The Danger Habit: How to Grow Your Love of Risk into Life-Changing Faith - Softcover

Barrett, Mike

 
9781590527405: The Danger Habit: How to Grow Your Love of Risk into Life-Changing Faith
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1590527402 ISBN 13: 9781590527405
Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

You've been called adrenaline junkie, thrill seeker, permanently out of the box, difficult, and just plain crazy. And mostly, it's true. Whether you show your radical streak in extreme sports, supercharged business ventures, or high risk relationships, you have a full-blown danger habit. As far as you can tell, you were born with it. And honestly, you wouldn't have it any other way- Except when your danger habit betrays you. Then your craving for adventure turns into a magnet for disaster. You leave a trail of broken commitments and unwise decisions. You get trapped in stupid addictions. You hurt the ones you love. And you end up feeling like a big mistake. But what if you were created extreme for a purpose? What if the radical faith God has in mind for you doesn't have to come with a dark side? What if it actually turned out to be your ultimate rush? In his fast-paced book, The Danger Habit, surfer and lifelong adventurer Mike Barrett explores the mindset of born radicals and the promise of what he calls "adventure faith" He combines personal story telling, raw honesty, and biblical wisdom in a reading experience that will capture your imagination and motivate you to reach for your huge life mission in Christ. Story Behind the Book "I caused significant pain to my own wife and kids while struggling with an addiction to risk, the pursuit of extreme sports, and an overwhelming feeling of being bored with many Christians and standard church life. My epiphany came a number of years ago when God broke through it all and showed me how 'propped up' my life was without His real presence and power. In the end, we sold our suburban home, moved to the Oregon Coast, and started a ministry to surfers. Countless lives were changed; my wife and I even became pastors. Once dead to the life I had pursued, God gave me back an adventure I could never have previously dared hope for" -Mike Barrett

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mike Barrett has been a senior executive for both global technology companies and smaller, venture-backed startups. In 2002 he founded the Oregon chapter of Christian Surfers United States and currently serves on the national board of directors for CSUS. Mike also serves as a teaching pastor at Coast Vineyard Church in Lincoln City, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, Donna, and their four children.

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The Danger Habit

My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.
-Bono

A strong man knows how to use his strength, but a person with knowledge is even more powerful.
-Proverbs 24:5, God's Word

As a kid, I always colored outside the lines and was chided for not staying within them. In reality, it was harder to stay inside. Outside was freedom of self and expression of who God created me to be.
-Ted Gillette, Surfer, Businessman, Pastor

More than an athletic exercise, surfing is an almost spiritual interaction with the forces of nature–forces that sometimes get the best of us. Which is what happened one Sunday afternoon when I went surfing in front of our home on the Oregon Coast with my fifteen-year-old son, Joel.

It was late January and, completely out of character, the sun was out in full force. A slight offshore wind lifted spray off the top edge of each wave. Two separate tow-surfing teams were at work in the water that day. I had done tow-surfing a few times and quickly realized that paying for the gas and breathing in the exhaust was not my cup of tea. However, walking across the street to surf with my son, unassisted by machinery, was pure and right.

Joel and I paddled out to the swells on the outside sandbar. The eight-foot waves created a wave face of well over twelve feet. In surfing we call that “double overhead.” And it was all of that and a bit more.

Looking things over, Joel decided he was out of his league and sat on his board just outside the impact zone while I tried to paddle into a few. Joel is on the high school swim team and a solid waterman for his age, but he has only been surfing for a few years, so he was intimidated on this day for good reason. I’ve been surfing on and off since I was ten years old, and I was pretty excited.

I caught my first wave, a moderate-sized one that hurled me down the line. I made a quick exit out the top of the wave as it began to close off into a thundering shore break.

As I paddled back out, Joel paddled for his first wave, a smaller swell that looked safer than the others we’d been seeing. Joel is sensible. I respect him for that. For many reasons surfing with him and talking with him are deep and meaningful. Nearly twelve years ago Joel lost his mother, my first wife, to cancer. He was only five years old then and his younger brother Joshua was only two. Since then we have been close. Surfing together is a treasure I don’t take lightly.

On this one beautiful Sunday, things suddenly changed for the worse. Much larger swells loomed on the horizon, what we sometimes call a “clean up set.” Waves come in sporadic sets and at some surf spots the sets can build up in size over time. They’re called “clean up sets” because they tend to clean up everything in their path–surfers, kelp, seals, logs…everything.

Joel began paddling as hard as he could toward shore. I paddled as hard as I could toward Hawaii. When a wave broke right in front of me, I ditched my board and swam as deep as I could. I felt my leash break and knew that my board was headed toward the beach. I was in for a fifteen-minute swim.

By this time, Joel was twenty yards closer to shore. I saw him get pummeled. The white water alone must have been eight feet high as it reached him. Later, he said it briefly pinned him to the bottom.

Surfers learn to take their time in these situations. Panicking or swimming too hard just depletes the oxygen in your blood and can hasten dehydration. That will bring on dizziness and fatigue, which increase your risk of drowning. So you just learn to relax and swim.

Which is what I did.

At one point during my long swim to the shore, I noticed a Coast Guard helicopter flying over my head. I thought, How convenient. If I were in trouble here, that guy would rescue me. Cool! By the time I reached shallow water, I noticed a police officer walking down the beach toward my son, who was waiting near my board. Then I saw the local fire department backing their rescue jet skis toward the water while an ambulance crew unloaded equipment.

Who were they here to rescue? I came out of the water down the beach from where my son and half a dozen others were standing. As soon as he spotted me, Joel looked immensely relieved. In minutes I learned that everyone was there to rescue me. Joel had seen my board come in without me, and I was in the water too far outside the huge swells to be visible. Thinking I was in trouble, he’d called 911.

The whole experience was embarrassing for me, but for Joel it was excruciating and nearly heartbreaking. Afterward, I made sure he knew that calling 911 had been the right thing to do. I was proud of him.

Later, the more I thought about it, the more my embarrassment turned to self-doubt. My habit of taking risks to get a bigger charge out of life had inflicted direct, unnecessary pain on my son.

What kind of father does that?

If you’re like me, you can look in your past and find clues.

Built to Thrash

Living on the edge makes life more exciting, especially for people who need to escape. And as a kid, I really needed to escape some things. My heart must have been broken about five hundred times before I turned ten. Not that I’m alone in feeling that way, but those early school years were filled with experiences that made me question my worth. My memory is foggy now about much of it, but I remember mockery, meanness, getting beat up on the playground, being the last one picked for dodgeball. I remember lunches of a peanut-butter-and-jelly tortilla because we didn’t have money for bread that week.

Things got better when I stumbled into skateboarding and surfing. My father bought me a ten-foot surfboard that I couldn’t even carry to the water by myself. We lived across the street from the beach in Oxnard, California, and my parents could always find where I was surfing by looking for the line in the sand created by the tail of the forty-five-pound board I was dragging across the beach. There were summer days so hot I would do my best to run across the sand that burned my bare feet, periodically stopping to lay the board down and bury my feet deeper in the cooler part of the sand. Then I would gather the courage to make another one-hundred-foot run toward the water. The lifestyle fit me like a glove.

I also became one of the first-generation skateboarders. Without realizing it, my friends and I were on the bleeding edge of extreme sports before anyone was even using the term extreme sports. This was in the early seventies when California beach houses sold for $40,000, and Volkswagens and Datsuns were outselling American cars. We used to listen to scratched Beach Boys records on the turntable, or we got caught up in the great Los Angeles rock-radio wars between KMET and KLOS. Those were the days when we wondered if the Soviets were really going to bomb us, and President Nixon was telling us he was not a crook.

It’s hard to believe now, but my first skateboard had metal wheels fit over a metal axle with no flex at all under the board. The ungodly noise it threw off echoed between houses down Ocean Drive, letting the whole neighborhood know that the skateboarders were out. Riding the asphalt streets on metal was enough to make your teeth fillings fall out. But we loved it. Escaping from the house to ride down the street with a few long-haired friends was pure joy and freedom. I remember riding on summer nights, turning so hard on concrete that our metal wheels would throw sparks from under the board.

Clay wheels improved things, but we still had to pack grease into the ball bearings to keep them from...

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Verlag
PRH Christian Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1590527402
ISBN 13 
9781590527405
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
190
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
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