WHAT IF

I have never been a recipe girl. By the time I read through the directions my enthusiasm has been baked right out of the process. Literally.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate details because delight is definitely in the details. But it’s the trying, not the talking, that activates my creative brain cells.

There is a difference between instruction and invention—one follows the path that others have already defined. The other strikes out in its own direction with “What If” as its guide.

What If. My two favorite words combined. This is where I find my joy—in the rolling up my sleeves, plunging fingers into dirt or dough and feeling the flurry of neurons pulsing through my body and entering the world through my hands. Invention depends on the concert of thinking and doing, when what is imagined…is given life.

What If takes a vast amount of courage—

It’s the ability to go against everything we’ve been taught of success and, in nearly every “first attempt,” making an agreement with ourselves to fail.

It’s a letting go of the pride that makes us human in an attempt to reach the Divine.

It’s embracing what others see as failure, as the necessary step toward the very definition of “Wow.”

It’s the unstoppable confidence in a vision that sees beyond the boundaries of another’s safety net.

To be willing to stay awake all night long in the angst of a decision, or even cry yourself to sleep.
To make friends with such discomfort as to wonder how what you envision could ever possibly be—
What If is the unimaginable, indefinable mountain top that to be reached, must brutalize, even demoralize nearly to defeat.

When I come away from these seasons of pulling myself as far out of comfort as to hardly recognize who I am, I must trust that to “become” I must die a thousand little public deaths.

Most assuredly, What If will demand that all of what we go through must be on grand display. There is no such thing as being “privately human,” no real growth in being “privately wrong.” The best of us are sometimes [for a season] the hardest to understand or even love.

But just hold on. Because something glorious is about to unfold.

And when it does, it will be sensational…each morsel, every crumb.  

The world is ours when we reframe the minutes we've been given in the context of What If instead of What now.