Ambition isn't cheap

Ambition is a funny thing because so many of us have it but so few of us are actually willing to do anything about it. I'm six years into this teaching thing and I'm realizing that it would be so ridiculously easy to quietly sink into resignation, to succumb to the urge to just be what I am now and nothing more. I used to talk to friends in college about adults I lost respect for because it seemed like they settled, like they just gave up on life. That doesn't seem so far off now. I was an arrogant little prick. What makes it so hard is that ambition is usually in direct opposition to comfort. In my teens comfort was friends and acceptance, in my 20s comfort was having a job, friends, and acceptance. In my 30s it looks like you just throw family in there, shake, and serve. I don't want that.

I was talking to a friend of mine about what life in the Spirit actually was and wasn't. He was saying that life in the Spirit, real life in the Spirit is something that very few people want because it's extremely unpredictable, it's often hard, it's never comfortable. It tells one person to sell all his/her possessions and tells another that it's ok to have them if used them a certain way, it leads one person to leave everything to live in Africa and another to live on the beach in California. It's chaotic and it often seems unfair.

These two things have been coming to a head lately because I'm realizing that I A) don't want to live without ambition and B) my principle ambition is to live life fully in the Spirit. That seems terrifying. I've known very few people who actually do this and those I have known have lived insanely tumultuous lives and not often in the fun way. That being said it's the only thing that seems worth chasing that really means anything at the end of the day.