I was buckled into a window seat somewhere over the middle of the country, half listening to the hum of the engines, when the man beside me began to talk. He had an idea. Not a small one. It was the kind of God-sized idea that quickens your heart even when you are a stranger hearing it for the first time. The longer he talked, the clearer it became that he was looking for someone to step into it with him.

And I had to let it go by.

Not because it was not of God. Not because I doubted Him. But because, in that season of my life, I simply was not in a position to say yes. The crossroads came, and I watched it slide past the little oval window like the patchwork fields far below.

I have replayed that flight more times than I can count. And if I am going to be honest with you, and I intend to be honest with you all the way through this book, that moment laid its finger on something tender in me. For years I had been managing my life. I had not been positioning my life. Friend, there is a world of difference between those two words, and most of us never discover it until we are standing in front of an open door we cannot walk through.

Have you ever been there? Have you ever sensed that God was up to something, and quietly wondered whether you were ready for it if He ever brought it your way?

The Book Everybody Else Already Wrote

As I prepared to write this book on what a spiritual journey looks like for the Christian, I discovered that there are a great many books on the market about "a spiritual journey." I further discovered that most of them are not written from an evangelical Christian perspective. Much of the writing is sincere and even beautiful, but it points the traveler inward, as though the path were something we invent for ourselves out of our own wisdom.

I want to suggest something different. I want to suggest that the path is not invented. It is discovered. There is a journey God prepared for you before you were born, and your great work in this life is not to dream it up but to find it, embrace it, and walk it well.

Most of us carry a second, secret fear underneath the first one. If I am truthful, the thought has crossed my mind in a vulnerable moment, and I expect it has crossed yours: if I really surrendered everything to God, what would He ask of me? When I was pastoring, I used to stand before the people I loved on a Sunday morning and say, "God is more interested in your character than your comfort." And then I would add, "I do not like that at all. I like comfort." I was only being honest. We all like comfort. But comfort has never once positioned a person for a miracle.

That word, full, is the life Jesus is offering you. Not a careful life. Not a comfortable life. A full one. So how do we lay hold of it?

I have been in classrooms most of my life, from the first grade at age five right on through college and graduate school. I have reached one thoroughly unscientific conclusion: nobody gives an examination like God. If you will let Him, He will thoroughly prepare you, and then He will thoroughly examine you. The tests along this journey are never meant to discourage you. They are catalysts. They are how an ordinary life gets made ready for an extraordinary God. An untested, unexamined life will always underachieve at what God called it to do and shaped it to be.

A Better Question

It begins with trading one question for a better one. For most of my life I asked, "What am I going to do with my life for God?" It is not a bad question. But there is a better one waiting just behind it: "God, what do You want to do through my life on this earth?" Do you feel the difference? The first question leans on my best effort. The second leans on God's hand working in and through me. One will wear you out. The other will carry you home.

That single shift is the doorway to this whole book. The journey moves us away from the frantic question of what we can pull off for God, and toward the restful, thrilling question of what God intends to accomplish through a surrendered life. It is not about my best efforts. It is about His hand on an ordinary person who said yes.

The Mile Markers

In my travels with Sauls Consulting, I am forever flying into a new city and trying to find a church I have never seen before. Before I leave the office, I map the route from the airport. On most maps there is a helpful note: "If you reach Maple Street, you have gone too far." Those little markers tell you that you are still on the road, or that you have wandered off it.

Across forty-eight years of ministry, twenty-two of them pastoring local churches and twenty-six more walking alongside churches all over America, I have watched God lay out a different path for every single person. Your journey will not look like mine. But I have come to believe the mile markers are the same for all of us. I have found these five recurring markers in everyone's life:

First, discovering, developing, and living out God's vision for your life. Second, living a fully surrendered life by keeping everything God has given you on the altar of sacrifice. Third, learning to recognize and listen for God's voice, because we serve a creative God who refuses to be limited to one way of speaking. Fourth, walking in obedience to what He says, closing the long chasm that exists between hearing and doing. And fifth, leaving room for God's miraculous intervention, those God-designed crossroads where He shows up and does what only He can do.

Here is what ties all five together, and it is the one sentence I want you to carry out of this book. For most of my life I was running my own life. Managing it, white-knuckling it, hoping it would turn out. This journey is the slow and freeing work of stopping that, and getting into position for the life God already planned for me before I was born. Each marker is simply one more way you get into position. Vision is knowing where He is taking you. Surrender is taking your hands off the wheel. Hearing is learning His voice. Obedience is actually doing what He says. And intervention is leaving room for the things only He can do.

These markers are general mapping points for anyone who chooses to follow Christ. But the moment you start walking them, they become deeply personal. Whether you settle the question of ownership in your life is important; how you settle it is personal and practical. Whether you choose to listen to God is important; how He speaks to you is yours alone. The map is shared. The journey is custom-built.

The Sin That Keeps Us Off the Path

Before we take a single step, I have to name the one thing that knocks more believers off their journey than failure ever could. It is the sin of comparison. We look at someone else's path, someone else's gifts, someone else's chapter, and we either despair that we are behind or we try to copy a journey God never assigned to us.

I once spent time with a friend who has had real success in the music industry. She started out singing in church, and over the years she has had hit records and shared the stage with some of the most renowned artists in America. For years I quietly envied a road like that. But God did not make me for her road, and He did not make you for someone else's. To truly enjoy this journey, we have to be content with, and fully embrace, the life God designed for us. Get happy. Be who God made you to be. Nobody else can be you, and no one else can accomplish the things God laid out for you to do.

If Someone Asks

If someone stops you in the grocery store and asks what this book is about, here is the whole of it in a single breath: stop running your own life, and get into position for the life God already planned for you. The five mile markers are simply the five ways you do it. That is the journey. And it is waiting to be walked.

So let me ask you to come with me. Over the pages ahead we will look hard at each marker, and I will tell you the truth about my own road, the tests, the wrong turns, the times God had to kick me through a door I was too comfortable to walk through on my own. By the time we reach the end of this journey together, my prayer is that you will be living in such a way that when God brings your crossroads, and He will bring it, you are already standing in a position to say yes. No more watching the open door slide past the window.

The journey is exciting and waiting to be explored. So let us get started and see what God does in your life.