All In

If you play any poker nowadays you've certainly heard the expression "All In." It's a gutsy move but one that is necessary by players to replenish their chips, take down other players and generally wreak havoc on other players' psyche.

I was thinking about that expression today when I was reading 1 Peter. Been stale in my walk the past couple weeks, wrestling through faith and hope and trust. I began to realize that I'm holding all my chips back. I'm in the game but not really playing. I only play out a hand when I'm sure I've got the cards and therefore I never really go or do anything. Metaphorically this works so hang with me on this...

"Set your hope fully..."

This is what sticks with me today. I need to fully enter the game, play with all my might, not hold anything back. Put my whole weight into it, jump in with both feet.

This past week Anna and I went on a 40 mile backpack trip down the Wild and Scenic Rogue River. It was incredible. About 35 miles in there is a creek called Tate Creek. If you stop and hike about 1/4 mile up the creek you come to a 25 foot natural rock slide into a deep pool of water. You can sit down in the slide and the water pushes you down and off the edge into the pool. Anna couldn't go up because she had some blisters so I ran up to take it all in. As I stood at the top of the fall I decided this might not be the smartest thing to do. I was 5-10 miles from help, my wife's feet were in bad shape and she wouldn't even be able to hear me if i got hurt. I am having some minor problems in a joint in my back and then of course there is the broken tailbone from 5-6 years ago. All this starts going through my head and I decide I'd better not do this...that is until i accidenatly dropped the camera down the slide into the pool below.

It took me all of 10 seconds to decide to jump. It was awesome! I found the camera by the way. The point of all this is that for me to jump, I had to have something that took me out of thinking about all the why not's into the action forward.

Today - that is my focus. Forward momentum along this path of jumping when I'd rather look, pushing all my chips in more frequently and keeping my eyes on the Lord. After all, nobody knew better what happens to you when you don't set your hope fully on the Lord.

I gotta get out of the boat.