Burn Your Bridges: Encouragement to Be All You Can Be

Aish has to be one of my long time, favourite sites.  What a gift I received this morning in my e-mail in-box.  My regular update e-mail from Aish.com on what’s happening, special and encouraging stories, the how-to’s of living a complete, full and enriched life.  So I say to you, I say to me, “Burn your bridges.”  As the Hebrew children when faced with no way out; surrounded by mountains on both sides, the Red Sea in front and the enclosing army of Pharaoh behind them – told to enter into the raging Red Sea, terrified; but instructed to “take that first step.”  It was, you see (pardon the pun ‘see’/'sea’) their “only way out.”  They had no other choice; it was to step out in faith (and I can imagine it wasn’t so much faith as no other choice) or be killed by the fast approaching enemy.

It has been those moments in time, when faced with no other choice, that my life has taken it’s most awesome turns.  It has been those times, that I never, in a month of Sundays, would have chosen, that I have discovered the greatness of who I am; the strength, knowledge, wisdom and ability that lay dormant within, just waiting to be awoken.  It has been those times of being faced with no other choice, that though scared to death, because I had no choice, I arose to the occasion…and DID IT!

Am I brave enough to burn my bridge.  As I write this note I think of my love of writing and encouraging others.  I think how I have said or written something that has been “just what someone needed”, and ask myself, “Can I burn the bridge of the guaranteed pay cheque and step out and do what I love – with faith that it will meet my needs, keep the roof over my head, put food on my table?”   The very thought of it scares me to death – and yet, I know that in doing that, I will be fulfilled as it was meant to be.  But, I am “scared to death.”  Do I need YHWH to step in; to close the door, “that no man can open?”  Even as I write this I sense I am not writing it at all (I mean me, the flesh and bones), but it is my essence, my spirit speaking to my flesh…saying, “Child.  Believe.  It’s time.”

And I shudder – living in a city where money means you do have food and a roof over your head; a city where a person paid as much for a special front door to be installed in his house as my sister paid for her whole house in another city in Canada.  I live in a city that has no families; just adults and children living under the same roof.  I live in a city where my neighbour is not my neighbour but more like a stranger, even more perhaps an “enemy” – why, because we value our stuff and our things and it is such that we are “fear-FULL”  all the time, because someone might break in and steal your stuff.  I live in a city where our children can’t go to school, and I’m talking about pre-teens, without there being the threat of a shooting or stabbing…by another child?

Doe my people need to have their eyes opened to what is real, what is important.  Am I to write the message, speak the word?  I only know that I often times feel like the prophet Ezekiel, who was known as the weeping prophet.  I am more often sad than joyous because of what I see in this city of 5 million strangers, enemies and fearful and glutonous people; people craving for more and more stuff.

Do I sound harsh?  I don’t mean to.  Am I sad?  Yes I am, very sad…and yet another day shall pass; more will die from drug and alcohol overdoses or prescription medications.

YHWH created us in His image and He is perfection and there is nothing He cannot do, ergo we too being made of the same as our Creator have all that is needed to rise above and “complete our assignment on planet earth.”  YHWH does not Create without purpose; each of us has a purpose.  It’s just taken me a very, very long time (by man’s perspective of time) to even begin to glean what my “human journey purpose is,” and even now…well I hesitate with negative thoughts implanted in my mind that say, “Who you?  Just who do you think you are anyway?” to which I shall repeatedly retort, “I am a child, a daughter of the Greatest that was, is and ever shall be.  There is therefore nothing, absolutely nothing I cannot nor will not do that has been determined from before I came into fleshly being.”

So Aish – thank you for encouraging, for always being there to say the right thing at the right time.