Yesterday I spoke to a group of leaders at Dynamic Recycling in La Crosse.
During Q&A time, we heard a great question.
“On your Mississippi River trip, where was the tipping point? Where was the point when you knew you’d make it?”
Interesting notion—where’s the tipping point? Where’s that instant where impossible transforms to inevitable? When exactly does “not-sure-if-we’ll make-it” turn to “it’s-gonna-happen?”
I think tipping points become apparent only in hindsight. You look back and the inflection point’s obvious, that magical point when uphill turned to downhill. The temptation is to project that forward and make it seem as though it was obvious at the time.
Almost always, it wasn’t.
I don’t know when we knew we’d make it to New Orleans. But the question got me wondering about other tipping points.
When does “confronting fear” become “same-old-same-old”?
I have a sense that RICH’S RIDE has passed a tipping point. Three years ago we followed a God-sized dream through La Crosse on our way to New Orleans. We weren’t sure we’d succeed, but we trusted God for whatever would happen.
Today…we know we can do this ride. No fear, no dream.
And that’s okay, if the goal is to do bike rides. But that’s not what we set out to accomplish.
RICH’S RIDE began as a dream. The point was never to repeat what we knew we could do.
The point was to follow a dream.
Somewhere along the line we reached a tipping point, and the impossible dream became an important, inspirational, repeated project.
So now, the question: when you recognize that you’ve passed a tipping point, what do you do about it?
Tipping points, I think, are God’s way of telling us to dream bigger dreams.
I don’t want safe and same-old-same-old. I don’t want the appearance of confronting fear while following a familiar pattern.
What tipping points have you passed?
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