In less than 48 hours, I will be boarding a plane to fly to Atlanta, where I will gather with my squad and get trained at Launch. This is the day I have been anticipating for months, and it is finally around the corner. As I think about my trip ahead, my mind immediately goes over and over and over the list of tasks I need to complete: packing my bag for the final time, writing a few notes, settling a few things.
Physically, I am prepared to go. But as I have been getting physically prepared for this trip, I have realized that I don’t feel at all spiritually prepared for this trip.
So, I’ve been thinking about planes, especially the plane I’m going to board on Sunday, when I fly to Africa. And I’ve been thinking about how my spiritual life right now feels a bit like being on a plane. Right now, I am neither here nor there with God. It feels like I have departed some very important place, and I am off to the next place spiritually. But I haven’t arrived just yet.
The thing about plane rides is that they really aren’t all that exciting. When someone asks you about a vacation, you typically don’t recount the details of your in-flight experience. But the plane ride is essential. It’s what gets you from point A to point B. It might be unexciting, uneventful, and often painfully long. But it reminds you of the space in between, the distance that stretches far and wide, and it might make you feel just a little bit small.
Right now, I’m waiting for my flight to arrive spiritually. The problem is that I have no idea what my destination is, and maybe that’s why I don’t feel prepared. I know that I’ll be physically in Mozambique, but where is God taking me next spiritually?
I have left behind the old places I used to inhabit with God… I know what it looked like to walk with Him there, and I knew the feeling of that familiar spiritual space, but we are going to a new place now.
But the in-between is long. It’s hard. It’s sad sometimes. You think about what you left behind and think maybe this new place won’t be the same. It won’t be as good.
And sometimes the in-between is just so unexciting. How could the journey to this new place begin with such a boring season?
But like I said before, the plane ride is essential.
Maybe that’s the feeling I have right now in the pit of my stomach. That feeling you have on a plane when you know you will be arriving soon and you’ve been waiting weeks, months for the moment when you step off the plane and enter a new place and you know only good things will be on the other side. And you just can’t wait.
But for now, you sit, buckled up in your airplane chair, tray table down with a soda and some free peanuts, watching the clouds go by in anticipation of the moment when you’ll break through the clouds and finally get a glimpse of where you’re about to be.
And you feel just a little bit small. In a good way.
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