Instinct: The Power to Unleash Your Inborn Drive (7 page)

He knows what all eagles in the air know. It’s okay to be fearful, but don’t let the fear keep you from flying! And the rush of adrenaline that comes from overcoming one’s fears is addictive. When you leave the familiar and enter the unknown, your fear becomes refined by experience and hammered into tools of survival on the anvil of anxiety.

I am never more passionate about a fight than when I fear my opponent. Fear teaches you to be cautious, careful, and conscientious. It also forces you to be creative, compassionate, and calculating. So often, fear becomes the fuel for your power in the jungle. As my friend Joyce Meyer says, “Feel the fear and do it anyway!”

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nstincts under pressure crush the carbon of conformity and create diamonds. Each new season of life offers to train us for the next season if we pay attention and adapt. If in this training camp we call life, we learned to survive with a job and that is how we received the nourishment of income, when something happens to that job we are thrown into the wild of unemployment. This adaption feels much like the caged animal sent to the jungle. We ask, “How do I eat in this environment? What do I do next? How do I protect myself and my family?”

When we are placed in a set of circumstances where we have to take initiative and be creative, some of us find it hard to transition. Those people have been trained not to think but to obey orders. They are slaves to the training, unconsciously pledging allegiance to
the average. Mentally they recite from the manual of mediocrity.

But how quickly they discover that the old rules don’t often apply. In other words, they must adapt. They must become a quick study or risk becoming some predator’s entrée! It’s not a matter of intelligence but of instinctive adaptability, which means you may not have the past training or experience to prepare you for these new challenges. But if you do not immediately recognize the vast changes in your environmental circumstances, then the opportunity for growth and innovative achievement closes.

You could be a leader and not know it. You could be a warm, loving person innately but not have had an opportunity to unpack what’s inside of you. You could be an artist, a parent, a healer, a communicator and simply not have had the opportunity for adaptation yet.

Transitions are usually challenging. But what is exciting is that though we often resist, complain, or become irritable and cry like babies, we do so because we have the confusion of being unsettled and forced to discover new skill sets. If we are willing to trust our instincts and act on them, most of us can adapt and reacclimatize to the new social constructs we are placed in. I’m convinced at our core we are ultimately survivors, constantly thrust into new jungles and perpetually rediscovering dormant capabilities we didn’t realize lay within us.

The fact that you may be experiencing trouble activating those internal instincts necessary for transition
simply doesn’t mean that you don’t have it in you to do so. You must realize that no matter how gifted you were at receiving income one way, it doesn’t mean that you can’t unearth the creativity and passion to receive it another way. Or the fact that you haven’t lived alone for years doesn’t mean you can’t cast off the learned behavior of a previous relationship and find your instinct to be contented in another social construct.

Ever wonder what your life would be like if you stepped outside of what people expect from you? Isn’t it time to step outside the cage and find out? What if you discovered something previously undiscovered, something God placed inside of you to fuel your purpose in life?

Our Creator has gifted you with varied tools for survival both intellectually and instinctively. Survival in life will require that you use them all. What you activate in one set of circumstances may now have to be overridden to adapt to a new set of circumstances. But you do have the gift, the ability, and the elasticity of internal fortitude to unearth those skill sets that are necessary for change and implement them for the next move.

He who wins the race cannot run with the pack. And once you get out you can’t come back, because caged lions don’t mate with free ones! If ever you are going to
win, you must forsake the social construct of the cage and all the cage dwellers. Whether they are business associates, community activists, political pundits, or any other order that has spoken and unspoken rules, you will have to take your own stand. This is never easy.

I cannot tell you how many times I have been that animal who hears the sound of the gate creaking open and momentarily freezes in place. And then with a racing heart, I step into a world where the first terrifying sound I hear is the same gate closing shut behind me. So many times I have not known the lay of the land I was about to explore, but I knew that the passage behind me had closed forever.

This rattles the nerves. And yet, we must consider facing our fears and asking what we will regret the most. I’m not as afraid of dying as many people. I learned early that death is a part of life. My greatest fear is not living before I die, to play everything so safe that even though I had no risk I also enjoyed no reward.

You see, the Olympic race of fear within you has but two contenders. One is the claustrophobic fear of staying, and the other contestant is the heart-pounding, adrenaline-releasing fear of stepping into the unknown world before you. This race is especially close when instincts take you where your history forsakes you. And there you are left alone with the frightening prospects of that which feels foreign and yet entices the instincts within.

You see, I am afraid of spending my whole life with
the deceptive deduction that my cage is the world! So when death tolls and life’s final buzzer shrilly ends my tournament, more tragic than the end of the temporal would be the eternal hypotheticals of “what if?” When I consider such a fate, the hell of regret singes my soul. The agonizing anguish of wondering what I might’ve been or done if I’d had the courage to free myself from learned behaviors and the cages life imposes is indeed the wind beneath my wings!

I’m not talking about just the cages of calling and careers but something much more significant: the cage of contained thought. The sanctity of the orthodox, succumbing to living in the land of the average, seems a massive waste of will and wit.

We’re used to basing our decisions on past experiences and then suddenly our instincts pull us toward something equally tantalizing and terrifying. We cannot deny our instinctive attraction, and yet we’re unsettled by its unfamiliarity. Nothing in our repertoire of achievements and abilities, nor our family, our training, our education, or our experiences has prepared us, and yet we are drawn instinctively toward something that excites us, touches us, energizes us, and leaves us shaking in our boots.

From my experiences and those of many others,
instinct likes a challenge more than it likes comfort. Our instincts would rather lead us to face the unknown than let us shrink into the corner of our cage. When we’re committed to fulfilling our destiny, our instinct drives us away from complacency and toward contentment.

An inmate leaving prison must certainly feel this odd mixture of excitement and fear as he walks through the door of his cell one last time, through the gates of the prison grounds. What had become familiar to him, normal and routine, must now be left behind. He must start over. And as exhilarated as he may be by the restoration of his freedom, he also must make his way into a new jungle that has grown unrecognizable from when he knew it before. In fact, many parolees and former inmates become so stressed trying to reacclimate to the outside that they often end up returning to crime.

Did they commit a crime in hopes of returning to the confinement of a prison cell? Probably not consciously, but one wonders when looking at the recidivism rate. The literal, physical incarceration may even seem preferable to the fear of learning to live outside the prison walls.

Even if we have never faced physical confinement, most of us can relate. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a new career, a new marriage, a new season of being single, a new business launch. When we start anything by following our instincts, we will likely be forced to leave our cage of comfort and complacency.

I faced this very dilemma when I made the decision to move my family and ministry from Charleston, West Virginia, where I’d grown up and lived all my life, to Dallas, Texas, which I probably knew better from television and movies than from my own experience. I’m still not exactly sure how it came about. I became interested in the Dallas area because I had heard that many people there attended church regularly (not always the case in urban areas) and were open to joining a new Christian community. I had also heard that property was relatively affordable for such a large urban area.

Ironically enough, I had actually told a friend of mine, another pastor, that he ought to move to Dallas and start a church there. But after some thoughtful and prayerful consideration, he ended up going another direction. And yet the thought of this place I had recommended to him haunted me. I began to wonder what Dallas was really like. While I had been through there a time or two, I knew very little about the people, the culture, the flavor and lifestyle of Texans. And yet I couldn’t quit thinking about moving to the Dallas–Fort Worth area. It remained an alluring attraction, one I finally could not ignore.

When I went to Dallas and visited the prospective property for a new church, I asked the owner if I could have a few minutes alone in the building and
he agreed. There in the echoing cavern of a structure so much larger than our entire church back in West Virginia, I asked God if this was where he wanted me. It didn’t take long before my awareness of his presence increased, and everything in me heard, “Yes.”

Even with this sense of God’s calling and blessing upon the move, I remained fearful. I had lived in West Virginia my entire life! I would not only be leaving my church to plant a new one, but I would be leaving one lifestyle and culture for another. The Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area included over two million people at that time—about twenty times more than Charleston! And how would Texans take to an African-American outsider moving into their territory? If everything is bigger in Texas, would that include prejudice and hostility?

With growing trepidation, I agonized over this decision. I paced the cage that contained me and wondered if I dared set foot into the Texan jungle opening before me. If I stayed put, would I regret not exploring this opportunity, forever wondering, “What if…?” Or would I long for the comfortable security of my humble roots and regret my risk when inevitably confronted with adversity?

Moving away would include uprooting my wife and kids, and taking my mother with us after she had lived over six decades in the same area. We would be leaving the small-town warmth of our cocooned community
and launching out on new wings. But would we fly? Or flutter momentarily before crashing to the ground?

It was a huge risk, but I had to take it. I had to leave my cage. Not only did I feel God’s prompting to make the move, but something deep inside me knew it was where I belonged—even if I didn’t exactly know why. Needless to say, I have never regretted my decision to follow my instincts and move to Dallas. No, instead I discovered that my move was not just an open door to me but was in fact the intersection of the destiny of thousands if not millions of others whose lives would forever be changed, all predicated upon me releasing my fear and mustering the courage to be stretched beyond my comfort.

When we find ourselves at the crossroads between at least two different directions, we often panic. It feels like a no-win. After our instincts have been stirred by a vision, a glimpse, a divine whisper inside us, we cannot ignore the decision. Or, if we do, then that in itself becomes a decision we know we will soon regret. When our instincts magnetically urge us in a particular direction, my experience has been that we will regret not acting on that urge. Standing at the crossroads may feel like being caught in the crosshairs!

But I’m convinced that it is so much more productive, satisfying, and invigorating to have risked a new endeavor and failed than to play it safe and remain in the status quo. When a mother eagle senses instinctively that her eaglets are now ready to fly, she disrupts the nest with her beak, pushing them out with an eviction notice that seems so cruel. Her beak dislodges them from their nest and pushes them to the edge. Have you ever been pushed to the edge?

I saw eagles in the plain I visited soaring in the wind. It was amazing to me to realize that what seems so natural now was once a moment of great terror. When it was young that eagle was pushed to the edge. Its mother’s beak had no doubt dropped him off the edge of the cliff!

The results produce a striking beauty, but in the moment of crossing from nest to nature, the sight would make you call the animal rights commission and file a complaint of abuse! The mother obviously is not being cruel to her little birds. Instead she is pushing them into the uncomfortable place of discovery. She knows that the nest was only the crossroads through which they would grow and develop. If they sat in the temporary, it would be at the expense of the permanent.

Now, I’m told the little birds become frightened half to death and initially start flapping their wings out of terror, flailing wildly to ward off what looks like inevitable death. But the flailing of their fear is the birthing
of a discovery. Their instinct to fly is released with great peril and fear.