If you all haven’t heard of Hannah Brencher, you should check out hannahkaty.com right now. …Or maybe you should wait until after I finish my introduction. I think Hannah is me in a more poetic form. I think she’s me if I were living freer and dreaming bigger and daring greater than I ever have before. Hannah believes in beauty and wonder and sacredness.  She believes in living with her heart wide open and loving deeper than most would dare to love. Hannah is my inspiration. Because Hannah reminds me that I’m not the only one foolish enough to believe she can change the world.

You know what our problem is? We try to make sense out of life. We try to rationalize things and define things and pretend we know exactly what is going on all around us all the time. We like to be in control, and we content ourselves with living an illusion of control because we will never actually have a handle on our lives. Never.

And we call ourselves “realists” ~ say we’ve “grown up” ~ when really we’re just control freaks who don’t want to imagine that there could be more to life than what we know. We’ve forgotten that Jesus commanded us to be like little children. We’ve forgotten that our sense of wonder is something we were never meant to lose.

We clench our fists around the details of our lives and watch them pour like sand through our fingers when, all the while, God is asking us to live with open hands and watch His will unfold. It’s so much easier to cradle sand in open palms. But in our desperation to control our lives, we forget to cherish the moments. As God’s perfect design explodes into being around us, we forget to stand and gasp in awe like a child on the 4th of July.

And we quietly live our infinitely small lives, never dreaming that something better could be out there. Never hoping that maybe we were meant for greater things.

Well I, for one, will not go gently. I’ll not remain silent as life passes me by. I would rather fail believing I was meant for world changing than live knowing I wasn’t brave enough to risk it. And in the words of Hannah Brencher:

“If I have only one quality for the rest of my life I hope that it is foolish… Foolish enough to think that I can make a difference in this world and then go out and do the things that others say cannot be done..”

May God make us all foolish enough to believe we can change the world.