A couple of weeks ago - this cartoon infographic showed up in my news feed. I read it several times and decided that this was the PERFECT lead-in to my FIRST blog post of the NEW YEAR! Why is there so much TENSION when we step outside of our “comfort zone?" Simple. FEAR! As a matter of fact, the TWO most important steps in the above graphic are #3 and #6.

#3 We often don’t push ourselves enough past of our fears to realize that our fears are fictional! Another way to understand this is darkness and light. Everything UNKNOWN is darkness in our mind - however when we bring in the LIGHT (of experimenting, experiencing, and succeeding) we overcome the darkness and realize there was NOTHING there to fear.

[Tweet "We often don’t push ourselves enough past of our fears to realize that our fears are fictional! "]

#6 However, failure is missing from the graphic above. WHY? because it was written by an optimist. I’m an optimist - so I get it. But #6 helps us remember that when we take steps outside of our comfort zones - we will stumble and fail, this is a part of finding out more about our strengths and weaknesses. We cannot bypass failure, it’s just one of the steps we MUST embrace. Let’s just insert it as STEP #5.5a.

[Tweet "We cannot bypass failure as a step, we MUST embrace it in order to understand ourselves better."]

No matter what your goals or resolutions are in this coming year - don’t Let FEAR keep you from taking some steps outside of your COMFORT ZONE. We believe that God through His Spirit not only gives the strength to take these steps - but He meets us outside of those areas of comfort and predictability to do something amazing in our lives! Replace that FEAR with FEARLESS living in 2016! [Tweet "Replace that FEAR with FEARLESS living in 2016!"]