My Name is Daniel (part 2)

My name is Daniel. Daniel Patrick Wright, Jr. That’s right, I’m a junior. I’ve been lugging my father around my whole life. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; someday when I have my first son I’m most certainly going to nominate the name Daniel Patrick Wright, III. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m quite fond of the name Daniel.

However, my name is not the only thing I hold in common with my dad. The name often serves as a reminder that we as children are often saddled with the faults of our parents. I don’t really know anything about the concept of generational curses, other than that it’s a frequent theme in the Old Testament. I don’t even know if that is anything remotely applicable to these thoughts here. I do know, however, that part of growing up is realizing just how much we are becoming like our parents.

One very prominent fault of my own is my nearly paralyzing reluctance to take risks. I’m the guy who, upon finding himself lost in the forest, is perfectly content to sit down and wait for someone to find him, out of fear that looking for a way out will only make him even more lost—and all that only after being forced into the woods in the first place. If I don’t know for a fact that something is the right thing to do (or the only thing to do), I won’t do anything. Sure, this protects me from making a lot of mistakes. But if I want to do more with my life than just work/eat/TV/sleep/repeat, I’m going to have to take some risks. And sometimes I’m going to have to take risks without knowing what all the variables involved might be.

I am watching this whole thing unfold right now with my own father.

When I was four or five years old, we moved from Alberton, Montana, to Hobe Sound, Florida, so that I could attend a school there that my mother wanted her children to attend. I was enrolled in kindergarten at (then) Hobe Sound Bible Academy, and my mother took up the position as high school English teacher. My dad found a job as a roofer, something he had done when he was in Bible college. I was seven years old when my parents separated, and my mom was left to raise three sons (the youngest being less than a year old) by herself on an extremely small and inconsistent salary. My father remained in the area, continuing to work on roofs.

My relationship with my father is another story for another day, so I’ll fast forward to Super Bowl weekend 2008. I joined him in Indiana on the occasion of his mother’s funeral. I barely knew her at all, and I had never even met anyone else on my father’s side of the family. I think that due to my proximity to the funeral (I lived three hours away in Nashville), he simply wanted me to be there with him during what had to be a very difficult time for him. It was during this trip that he told me about his dream for his life. He’d always wanted to return to Montana and open up a carpentry shop. He had a heart for the Native Americans—in fact, both of my parents had been teachers at a place called Northwest Indian Bible School when I was born—and so he also wanted to hire on a couple Native American guys that he could teach and mentor in his shop. But he’d felt obligated to remain near us as we grew up, and so he’d never made the move back to Montana. My youngest brother was about to turn eighteen and graduate high school at this time, and I think his dreams had started to return to the forefront of his mind (that is, if they’d ever left it in the first place).

But thanks to the ballooning of insurance rates in Florida following the disastrous 2004 hurricane season, and to the economic recession that is currently in place worldwide, he has had trouble finding work at all, much less enough to allow him to save up for a move. His truck is too old to make the trip, and he just doesn’t have the money to make it happen. So he continues to try to ignore his dreams and just fight to make ends meet working the same job he’s worked for the past two decades—a physically demanding job which he frankly can’t do too much longer at his age. Doing what has to be done to make it all happen is just too risky.

I realized not too long ago that I am absolutely following in his footsteps. In college I worked at a grocery store during the summers, and upon deciding to move to Tennessee I simply transferred from the store in Florida to one in Nashville. I had a job waiting on me when I arrived. Then suddenly four years passed, and I’d done nothing to further my dreams of making music. I was stuck in the rut of working forty hours a week at a job that sucked about eighty hours of energy and willpower out of me. My fear of doing this for the rest of my life was only trumped by my fear of not being able to pay my bills. And so I stayed.

After learning about my father’s dreams, though, I began to realize that I was fully placed to find myself two decades down the road in his exact same position. And so I began desperately praying for a way out. Nothing ever came to fruition, though, and the workplace environment began to degenerate considerably, adding to my misery. So many times I just wanted to walk out of that place forever; I wanted to just give up and try to force God’s hand, really. But each time I felt God tell me to hang on, to wait just a little longer. He promised I wouldn’t be there forever, but every time I wanted to quit He told me to persevere. In August and September of 2008, a sense of restlessness began to build inside of me; friends were traveling to Canada, France, South Africa, and all over the U.S., and yet I was stuck. And still I was told to stay.

Then in April 2009, I felt God clearly say to me that it was time. I put in my notice for the end of June, giving me two months to chicken out. And during that time I received nothing but confirmation. All the friends I expected to be voices of reason to advise me to think and pray a little harder before quitting instead expressed nothing but encouragement and happiness. And one night at church I felt God point out to me that I’ve inherited from my parents an aversion to risk, and that He wanted to heal that place in me that allowed fear to reign, and that taking risks was going to have to become something I get used to. He reminded me that I had prayed a very genuine and desperate prayer for Him to build faith in me, and that this was a vital part of the process. He was going to take it quite seriously.

So here I am, jobless and uncertain where to go next. My dreams of making music and traveling have been pumped to almost painful levels, and I’ve been receiving stronger encouragement than ever before from those around me. Yes, the obstacles are pretty much insurmountable. I’m not gonna lie; I have no idea how to make things happen in my current circumstance. But I also believe in grace, which is God’s hand placed upon us to empower us to do the things He’s called us to do, but which we cannot do in our own strength. This is where my faith must grow. This is where I must continue to take the risks that will allow me to follow after the calling God has placed upon my life.

I have inherited this legacy of playing it safe. I am watching as my father struggles with the idea of pursuing his dream, which seems to me like a legitimate calling from God. I am realizing that this is something I need to break now, and build a new legacy, one of faith and courage and boldness which my children can look up to someday as an example to follow. And I am fully aware that I can only do it through God’s grace.

And this really is why I created this blog. I’m in a rather crazy point in life, and I just want to provide account of the developments as they happen. I hope that it can be both a place where I can reason things through “out loud” and a testimony to others of what God can do if we’re willing to let Him have His way completely. It was over a year ago (March 11, 2008, to be exact) that I told God I wanted to be transformed into who He wanted me to be, no matter what. I was sitting in Starbucks, having just finished reading The Rainbow People of God by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and I realized that I wanted to be completely turned over to God’s purpose, no matter what it might require of me to do or to sacrifice. And He’s taken me very seriously. So let this place be a chronicle of what God can do with an underdog like me.