For some reason, I am drawn again and again to the idea of the frontier. Stand me by a body of water and my focus goes two places: to the horizon, that irresistible line that calls us to worlds beyond our world; and to the shifting line at my toes, where land and water begin and end, each with its limits and its possibilities.

Always, the constant and somehow poignant dance of that fluid border captures me. The water gains the land, only to fall back and try again. The land slips under the water as if to find the secret of the sea, only to be denied and exposed again to light and air.

Along the shore the conflict between land and water gives the frontier a voice. The surge of the sea that buoys our imagination with its insistent pulse calls to us. So does the quietest ripple of pond water against rocks. So does wind singing around windows and eves. That voice, that call, issues from the edge of things and calls us to something beyond the edge of things, to something beyond ourselves. It calls us to create.

Why do we stare into fires as if we’ve never seen one before? Why is the night sky, which we see as often as we see the kitchen, with every constellation right where it was last time we looked, except turned around the pole with no more variety in its turning than the hour hand of a clock-why is this familiar scene ever novel?

Why do we go back to it again and again? Or sunsets and sunrises? They show up twice a day. Why do they always stir our spirits with a longing deeper than tears?

Souls at the edge

I believe we stare into fires, especially into the shimmering embers at their heart, and at their sparks as they shoot skyward to vanish, because the fire itself stakes a frontier against the darkness, and it has only its own lifetime in which to burn.

A fire, born where there was no fire before, then nurtured to life, then dancing and alive, then hottest when its embers are quietest and oldest, then fading and gone, reminds us of us.

Our souls know we stand, literally, at a great frontier with every breath we take. We stand always at the edge dividing darkness and light, death and life, sin and salvation, now and then.

All of us long to move from “here" to “there." We long to follow the imploring call of that voice that urges us out of ourselves into new life.

Each horizon, each shoreline, each note of music that rises out of silence to fade into silence again, each sunrise, star, mountain peak, each exchanged glance, each conversation, each moment lived, confronts us with the frontier between who we are, and who God calls us to be.

Each time we meet another person, whether a new stranger or somebody we see every morning across the breakfast table, we confront a creature of wonder. We stand at the frontier between good and evil, between life and death, between love and fear. Overstated? Nope. If Jesus died for that person, then what sort of world are we in? And what must that person be?

Follow Him

Christ calls us right now to follow Him into the world, His new world of wonders in which He gives each of us essential roles to play in His drama of creation, fall and redemption.

God calls you right now.

For me, part of answering that call, part of edging into the frontier, part of following Jesus into the unknown, is writing the word I am writing here and now. Tapping these keys, pushing these words across the screen or across the page, I am answering, as best as I can tell, God’s call.

To be honest, I’m terrified to write. I fear exposure. After Jesus died tortured and naked in front of the taunts of His enemies and the tears of His mother, after He was so exposed, I fear exposure. Figure that one out.

But He embraced His defining frontier, both the joy set before Him and the death He despised, and He crossed it alone, doing as one abandoned by His Father what we will never have to do: face our fears by ourselves.

Right now Christ calls us into something promising, full of wonder, frightening and unfamiliar. Something beyond the edge of ourselves. In His passion for life, for love, for us, He calls us-first by name, and then to our gifts. Ours is to cross that frontier, in Him and with Him, and prove 2 Corinthians 5:17 true.

Brian Inkster is the chaplain at Ontario Correctional Institute in Brampton, Ontario. He lives in Oakville with his wife Mary LuWayne, their four sons and two cats.