Confessions, Translations, and Alaska

Confession: My favorite television show for the last year has been Alaska: The Last Frontier. I’m not positive why, but I think it has to do with the setting.

Alaska is beautiful, stunning. Pollution and people and the-next-best-thing haven’t invaded it like they have in the lower forty-eight. At least not from the lens of this television show.

The setting of Alaska: The Last Frontier is unique, as is the lifestyle of its featured family. Subsistence. Manual. Messy. Dauntless. An adventure awaits with each sunrise, and, at least according to the show, this family is completely fearless to wake up and take it on.

They work hard day in and day out to provide food for each other, to take care of their cattle and land, and to survive an eight month winter. They are uninhibited by a lack of plumbing and heating and grocery shopping. They don’t complain about the cold and wet and hot and muggy. They live through it, and they absolute love it.

This family thrives in the extreme, on-the-edge, sometimes scary, and oh so beautiful way of life. Their extreme is real. They live literally on the edge of a cliff. Their scary is life-threatening. And the beauty around them is God’s–untainted by man. They live off the grid and they aren’t missing out.

I guess this is my favorite show because I want to live that way in a place like that. To live off the grid of this craziness of American society. To live in extreme trust, on the edge of eternity. To surround myself with God’s beauty untainted by man.

Translation:

This spot in my life requires major decisions and intense transitions. I don’t want to wade through them in lukewarm acceptance. I want to dive into them, fully submerged and engaged to whatever God will teach me. Scary and daunting though they may be, these transitions and my future are divinely designed for me to journey through. I want to experience them and the people I meet along the way untainted by man.

This means I relinquish the filters of American society when I look at the world, and I read the Word without an agenda, and I love because I’m commanded, not because I feel like it, and I live sacrificially all the time, and I am dependent on Him, not my own flesh.

Whether I end up living halfway across the globe in a hut, or even in suburbia (that was hard to type), I must run the race I’m called to. The fullest, most dangerous, most thrilling life of adventure exists on a narrow road, and few find it. It’s counter-cultural and fresh, white-hot and uncomfortable, and certainly not on the grid of “normal”.

Why would I want it any other way if it means radical, untainted existence dancing on the edge of eternity?

#Adventures #Faith #Life