Yep, there’s more to the awesomeness that is Project Searchlight than could be contained in one blog! Part Two is here!
One of the speakers we had at Searchlight was talking about the natural human hesitancy to commit to something terrifingly larger than we are. It’s all well and good to say, “I want to be someone important” but to actually take a look at what that decision requires can be dissuadingly frightening. We want to take a minute to relax, review our options, maybe get some training. “Let’s go at this slowly, carefully,” we say, and ten years later we’re no closer than when we started. There is certainly a place for experience and training and it’s a great and necessary thing, but sometimes we use it as a delaying tactic to avoid getting started on the actual work of getting to our goals. He said at one point, “You’ve got a Bible. You’ve got a passport. Get on the plane!” (One of us did exactly that, getting up in the middle of the talk and going to the back of the room to book a plane ticket to Thailand. He leaves in a month.) The speaker continued by asking us a question: if money was no object, if training was unnecessary, if there were absolutely no barriers to you for any reason, what would you want to be doing right now? Most of us had something we’d like to do – missions work in South Sudan, or a soup kitchen in Philadelphia, or an orphanage in the Ukraine. I was talking to a squadmate afterwards, and asked her what she thought of – where she’d be right now if she had the option. “I’d be in a canoe in Papua New Guinea” was the reply. She wants to use her background in conservation biology to go into unexplored areas, closed countries, the furthest places left on the Earth, and bring the light of Jesus to unreached people groups. Her biggest problem: she didn’t have the canoe. She didn’t know anyone with a canoe, and she didn’t have the contacts to get her into a canoe.
Now, I don’t have a canoe either, and I don’t know anyone with a canoe, but by the end of the week she’d found someone that could help her get started on pursuing her goal. We learned this past week how important it is to have someone to help you out as your pursue your dream, and how hard it can sometimes be to find the right person. After a year of international missions, one thing has become clear to me: the church was never intended to be a scattered bunch of individual groups identifying by the building they worship in or the country they live in. I am part of a GLOBAL body and everyone is connected to the same family. I really want to see that mentality spreading to everyone as we understand that Africa and Asia and Europe aren’t distant places with their own sets of problems and people that have little impact on us – it’s where our brothers and sisters are living, and praying, and sometimes dying for the sake of the same Father we serve here.
One of my V squad sisters lives near Reno, Nevada. There was a giant fire there a few days ago and it was only through the grace of God that her house didn’t burn down when so many others on her block did. I probably wouldn’t have cared about the fire if this had happened two years ago. I would have said, “oh that’s a shame” and moved on. But now, I have a sister who’s living in a disaster area. Now I have someone who was very directly affected by one of those news events. Then I remembered all the brothers and sisters I met on the Race, around the world, who are daily affected by ‘news events’ that I didn’t care about before. I got to wondering if there were indeed any news events that didn’t affect one or another of my family around the world. I got to wondering if maybe there were other people like my sister at Searchlight, just looking for a canoe to get going on a Kingdom-focused life. I got to wondering if maybe I had a canoe they could use.
You hear the phrase a lot these days: global community. A lot of Christians kick back against that phrase, loaded as it is with fears of a one-world government heralding the end times, but there’s another way to look at it. We are, as the body of Christ, a single community. We really are all connected, and we all suffer as a body when one part suffers. But in that same vein, we all have something to offer the whole body. Maybe our specific skills, networks, or possessions have great impact right next door; maybe we have to go to the other side of the world to plug them in – but I believe what we have – whatever that might be – was not given to us solely for our benefit. We have an obligation to be part of the family of Christ, and when we involve ourselves with the whole family we’ll get to see first-hand the incredible things God is doing every day.
So how about you? Do you have a canoe?
