Loose to Win

The journey to the next will always require something of you.  It will require releasing your comfort and taking hold of the unknown.  The next version of you requires a new version for the new horizon. The skills you have attained were great; that success has passed. The skills, knowledge, and character development required for next will require you to stretch beyond what you have mastered. 

This, friend, is the journey of life.  Life requires more of us day by day because the tracks we make in the sand are for others to follow. The barriers we break through are for those behind us so they won’t have to. And when we offer ourselves up to doing what the greats who have gone before us have done,  we widen the playing scope for those behind to hold onto a larger landscape of what we would have only dreamed. In so doing, we, too, get to join in the great imprint we leave behind if only we chose to lose to win. 

The journey of growth can be a fun one, and with no doubt, it will be a hard one. It will be hard because life ordained it so that the making produces character to stand in the climbing. Some avoid or skip this process only to remedialize later what could have been acquired on the way. 

The comfort level you crave here will keep you emotionally incarcerated to stagnation. Being full of heart but crippled to ease. Conflicting, the double-edged sword gives us comfort and yet no comfort at all. It satisfies our current appetite for the simplicity of life and battles for the life we crave—the two natures within wait for you to feed the one who is to win. 

To decide to lose the parts of you that no longer align with the path you hope to attain, the success you have in mind, and the assignment to which you have been called.  It will again require that you lose to win. The hunger within you was planted within you like the seed in an apple assigned to bear the fruits of an apple on an apple tree. 

The holy discontent you feel is because your assignment runs deep, and it will never leave you because the word was sent and will not leave you until it’s complete. 

Let today be the day you release the comfort, keeping you bound from growth, and continue to make the tracks in the sand for others to follow as you journey through the terrain for which you were called, clearing the path for others to follow. Take up your assignment and commit to carrying on to the finish so that you, too, may stand among the greats who inspire others to greatness.

The challenge is that we must do it over and over again as we grow in Christ. In every area of our lives, we will have to accept temporary defeat for the greater goal ahead.

³⁹ Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.- Matthew 10:39

Author: Shennel James