I can still recall a thought I had in my youth as I walked out of church mid-week.  I had not been there for a service, perhaps just a visit.  As I left, I felt happy about my life and in that moment thought “there is nothing stopping me from doing whatever I want with my life.”  As I look back I think I realized for the first time that I had within me vast potential to do whatever I set my mind to do.   I then prayed that I would never let go of that perspective.    I can do anything I want…except fly.

For probably just as long, I have been fascinated with the idea of flight.  I have a recurring dream that I can fly, that I’ve figured out how to do it.  I just relax and let the wind take me away.  Ironically, I’ve had a fear of flying in airplanes because they sometimes crash.  In my dreams, however,  I soar with ease while other people don’t seem able to understand how easy it is to fly.  Thinking about potential might have been what Wilbur Wright was thinking when he said “I see no reason why man cannot fly like the birds.”  He and his brother Orville were able to tap into the potential God had given them and humans have been flying for over one hundred years.

The seeds of California Redwood trees are so small that you can easily pick up twenty or thirty of them with one hand.   Yet within each each tiny seed is the potential for a tree which will reach a height of over 300 feet and a diameter of  over 20 feet.   Typically a seed contains an embryo, a supply of nutrients and a coat.   The nutrients rich in oil or starch and protein begin as tissue which comes from the parent plant.  These nutrients contain the potential for the plants eventual size.

All this thinking about potential got me wondering about the untapped potential that still exists within me.  Even at age sixty seven there is untapped potential in me.  Once again I feel I know how to fly.

After writing a novel, I am now learning what it means to promote it.  This is hard.  I am not comfortable talking about myself, but two things have been shown me.  The first truth I heard on a Webinar: “I am not promoting myself.  I am promoting God.”  The second truth I read:  “Anyone who can write a novel is also capable of promoting it.”  These truths are opening the flood gates of nutrition from God which will help unleash more of my potential.  And this is happening in my sixty-seventh year of my life.

For the reader of this, I am wondering if you might have concluded that there is no more potential for growth inside you.  Did you decide years ago you had reached your full potential?  Or…are you feeling today you are on the verge of soaring into some new adventure?  I hope you are as excited today as I am about the future.  If you are not, go and read the parable of the talents in which the third man was so afraid he would lose what he had that he buried his talent (potential?).  In the end, what he had was taken away.

Let’s not let that happen to any of us.