On 20th August 1860, Robert O’Hara Burke left Melbourne with 18 others on an expedition to cross Australia from South to North. The journey was to blaze the trail for a telegraph line to link the burgeoning new city of Melbourne with the rest of the world. It was an ambitious, visionary quest. But there was one problem: Burke had zero experience in exploration. Not surprisingly, the whole expedition was plagued with almost farcical tragedies. Their preparations were a joke. For food, they took dried meat instead of live cattle, which created three extra wagonloads. On other wagons, they brought such essentials as cedar and oak dinner tables and chairs, rockets, flags, a Chinese gong, a large bathtub, twelve sets of dandruff brushes, and (allegedly) four enema kits. When they got partway to Cooper Creek, they dumped most of the gear and food and left most of the men with it all. But Burke, along with his second-in-command William John Wills and two others, soldiered on—with not enough food, and still not much of an idea about what they were doing. Amazingly, they made it to the Gulf of Carpentaria. But on the way back, they were plagued by monsoon rains. They had to shoot and eat their horse. When they arrived back at Cooper Creek, they discovered that the remaining men had left just hours before. And not long after, by the end of June 1861, Burke and Wills were both dead.[1] Still, their monumentally tragic trip has gone down in history as a touchstone of Aussie bravery and battling against the odds. Booth (1873). The Return of Burke and Wills to Cooper’s Creek (Public Domain) Is this how we’re supposed to live our Christian lives? In other words, is the Christian life all about setting outrageous and ambitious goals to glorify God, then setting off into the spiritual wilderness, assuming it’ll all be right in the end, because we have God on our side and we just need to have faith that he will make our plans all work out fine in the end? Putting it that way sounds a little crazy, doesn’t it? But sometimes we can act a little like that is the way to live the Christian life. We can live our Christian life—walk our Christian walk—with big goals, but without thinking properly about how we’re going to achieve the goals, what it’s going to cost, and how we might need to prepare and plan for the long haul. Is this really what God wants us to do? Of course, it’s not wrong to have big goals for our Christian walk. Paul spells out some pretty huge aspirations in his letter to the Ephesians. He urges believers to “become imitators of God” (Ephesians 5:1), to “walk in love”, imitating Christ’s costly sacrifice for others (Ephesians 5:2), and to “walk as children of light” (Ephesians 5:8), so that Christ shines through us and transforms the darkness. Paul has big ambitions for the Christian walk, and it’s right for us to consider how these aspirations should play out in our own lives. It’s good to have ambitious goals for ourselves. But as we do, we mustn’t be naïve or unprepared. Because Paul doesn’t just lay out big ambitions and leave it there. In Ephesians 5:15–17, Paul goes on to tell his readers: Watch carefully, then, how you walk, not as unwise but as wise people, reclaiming the time, because the days are evil. So don’t be foolish, but grasp what the Lord’s will is.