The Spiritual Frontier

Finding the courage to leave the cage of fear and discover who we are and why we are here.

📌 This essay was originally published on Deep Spirituality. Read the original here.

Space: the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.
Its five-year mission:
to explore strange new worlds,
to seek out new life and new civilizations,
to boldly go where no man has gone before.

— Star Trek: The Original Series

The Spiritual Frontier is a newsletter whose inception came from an awareness of my own fear and the resulting inclination toward stagnation instead of innovation.

The Scriptures confirmed my realization. Proverbs 28:1 contrasts the godly, who are “as bold as lions,” with the wicked, who are cowardly. Awakened by this awareness, I was forced to question the condition of my faith.

Faith brings extraordinary confidence. We see this in the first Christians in the Bible, whose source of confidence was God:

God, who got you started in this spiritual adventure … will never give up on you. Never forget that.

1 Corinthians 1:7-9 MSG

Powered by this faith, the first Christians were able to enter and conquer new frontiers such that more and more people discovered God.

Through all this upheaval, God’s message spread to new frontiers and attracted more and more people.

Acts 12:24 VOICE

I enjoy both science and spirituality, and when I reflected on the Christians in the Bible, a truth became apparent to me. The spirituality of God through Jesus Christ and science share a pioneering mindset. It’s the mindset described in the iconic Star Trek series: “to explore … to seek out … to boldly go.” No matter whether the measure was spiritual or secular, I was losing my pioneering mindset. I was becoming someone I didn’t want to be.

I needed to get back to exploring the unknown, uncertain, uncontrollable, and impossible. With a trusting faith in God, who is the ultimate source of the courage necessary to navigate every new frontier, I could walk boldly into four areas that my fear told me were off-limits:

• The unknown: I don’t know where this will lead.

• The uncertain: I don’t know how this will work.

• The uncontrollable: I don’t believe I can do it.

• The impossible: I don’t see a reason this should come true.

This is the final frontier, not space. Space is finite. The ultimate and final frontier is the spiritual activity of life.

Just as you cannot understand the path of the wind or the mystery of a tiny baby growing in its mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the activity of God, who does all things.

Ecclesiastes 11:5 NLT

I have avoided and resisted entering this spiritual frontier because I am afraid. Fear of the unpredictability of life erodes my faith and produces insecurity. It causes me to run from pain, to anticipate potential suffering and hesitate because of it. Fear confines and cages my life.

Do you ever feel that way?

This is not God’s plan for our lives.

For God did not give us a spirit of timidity or cowardice or fear, but [He has given us a spirit] of power and of love and of sound judgment and personal discipline [abilities that result in a calm, well-balanced mind and self-control].

2 Timothy 1:7 AMP

God wants us “to explore … to seek out … to boldly go” into the spiritual frontier. This is the spiritual space he inhabits. The spiritual frontier is where we become free to discover who we are and why we are here.

This is the freedom Maya Angelou described when she heard the caged bird sing. It’s A song of freedom familiar to those of us who feel caged by our fear of the unknown, uncertain, uncontrollable, and impossible

The caged bird sings…of things unknown but longed for still...

— Maya Angelou, “Caged Bird”

God hears our song and offers us this freedom to discover who we are and why we are here. But this is a calling, and it requires courage—the willingness to lose who we have been to become who we are meant to be. Only courage will set us free to embark on the grand adventure of life, which is the exploration of the spiritual frontier.

The question this newsletter asks, and the one I’m asking myself, is whether we will choose the stagnation of cowardice or the frontier of courage.

The frontier is waiting. Will we go?