Why Christians Could Use a Little Adventure

It all started, as I imagine many great adventures do, with a post on Craigslist.

"Ha ha ha, was airing out items on my fire escape, wind blew this gorgeous dress into the tree, I am moving and don't have the energy to get it out, originally priced at four grand. Backless classy dress. Bring some kind of pole to get it out, before it rains …"

I didn't have a pole, but I had a spear, a broomstick, some packing tape, two willing accomplices, very little money, and absolutely no shame.

My husband Joel has been trying to convince me to sell my wedding dress online this past year for money to put toward a trip to Europe - an idea we've always talked about, but will never be able to afford. An idea, despite my yen for travel, on which I am not yet entirely sold. (See the above wedding picture for an idea of what that dress looks like.)

Per his insistence before this most recent adventure, we piled into Joel's car with our friend Kristin, a souvenir spear (collected on a past missions trip), broomstick, and packing tape, and drove to Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. As we craned our necks for flashes of ivory in the trees above, we spotted it - right in front of the fire escape of the address I had saved in my phone. Joel threw the car in reverse and parked while I danced around the trunk of a tree that had a plastic bag caught in its branches. I had the wrong tree.

On second look, the dress was up there, lodged high in the branches. Joel shimmied up the bare tree trunk effortlessly as I marveled at the man who had married me. Then I taped the spear and broomstick together and lobbed it up to him. While he was jabbing at the dress and I was positioning myself underneath it, arms outstretched, I overheard a man ask Kristin if we were from around here.

The dress was his, he said, and he had bought it fairly cheap at a thrift store.

So much for the $4,000 profit we'd envisioned.

In his best-selling book Love Does, released this year, Bob Goff describes Jesus as a "man of adventure," like his friend Doug, who "was full of adventure and always had some mischief in mind." Doug had a pellet gun and was also friends with Jesus - Goff didn't think that was allowed.

Goff then decided to join Doug and Jesus on that adventure. He got to know God in new and unconventional ways: He pulled his kids out of school for a year to eat ice cream with world leaders; started bringing unheard cases to trial in Uganda because Jesus never told anybody to agree with him, but rather, to "go" (Matthew 28:19 NIV84) and "do" (Luke 22:19 NIV84). Being a lawyer, bringing cases to trial is what he does. Also, he snuck on to the set of a movie in Washington, D.C., because, come on, that's cool - except maybe for the part about how the movie was National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

I write all of this because he tweeted me:

"Ha ha ha, was airing out items on my fire escape, wind blew this gorgeous dress into the tree, I am moving and don't have the energy to get it out, originally priced at four grand. Backless classy dress. Bring some kind of pole to get it out, before it rains…"

God doesn't always pass us audible messages, the same way he "would speak to Moses, face to face, as a man speaks with a friend" (Exodus 33:11), or ask us to jot down a couple of things for him, "inscribed by the finger of God" (Exodus 31:18). Instead, he passes us each other, according to Goff. Sometimes, he even passes us an adventure, like a movie set - something that illustrates Jesus' invitation to show up to life.

But adventure doesn't have to mean sneaking onto a set or sending your husband up a tree with a spear or getting banned for life from Disneyland and somewhat inadvertently faking a doctorate, such as the man who wrote his own obituary last month in The Salt Lake Tribune.

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered," G. K. Chesterton writes in On Running after One's Hat, as London was flooding and his Battersea neighborhood was "particularly favored as a meeting of the waters."

The author was in the country at the time, and imagined his neighborhood as a "vision of Venice," or, as "perfectly poetical" as an island. He imagined running after one's hat in the wind was no more inconvenient than running after a ball during a game or pulling on a jammed drawer; no more tiresome than tug-of-war or pulling a lifeboat from the sea.

In this way, every day is an opportunity for adventure. Every day is an opportunity to hear the sometimes inaudible voice of God: yo know him better, to discern his will.

"Everything depends upon the emotional point of view," Chesterton writes.

Or, as Paul said, "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-his good, pleasing and perfect will."

This is why I imagined a Craigslist post titled "New never worn wedding dress size 4 stuck in tree (Pilsen)" not as an inconvenience, but rather as an invitation to adventure - one that involved climbing trees, spearing things, and ending up in Europe.

Looking over the dress now, it's not likely we'll get much more from it than a good story. The dress isn't "new" or "never-worn." I suspect it is a size 4, judging by the way it doesn't quite zip up my back, and it's an A-line halter dress with a low back that ends in a cascade of flowers and a small train. It's a little wrinkled, and the part that fastens around the neck is starting to pull away from the rest of the dress.

It definitely needs a little energy, but I still plan to sell it online, though, not for anything grand. Someone will get a steal. And we got an adventure.