Do you have a sense of the growing edges in your life right now?

These are the places of your current formation — the places God is about the “right now” work of forming you, growing you, shaping you, and making you more into the person you really are and are meant to be.

How would you describe your current growing edges?

For me, my growing edges take on two themes right now:

Finishing things
Moving toward people

A lot of this has to do with what I shared in a previous letter about my new awareness of the Enneagram type indicator and my own place on its spectrum as a 5. Those who are 5s on the Enneagram spectrum are known as investigators, as information gatherers, as people who need to perceive the whole scope of a matter in order to feel secure enough to move forward.

While this can result in the offering of many gifts to the community, in terms of understanding and knowledge, the downside is that a 5 never feels quite ready to put their work into the real world — there’s always one more book to read or one more thing that needs doing to make it truly fitting and worthy and complete. Because of this tendency, 5s often stay inside the safety of their ideas and struggle to let themselves and their ideas meet with the rough and tumble of reality’s road.

This is so true for me!

The closer I get to finishing a special project or even making a decision about something I feel drawn to do, the more I can put my head in the sand, trying to hide myself from exposure through what I perceive is more preparation or planning.

So I’m trying to challenge myself in this area, to let God draw me beyond the safety of my 5-type’s fallenness.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S., then, I spent significant time pushing through resistance and working on some of the last few components of the Look at Jesus course. Last night, I stayed up until 3:30 a.m. recording the final three audio files for the final module. I’m proud to say that after a bit of polish on those last components, the course will be ready to go. (Can I get a hallelujah?!)

But true to form for a 5, I’ve noticed the closer I get to the finish line on all this, the more scary the whole enterprise feels. For the last two years, this project has been my baby. I’ve held it close, nurtured it, dreamed on its behalf, and poured all my best energies into it. Now that it’s finally ready to make its venture into the world, to do what it was created to do in the first place, I feel scared!

But since finishing things and releasing them into the world is a growing edge for me right now, I keep advancing. Even if there’s one more thing that could be done (and there always will be) and even if it’s not without mistakes (and it never will be), the goal is to launch. To put this precious gift into the world so it can serve its purpose.

Next week, I’ll tell you about my other growing edge of moving toward people — yet another intentional, formational process for me.

How would you describe your own growing edges right now? What does the invitation to grow in those areas feel like?

Much love,
Christianne