One Step

This morning, in my normal routine fashion, I was cleaning the kitchen, making breakfast, attempting to get my dishes cleaned and chasing a 15 month old as she toddled around my feet making her way to the tupperware cabinet that she is ready to destroy.

There’s a confidence that a baby has. It’s interesting. I watch Emmy Lou as she knows exactly where that cabinet is, she has no problem letting tupperware topple all over her. She knows where every toy is and how to get to it all… quickly.

She is confident in everywhere she moves… except for one step.

literally.

One. Step.

Our kitchen is a bit raised up in comparison to our dining room. Theres about a 2 inch step that steps from our kitchen to our dining room. We have had so many people trip on it walking to our fridge that it’s our immediate warning when new people come to our house “hey just letting you know there is a step here, don’t fall.”

But Emmy Lou, she knows that step. She knows it enough to stop when she gets to it. We can literally hold her hands and she will inch towards, she will let her little toes hang off but she cannot bring herself to step down off that ledge, even with us standing right there to help her and catch her if she falls.

Most of the time, she will go the long way around to miss that little step. The path of our house is well traveled in all ways that avoid that one step.

I laugh when I think about her fear of that tiny space and realized just recently how I do the same thing with my life. There are a million things I know, things that are easy, places that are familiar, people that I am comfortable with, but there is that one thing. That ONE. STEP. that I so desperately want to take in life, but I get to the edge and I can’t step 2 inches.

I can’t do it. The paralyzing fear of the what ifs, of not being known, that my choice might not be what others want out of me, is crippling.

So I stand there and stare at it.

I have the hand of Jesus in my life.

But I stare at a ledge that looks like a cliff to me and is a mere 2 inches to God.

I was hashing out some ideas and struggles to my parents the other day and my Dad said something to me that really stuck, “So many people struggle to take a step because they believe that their choice is permanent. But nothing is, we aren’t even promised that. We are promised seasons.”

He’s right. So what if Emmy Lou steps off that step and falls. Well, she will get back up. She will get better. In fact, she will learn how to do it right.

Speaking from a real place of anxieties and fears in my own life, I must speak to any and all people reading this today: Don’t miss the assignment you are set to do because of one step.

Don’t let that one step be the barrier between you running after your visions. Don’t keep on the road frequently traveled because the untraveled road seems too risky.

More than likely, it’s only 2 inches.

2 inches that could send you into the greatest adventure of your life.