You may have been reminded of another popular book while reflecting on the vision of God’s open-ended, creative, and lively adventure and on your own role as a partner with God in healing the world. Many persons have found a greater sense of meaning through reading Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life or participating in Forty Days of Adventure groups.

Warren charts a road map in which God chooses the most important events and encounters of our lives before we are born and without our input. Our personal calling, according to Warren’s vision, is to discover and live out God’s eternal purposes in our daily lives. We can find our true purpose only when we follow the directions and color inside the lines that God has already planned for us.

As you can see, I take a different pathway toward adventure. I believe God’s holy adventure calls us to be creative and innovative right now as we listen for divine inspiration, and then to respond by coloring outside the lines and giving God something new as a result of our own personal artistry.

In contrast to Rick Warren’s view of God, I do not believe that God determines everything in advance but that we are invited to be God’s companions in a future that is, to some degree, open and unfinished.

I have coined the phrase “forty-one days of adventure” as a way of saying that neither God’s work nor our own is complete and that God calls us to become creative companions in God’s new and surprising creation. There is “something more” in the future for both God and our world.

from Holy Adventure