I’m back from a week in Georgia, after an amazing conference AIM put on for us called Project: SearchLight. The main goal of the week was to help us find our next step in life, part of AIM’s commitment to continuing the process the World Race began. We spent a lot of time at AIM headquarters in Gainsville, Georgia, talking and learning and dreaming. The project was organized by a team called Kingdom Dreams within AIM, designed to allow people the opportunities necessary to pursue their place in the Kingdom of God. Searchlight was a place to explore options and develop goal-solving skills that will help us in our next steps to keep the big goals in mind, and gave us TONS of networking opportunities. Adventures In Missions has an immense amount of contacts from organizations all over the world, and we got a very good representation of them to come out for the opportunities fair during Searchlight.
One of the biggest focuses during the conference was on developing and pursuing our dreams. I was talking with one of my squadmates about her future, and she mentioned that she was still interested in pursuing her dream of running an alpaca farm.
She’s hoping to use the fur as a vehicle to provide all sorts of nifty initiatives and fun stuff, but when I talked to her she said it seemed a little silly in light of some of the other dreams floating around: full-time missions in Africa or Thailand, trips to leadership academies in Spain or Washington, travel journeys straight out of Luke 10 or Acts 4 communities. I thought about the connections we’d made that week. As an exercise, we were asked to determine our degree of separation between the hundred or so of us in the room and the President. Turns out, if we’d had something sufficiently pressing we could have probably gotten him on the phone in two calls or less. We were asked to provide some practical assistance as another exercise, and a girl got up with her Kingdom dream: she wanted to work in some sort of human rights organization fighting human trafficking. She barely got done talking when hands started going up: one person after another had contacts in various ministries that could help her get involved with her goal. It was a powerful example of the way the body of Christ can come together to provide an incredible network.
So I told her that she shouldn’t be concerned about whether an alpaca farm would be the best Kingdom impact she could have with her life. One of the things we were asked frequently on the Race was, “Are you willing to be the answer to your own prayers?” Sometimes God gives us a heart for something He wants done, and we ask Him to do it, so that He can send us to take care of things on His behalf. I think it’s far more humbling to be used as the answer to someone else’s prayers. I don’t know how all this works, but somewhere down the line it would not surprise me to find that someone had a dream to make a line of alpaca-fur clothing to sell for support for Kingdom work – and I’m standing there talking to the woman who’s going to make it possible. Ten years from now someone is going to ask God for something impossible – an alpaca farm run by someone committed to the Kingdom of God – and thanks to one woman’s faithfulness God’s going to turn and point and say, “got you covered.”
It’s a sobering thought to consider that God might be asking us to fulfill His work in such an intricately connected way, and because we’re unable to see the big picture we delay, and hesitate, and we miss out on the opportunity to be part of something that cool. Maybe God needs alpaca farmers. Maybe God needs you to be an alpaca farmer. It’s worth thinking about – maybe even dreaming about.
