Sorting Through Thoughts

7/25/2013 06:22:00 PM sendtheroths 2 Comments

Bear with me as I banter a bit. I’m trying to sort out some complicated thoughts.

The reason I haven’t been writing is because God has been writing on me. He has been writing on me with the lives of his servants walking in and out of my home; joining me together with people that I never could have known without him. People who I never knew that I could feel so close to in such a short time.

God, if you're going to let people like this just walk in and out of my life—this is a cruel trick.

I’m so emotionally charged right now. I have feelings that I can’t explain. I feel love and loved. I also feel attached and afraid. I feel blessed and yet I somehow feel cursed. I feel found and yet somehow lost. I feel joy and sorrow. It’s so mixed up.

Walking with Christ in many ways has caused me to walk in the deepest pits of loneliness I have ever felt in my life. At the same time, these pits have lead me to the highest mountains I have ever seen. Higher than what other people dream.

“Heroic” tales of missionaries and Christians do not do what they once did for me. I’m living it.

Yet inside of me has been this deep yearning to seek out others who are like myself. People whose decision to follow Christ wholeheartedly has lead them into such intense loneliness. Loneliness, not because of the absence of God—but because of the absence of other like-minded people; the absence of kindred spirits, actually. I have learned that I can be around like-minded people and not have a kindred spirit.

There are people who I have encountered in my life, that I can liken unto Mary and Elizabeth’s experience, when the baby inside their bellies leapt.

 I have often taken the practical advice of colleagues, friends and supporters to contact other like-minded ministries that are (and/or are considering) working in eastern Congo. These meetings have been necessary, but overall disappointing. Sometimes, when I sit in the company of ‘elite’ mission agencies—I can’t help but wonder what is really the difference between missionary enterprise and the world? After all, it is an enterprise—we are all trying to sell each other on a specific product (the vision) and build rapport to convince the other agencies that you are ‘legit’ and not going to do something like "declare yourself a God" or "take all their staff" (which by the way, does happen). You sit in meetings, prim, proper and ready to present the best of yourself.


To me this is pretty much the same façade we pass off for jobs in the world.

Isn’t the Kingdom different? Yes. I just figured out how.

There are people that have ‘coincidental’ encounters in their lives that awaken something inside of them. I can only say that, a baby literally leaps inside of you. It actually gives me a buzz… like taking a hit of marijuana or getting the happy-chills when you figure out that you're in love.

This is the only comparison that I can give.

I’ve met these people at random times in my life. They are people who, I believe, have kept me alive.

A friend of mine described it as a random oasis in a large desert. I’ve met these people—they’ve fallen in and out of my life. I’m not sure if it is because God wanted them to fall out or because of my lack of intentionality or even their lack of intentionality. Whatever the case—when people like that fall out of my life, it’s so difficult. It feels like a cruel trick from God.

I know God is not cruel and that his intention is for us to be a part of each other: solidarity, if you will. I can’t help but believe that we, the humans, are messing this up.

We either are so disorderly that we just allow God-given relationships to fall to the wayside in exchange for our personal motives, plans and insecurities or we create this enterprise sort of network (also known as the traditional ministry structure) where things become more about business than relationship and elite groups of noteworthy people are formed that are hard-to-reach and distant from the ‘average’ person.

Where’s the medium?

I have also learned that within the kindred-spirit network of people, there are a people even outside of that network. They are like the oddballs, the outsiders, the misfits. They are people that God has seemingly set-apart from even the like-minded and set them in a place of loneliness and complete dependency on God for some greater cause that which the person cannot understand. 

These people don’t understand why they don’t fit in. And they never will.

I dream about an alliance of these corky people: an alliance of solidarity and accountability, a labor-force. I dream of a people who give their word (and their word is enough) to be vulnerable to a group of other people. A group who will go at any moment to meet the labor-force at requested areas. A people who are a family, who celebrate together and keep in contact on a weekly, biweekly basis the same way it was intended for families to be.

I don’t know how this is possible. I don’t know if it is possible. But it’s what I want. We need laborers in Goma. We can’t do this alone. Honestly, I don’t want to do it alone.

Where are the laborers? Where is the book of Acts? Where are the nameless faceless people rising out of the ashes?