Packing Light: Thoughts on Living Life with Less Baggage

How much more in tune would we be with the twists and turns of our journey, and prepared to handle them with conviction and grace, if we didn’t think the “rules” were protecting us? We would have to pay close attention, exercise discernment, ask people to help. We’d have to let go of some rules that everyone else was following, and follow some that

This is the irony with needs. We all have them, but we generally don’t discover them until we go without for a while. We discover what we need when we live without things. This is part of the value of traveling and packing light as we travel. Sometimes it’s good for us to need things and not have them.

when we decide to go somewhere, we discover we can’t take it with us.

You don’t have to go. You can stay home. It’s up to you. But if you let fear stop you from doing what you really want to do, you’ll regret that forever.

That’s what happens when we get too attached to rules. We feel gypped when we don’t get what we were hoping for.

I want to be the kind of writer who is awake to the realities of heaven, but engaged in the realities of this world.

This is another thing that makes letting go difficult. The things in our life—people, places, experiences, dreams—all rest on each other, like blocks in a building. Some are more important than others, some are less so. Some of them are integral. Some are the foundation. But move enough blocks, even the secondary ones, and everything starts to crum

What do we do when it doesn’t work out? What do we do when we don’t get what we thought we wanted? We can either choose to feel like it’s the end of the world, or we can choose to decide it’s the beginning.

When you’re doing what you were made to do, hurting people will come to you. That’s what Jesus did. He just acted like Himself, and weeks after the start of His ministry, hurting people began to flock to Him.