Upheld In “Stories We Tell Ourselves” I

PART ONE

I like to read Seth’s Blog. How many of you do, too? Seth Godin, Entrepreneur and Writer and a lot of other things, has a lot of wisdom and he is always throwing out ideas to ponder. http://www.sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/12/the-stories-we-tell-ourselves.html

And I do love to ponder and search out meanings.

He recently wrote about stories we tell ourselves—one of those being, “I am too old to take a chance…”

Seth is a challenger, he encourages his readers to leap into the unknown.  He’s right.

I am old. But I’m not old on the inside. I guess that is where it counts. I don’t think I am too old to try new things, maybe I’ll hesitate at times—after all, one must count the cost, right? But, if you stop taking those leaps into the unknown and allow fear to overtake you—well, then—you get old.

I am reminded of Caleb, who lived long ago. His story is told in the Old Testament of the Bible. Several times, Scripture makes it plain that Caleb was favored by God for his heart to follow God fully. Moses had just led the Children of Israel out of Egypt and they were approaching the land God planned for them to dwell in. Moses sent several scouts to spy out the land. After all, they were facing some wars and needed to know what that looked like.

When the scouts brought back horror stories of giants in the land (“Woe is us, we looked like grasshoppers to them. They will overpower us!”), two of those scouts, Joshua and Caleb, begged to differ.

Amidst a crowd of raised voices and fists punctuating the air in their passion, I can picture Caleb gesturing with his own hands and walking around the circle, “Calm down, guys! Look, we brought back grapes on vines bigger than we could carry, it’s a great land! We can take the giants, God said so! I say we go!”

“Agreed! We can do this! God is with us!” Joshua raised his fist in agreement.

Moses was ready to go. After all, God DID say they were to take the land.

But the people as a whole refused. They let fear overtake them and it paralyzed their forward movement. God barred that generation from moving into the land. They stayed in the desert another 40 years. They got old. They died.

“For the Lord had said of them, ‘They shall surely die in the wilderness.’ So there was not left a man of them, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun”  Numbers 26:65.