Living and Breathing Audaciously.

My word of the year is audacious because it encompasses the idea of living both brave and free.

Audacious (adj.) means showing a willingness to take surprisingly bold risks; extremely bold or daring; recklessly brave; fearless; lively; unrestrained; uninhibited.

Recklessly brave.

Uninhibited.

Fearless.

Surprisingly bold risks.

Willingness.

These are the words that I want to define my year.

These are the words that I want to shape my thinking as I graduate and step out into the adult world.

AUDACIOUS.

That word holds so much because it challenges me to stop living in fear and to embrace the calling on my life.

I am not audacious. I lack courage. I shrink from things that God calls me to because I fear failure.

This year, I am turning over a new leaf. I choose to be recklessly brave in the pursuit of a living, loving, saving, sustaining, almighty God who shapes my heart.

I desire to be bold; sharing the gospel from my backyard to the ends of the earth.

I aspire to be gutsy; challenging myself to do things that make me uncomfortable.

I strive to be brave; living life with everything that I have.

Today, I choose to be audacious in my intentionality: talking to that person whom I do not particularly like.

Audacious in my spirituality; choosing to surrender those parts of myself that I hide from God because I think they are insignificant, or simply because I do not want to give up.

Fearless in the face of big decisions; choosing to listen to God’s leading as He directs my path through the unknown future.

Willing to step out in faith, even when the outcome requires messing up the comfortable life I am used to. Most of what I am called to does not come from being comfortable and safe.

Uninhibited by the desire to be someone else or to do something else, choosing instead to embrace where God has placed me.

I do not take to being brave, bold and fearless naturally.

My default setting is fear, even though God has proven himself more than capable of eradicating my fear with a single promise.

There is no formula to being audacious, brave and free.

It is an organic journey that requires me to trust in the One who moved mountains and parted seas.

Audacious because the One who called me to this journey set me exactly where he placed me.

Audacious because I follow a living, loving, saving, sustaining, almighty God.

Audacious because how else could I respond to the grace He extended as He took the nails for my sin?