How Do You Find Adventure?

What is adventure? What happened to adventure? And, how do we find it? To many, these answers are elusive. We wonder why is adventure so hard to find. But I don’t think we need to search for adventure. I believe it’s right in front of all of us. I hope that by the end of this blog, you’ll know how to find your own adventure.

You might be shocked by the picture of this blog. To answer your question, yes, I did go skydiving. However, you might be surprised that when I talk about adventure, I mean something much grander than skydiving. To me, skydiving is more of a thrill than an adventure.

What Is Adventure?

When used as a verb, Google defines adventure as “to engage in a hazardous and exciting activity, especially the exploration of unknown territory.”

You can’t experience adventure if your focus is selfish.

I think this is a great definition. There are three core elements that I think encompass adventure. Every excellent adventure incorporates a degree of risk, journeying into the unknown, and a sense of greater meaning and purpose.

Without risk all you have is a tourist expedition. Remove the unknown element and all you get is a momentary thrill. Take away the purpose in an adventure and all you get is a fun and interesting hobby.

But, when you combine these three, you get one epic adventure. For example, imagine a knight must journey into the barren wilderness of wild and hostile dragons to find the long lost sage who’s the only one with the knowledge of how to stop the plague that’s sweeping the world. Now that‘s an adventure!

What Happened to Adventure?

If you ask pretty much everyone nowadays, I bet you they’d say their life is not very adventurous. So what happened? It’s not that adventure just stopped existing, it’s that we don’t follow it and can’t find it.

Here’s the problem: we’ve stripped life bare of all three of these core ingredients.

We don’t like taking risks, because—after all—they’re risky. We like to play life safe. Now, being safe isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Using a helmet while snowboarding or riding a bike isn’t a bad idea. But we’ve learned to avoid anything that’s risky or uncomfortable. We pay lots of money to get small thrills at amusement parks or through fictional movies and games.

We desire adventure, but we aren’t willing to take the risk to walk toward it.

Additionally, when the path is unknown, we stray away from it. We like the tried and true paths because they are safe. Why strive toward something we care about that’s never been done before when we can have a stable income through an office job?

And so adventure dies.

But, no one is going to want to step out into the risky unknown unless they have a propelling purpose. This again is something our society has destroyed. Secular society relentlessly teaches us that life is all about being comfortable and having fun. Media tells us to follow our heart because it’s all about us.

You can’t experience adventure if your focus is selfish.

But life isn’t about us, it’s about honoring and glorifying God. He’s wired us this way. So, why do we crave adventure? I believe it’s because God placed within us a desire to be a part of something bigger. And why would he give us that desire unless he had a plan to fulfill it?

How Do We Find Adventure?

Hundreds of thousands of people die every day. This is terrible! We must stop this from happening. However, no amount of resources or medicine will stop someone from dying. Sure, it may delay their death, but they will still die eventually.

The only way to save someone from death is to reconnect them to the source of all life. God is this source, but before we can reconnect people, we must first fix the very problem that separated them.

If God is perfection, then he can’t be with sin. Since we all have sinned and are now criminals in God’s eyes, we must have our sins forgiven to be reunited with God. Jesus Christ is the only one who offers this kind of forgiveness. And after we each have been saved from our sins through Jesus, God calls us to help rescue others.

What an incredible purpose!

How do we do this? By trusting in God and following him. He will lead you to do things that might seem impossible and that have never been done before. You might not know how you will get there, but you can trust God. Additionally, God is going to ask you to do things that are hard and shouldn’t work. But he will move in incredible ways.

Do you see it? That’s all three of our core adventure elements. Risk: the hard things that will never work out unless God moves. Unknown: the path with an uncertain destination that no one has ever walked before. Purpose: God is calling us to play our part in saving as many lives as possible.

Step Out On Your Own Adventure

It’s going to be hard and scary—if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be an adventure—, but you need to take those first steps. Find that thing that sets your heart on fire and use it to love God and love people. Of course you’ll have no idea whether or not it will work out or how you’ll get there, but if you truly understand who’s calling you and what’s at stake, then how can you hesitate?

This—my friends—is how we live wilder. So join with me, and let’s fight this good fight together.

 

If you want more detailed and specific directions on how you can find your adventure, then check out my book Discovering God’s Calling

If you liked this blog, I’d encourage you to check out my blog post Why do we Crave Adventure?