ll get an urge to rethink something I’ve been doing
a certain way for a good while, to see if there’s a better
way to be doing it. Call it relentless perfectionism—I’m
working on it.

Revisiting my every-day carry (EDC for short) led to me
finally coming to realize a reason why I might want to
carry around a pocket notebook with me: to capture
ideas and thoughts on paper when they come to me,
rather than gambling by pulling out my phone to open
the Notes app, and instead getting distracted by the
fifteen other things it immediately shoves in my face,
ultimately forgetting why I took my phone out of my
pocket to begin with.

Focus and attention are valuable resources, and mine are
actively being stolen from me every day by my “smart”
devices. I won’t go into depth here on my thoughts on
technology and the ways it both harms and helps us;
that’s a topic for another day.

Stepping Stones

The desire to decentralize my phone and begin
carrying a pocket notebook also spun off into an impulse
to be generally more creative, along with an urge to more
deeply study the Word of God.

For me, the first step in deeper Bible study meant being
more intentional in looking for patterns in meaning of
the text, and one of the ways many people do this is with
a Bible highlighting system. In my case this led naturally
to a desire to also take notes while studying the patterns,
which meant getting a journaling Bible. I had visions of a
completely marked up Bible, with highlighting and/or
writing in the margins of almost every single page. An
ambitious goal for the year.

Learning about the benefits of carrying a pocket
notebook also led to me discovering the proclaimed
benefits of journaling, something which I’ve been
strangely allergic to for my entire adult life.

I took inspiration from many different individuals on
YouTube who preach the benefits of journaling and
analog notetaking. The most important realization I took
away from the insights they shared was that journaling is
not meant to be an exact science. In fact it’s not meant to
be a science at all. There is freedom in just writing
whatever thoughts are flowing through my head, without
concern for whether they are elegantly formed, or
perfectly structured.

Newness of Life

It was difficult at first, defying the hesitation, the
”paralysis of analysis” that tends to plague me every time
I sit down to attempt something creative or unplanned.
But the more I told myself it was OK to simply write my
thoughts as they came to me, whether it was in a
notebook or in the margins of my Bible, the more I found
I enjoyed it, and the more I sought excuses to just write.

The realization of how much my pursuit of perfection
steals from me in nearly every sphere of my life has been
a slow one. I’ve especially noticed it in my walk with
Christ. There is something inside all of us that craves
certainty. Whether in trying our hand at something new,
or accepting Christ’s offer of an easy yoke and a new life
with Him at the helm. Our faith only grows past the
limits of what we feel certain of. Comfort prized over
discomfort only leads to decay.

But Christ calls us to step out onto the water with Him,
into the unknown and unfamiliar, trusting that even
when we fail, because we will, He will not. His purposes
will always succeed—and as the Apostle Paul reminds us,
“for those who love God all things work together for
good” (Romans 8:28). And as imperfect and limited
humans, we are bound to fall down as we learn,
especially when it comes to learning to follow Christ
faithfully.

“With this magnificent God positioned among us, Jesus brings the assurance that our universe is a perfectly safe place for us to be.”

Just as we learn to trust in our own abilities when
developing a new skill or art, we learn to trust in Christ’s
ability and faithfulness the more we submit to Him and
allow ourselves to make mistakes and be uncertain in our
walk with Him—“work out your own salvation with fear
and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to
will and to work for his good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:12-
13)

Which leads me to the idea behind this blog, “Liminal.”
It’s another step in this year’s journey of trying things I’m
not used to, accepting that once I start, I’m in the in-
between, between the beginning of the journey and the
end. The same is true of our life once we put our faith in
Christ. We’re in-between. The now-and-not-yet. We’re
already saved, we’re being saved, and we will be saved.

To my mind, ‘liminal’ is an excellent descriptor of our
condition after we place our faith in Christ. We’ve
already been justified before God, but we haven’t yet
been glorified. Our old self has been crucified with
Christ, but we’re not completely rid of it yet. We’re still in
the midst of being sanctified, one day at a time.

The Call

I’m often amazed at the upside-down nature of God’s
kingdom. We seek comfort and rest, and Jesus tells us
that if we take on His yoke we will find it in Him, but not
in the way we expect. “A servant is not greater than his
master,” He says, “If they persecuted me, they will also
persecute you.” (John 15:20) What a marvelous paradox!
That if we endure for Christ’s sake the suffering and
discomfort we want to avoid, in it we’ll find the thing we
wanted from the start, and so much more besides.

This isn’t to say that suffering and discomfort are things
to be desired for their own sake. We endure suffering
because we are one with Christ, seeking to become like
the one who suffered tremendously out of His love for
us. “For if we have been united with him in a death like
his, we shall certainly be united with him in a
resurrection like his.” (Romans 6:5) No amount of
suffering we endure, especially for His sake, could ever
compare to “the glory that is to be revealed to us.”
(Romans 8:18)

“This is what the LORD says: Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.”

This verse speaks to me of the profound nature of God’s
wisdom, and how we are commanded to ask, seek, knock.
This is, in part, my goal with all of the changes I’ve been
making: to “ask where the good way is, and walk in it.”

There’s a tension inside many of us, I think, between the
desire for comfort and the call of adventure. I have a
theory that this is an outworking of the imago Dei that
we bear. An innate desire to fulfill the mandate God gave
to all humanity at the beginning of everything, to “be
fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it”
(Genesis 1:28). Life can certainly be an adventure. Yet so
often we settle for a life on the couch in front of a screen
that shows us mere pictures of what we might find if we
only set foot outside our door.

Bilbo and Frodo both showed the courage to step onto
the road and see where it took them, and both ended up
playing significant roles in the final liberation of Middle
Earth. Similarly, we can either choose the easy way,
sitting on our metaphorical front porch while dismissing
the call without so much as a second thought, or we can
trust what the scripture says, that “we are His
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk
in them.” (Ephesians 2:10)

It’s undoubtedly an adventure, choosing to follow after
Christ, one that involves both danger and self-sacrifice,
but also carries with it assurance of final victory. Like
Bilbo and Frodo, when we step onto the road to follow
Christ we have no idea where we might be swept off to
while on the journey, but unlike them we know the
ultimate destination. Following after Christ is indeed an
adventure, for what could be more adventurous than
taking part in the plans of the One who created
everything?