I hope all of you had a chance to hear my father's message last week. That powerful message taught us how to live the full life. Capital "FULL LIFE" because he laid a wonderful foundation and I'm going to carry on from that message today.

You know I had a wonderful childhood and being raised by Dr. Schuller and Mrs. Schuller, I am blessed, there's no question about it. One of my favorite things, as a child, was when mom and dad would bring us back to the farm for the summertime and we would stay with our aunts and uncles. My favorite farm to visit was Aunt Margaret's. Aunt Margaret is my dad's older sister and she was also a teacher. What a legacy Aunt Margaret has left because she helped pay to put my dad through college. And I loved Aunt Margaret's farm. My brother Robert, and I would spend time there with our cousins.

My cousin Arie, older than me by just a couple years, would best be described as a modern day little rascal. Have you ever seen the TV show, the "Little Rascals"? He had the strawberry hair, the freckles across the nose, and he was full of mischief. His favorite thing to do when Robert and I were there was to try to show us how naïve we "city slickers" were. He would put us in all kinds of interesting scenarios on that farm.

So, I learned I couldn't trust Arie all that much, especially one time when he said to me, "Sheila, you've got tennis shoes on. Do you know that you can touch a hot electric wire and you won't get a shock?"

I said, "You aren't going to get me with this one, Arie." There's no way I was going to let him get the better of me this time. As he challenged me, he was pointing to the electric fence that ran there along their farm. I had seen the wallop that those electric fences carried when big, huge, grown cattle and cows would jump back when they accidentally brushed against it. Our parents had told us "city slickers" to stay away from the electric fences. This tiny little filament that you could barely see, kept in herds of cattle. I knew there was powerful electricity in that little wire. So, when my cousin Arie told me to just reach out and touch it, I said, "No. Absolutely not!"

"Okay," he said, "I'll show you." So he walked over and touched the fence. "See, I didn't get a shock." I thought there must be a trick to this somehow. He said, "See, because I had tennis shoes on, I demonstrated for you that you won't get a shock. Now, you do it."

"I'm still not going to do it," I said.

So, to persuade me further, he walked over to the electric fence in his little tennis shoes and actually grabbed on and held tight to the fence. Now, this got my attention! "Now will you try it?"

I like to play it safe. I didn't want to be safe and sorry as a kid, so I said, "No. I'm still not going to touch that electric fence!"

He said, "Okay, let's do this." So he held onto the fence and said, "How about if you just hold my hand?" I thought, okay, I could touch his fingertips. So, I very gingerly reached out and I touched his fingertips and felt nothing. So, I stood there holding hands with my cousin, and then my brother Robert came up, also wearing tennis shoes on, and he held on to my hand and the three of stood there like this, holding onto this powerful electric fence, feeling nothing. Then Shirley, my younger cousin came up and she grabbed onto Robert's hand and I'm looking down at Arie's tennis shoes and Robert's tennis shoes and my tennis shoes and Shirley's bare feet and just then we felt the fence! Arie went, "Ow!" I went, "Ow!" Robert went, "Ow!" Shirley went, "Ow!"

We had an electric-full experience there that day on the farm. But I've learned that we can live a safe, and that it's better to be safe than sorry in life, but sometimes isn't it also possible that we can live a safe and sorry life? We might also miss out on the wonderful adventures and the wonder that God has for us because we're so busy trying to play it safe.

There's a movie called "The Last Holiday." It's a fictional story about a character named Georgia Bird, played by Queen Latifah. Georgia lives in New Orleans. And I love it because it starts out with Georgia with her scrapbook of dreams. She puts photos and images in her scrapbook that help her to visualize her dreams. She lives out her dreams in the safety of this scrapbook. One of her dreams is to be a world-class chef and to have a restaurant. But she doesn't dare to actually put her dreams into action. She continues to live her safe life, going each day to her department store job where she does cooking demonstrations. But always going home to look in her scrapbook of dreams.

One day, she gets a call from the doctor and he tells her, "Georgia, we've just run these tests on you and I have really bad news for you. You only have three months left to live."

Georgia thinks, "Three months! Here I am, my dreams limited to my little scrapbook. I'm going to make the most of those three months!" She had nothing left to lose. So she pulls all of her savings out of the bank and she flies off to the restaurant she's most wanted to visit in her whole life. She decides she's going to go there to enjoy the food that she's always wanted to eat and prepare in her own restaurant someday.

She checks into the presidential suite, throwing money away like there's no tomorrow because, for Georgia, there was no tomorrow. Her adventure continues as we see her bungee jumping off a dam. For the first time in her life, she lives life with sheer abandon. Everyone at this five-star hotel starts wondering, who is this woman? Who is she? She must be powerful. She must be potent. She lives life large.

When it came time for her to eat her first meal in the restaurant, the waiter comes out and recites the specials for that night. She's just drooling over every special. Every single one of them. "Oh, that sounds good. Oh, I can't make up my mind." She says, "I'm going to take one of everything." So soon they come out with tray after tray after tray of food, and she takes one little bite of one special, one little bite of the other special.

And then she gets the news, "We made a mistake. There was a faulty machine and there's nothing wrong with you. Absolutely nothing wrong with you."

Once Georgia had tasted and experienced a bit of her dream, she now had the courage to live her dream. She opens her restaurant and experiences the dream life that she had wanted to live, but previously hadn't had the courage to do so. When you have nothing left to lose, she learned that you're willing to risk it all and in the process find life--abundantly!

There's a tendency for us to try to live like Georgia Bird, to try and live the safe life. I would dare say the safe and sorry life, but I'd also dare say that the safe and sorry life can also lead to a dead-end life.

My husband and I, we had four boys within seven years time. We had a lot of life in our home. Before Nicholas was born, when Jason was five, Chris was three, and Scott was two, we decided to rent a motor home and take them up the California's Coast Highway. Let me tell you, this is a beautiful, beautiful trip. If you've never done it, consider it. This is not something you want to miss out on. So, in our motor home with these little boys, we decided to camp one night at a place called Limekiln. Limekiln is absolutely beautiful. It's right on the coast. As you climb up and go higher and higher and higher along Coast Highway, you look down and see the waves crashing below. And then there's a tiny little road that you go down, down, down. Then, there's a beautiful forest and a stream that's coming out from the mountains, ending up at the coast, spilling into the ocean.

The morning after we arrived, we woke up with these three little boys full of energy. Jim said, "Let's go take them on a hike before we hit the road again." And so we did. We took the little boys on a walk along this beautiful path when all of a sudden we came to a dead end. The path led to a chasm. We looked down that chasm and there was this stream that was going out to the ocean. Now, for me, it felt like thirty feet and my husband says, "No, no, no. It is only five or six feet." There was a log across the chasm about two feet wide that had been shaved so it was flattened on top. But there were no hand rails. It spanned about fifteen to twenty feet from one side of the chasm to the other. And my husband said, "Come on, Sheila, let's take the boys across." Well, my heart was pitter pattering as he held on to one of the boy's little hands, and we made a chain, all of us holding hands and walking across that log and looking down and seeing that stream bubbling below us. I'm thinking that we've got the life of our little boys in our hands here. But when we got on the other side of that chasm - what we saw, what we discovered - I was so thankful that we took the risk to cross the log bridge because there were wonders that we would have missed out on if we'd stayed on the safe and sorry dead-end side. Because we walked across that log, we experienced a wonder filled, spectacular morning with our children, creating lasting memories.

I would say, today, that there are some of you who feel like you're at the dead end and you have a choice to make. Are you going to stay on the safe and sorry dead end side? Or are you going to have the courage to walk across to the wonder filled side?

I was very, very blessed, as I said earlier, to be raised by Dr. Schuller, and when I was in high school, it was Dad's job every morning to drive me to high school. What wonderful mornings those were; every single morning for all those years, my dad and me driving to high school. And he would talk to me, he would share with me all kinds of pearls of wisdom, and he would even teach me poetry. When it came time for me to go away to college in Michigan (halfway across the world it felt like to a California girl), it was dad's job to drive me to school again, this time to the airport to let me fly away to college. And there we were, father and daughter, driving to the airport. During the trip, all these memories and emotions started to flood me. I was so afraid I was going to cry in front of him. I didn't want to do that. So I reached way back into my memory system to one of the poems that he taught me on the way to school. I said with as much false bravado as I could muster, "Grieve not for me who am about to start a new adventure. Eager I stand and ready to depart. Me and my reckless pioneering heart."

I didn't feel like I had very much of a reckless pioneering heart, but I needed it because that year, my first year in college, was a rough one. My roommate was sent home because she had a nervous breakdown in our room. And then there was a girl in my quad in the dorm, I will call her Jane, who did not know God; she did not know Jesus. And when it was just Jane and I, she would ask me about my faith, and she would ask me about God. And I would talk to her and I would tell her about God, but I don't think I ever asked her, "Jane have you ever made a commitment to Jesus? Because if you haven't, you need to."

Well, one day I came back from my classes, it was in February, and I came into my dorm room and I was greeted by the resident advisor, Sarah. She said to me, "Oh Sheila, something horrible has happened. Jane is in the hospital and we don't expect her to make it."

I was stunned. I asked, "Why? What happened?"

She said, "A boy broke off a date with Jane and she got upset about it and took a bottle full of pills. Then she came to me and she said, 'Sarah, I've done something stupid.'" Since this was before the days of 911 and paramedics, Sarah drove Jane to the hospital as fast as she could, but it was too late. The pills had done their harm and there was no way to save Jane. I was beside myself. Eighteen years old, far away from home, but God in His infinite mercy made sure that my dad was there on campus that very day. And so I went running across those icy sidewalks with tears streaming down my face and I knew where he was meeting. I knew the meeting room and I knocked on the door and I said to the girl who answered the door, "I need to see my dad. I need to see my dad."

Dad came out and he walked with me and he talked with me along those icy sidewalks. He said, "Sheila, never forget Jane because you will, during the rest of your life, encounter more than one Jane. There are lots of Janes out there. And they need to hear the message that frees them from a dead end life. It's a message that says that they can have a life that is filled, full filling, overflowing. Let God use you to speak His message to all the Janes, whether they be men or women. But give that message to as many people as you can the rest of your life."

And so, today, I am. I stand before many of you who feel that you are at a dead end in your life. You feel like you are losing your life. You may be losing your life to depression. You may be losing your life to financial ruin. You may be losing your life to life-threatening illnesses. You may be losing your marriage, the love of your life. But Jesus said this, "If you try to save your life, you will lose it. But if you lose your life for My sake, you will find it."

So I tell you, today is a day of good news as you stand at that precipice, that dead end precipice, that chasm and you don't see how you can possibly get to that wonder filled, wonderful side of life. I tell you, today, there is a log across that chasm. It is in the shape of a cross. You have a heavenly Father that you can go to at any time and you can knock on the door and you can say, "I need to see my dad. I need to see my dad."

And He's standing right there, your heavenly Father, His Son Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit is standing right there in the middle of that log, holding out a hand to you saying, "Step forward, step forward. I won't make you walk across this chasm alone. Take My hand. For an electric-full, wonder filled, full filling, over flowing life, take my hand, walk with me." And He will walk you across and He will be there with you.

If you want to find your life, lose your life to Jesus. Lose your life to His God-given dream for you. Lose your life to what God wants you to do to help others, to make a positive difference. Lose your life to making it count. I pray every day, "Lord, I choose to lose my life. I lose it so You can use it. I will live it away, I will give it away." That, my friends, is the secret to a full filling, overflowing life. And I tell you, it's a lifetime guarantee.

Let us pray: I step out in faith today, oh Lord. I choose to stop trying to live a safe and sorry life by trying to save my life. Rather, oh Lord, I will lose it by letting You use it. Use this one life for You, so that when I come to the end of my life to face life eternal with You, I will find that, when I look back, I will have lived a wonder full life, a faith filled life, a full filling, overflowing life. I will be able to say, "My cup runneth over." Thank You Lord, Amen.

© Copyright Hour of Power 2009. This message was delivered by Dr. Sheila Schuller Coleman from the pulpit of the Crystal Cathedral and aired on the Hour of Power, October 11, 2009.

Read more about this week's pastor, Sheila Schuller Coleman.