Sometimes
telling people about the World Race out here on the field is a blend of ministry
and marketing and the line between both is severely blurred. Tonight, we met with the teens of the
Potter’s House for an ice-breaker, praise, and sharing our experience thus far. Dan told them how he ended up on the Race,
and I showed my halfway point video after telling them what it is we do on the
Race. We invited them to ask questions,
and I hope our answers were sufficient encouragement and challenge for them. Answering their questions might’ve been more
beneficial to me than to them.
the more thoughtful questions posed to us on the Race about the Race has been,
“What was the most difficult thing you experienced?” Dan answered, “Eating a bone.” For Brandon, it’s been encountering suffering
and poverty over and over again. I
thought back to when I realized how hard it is to love sacrificially in small
ways. Christi shared about the physical
ailments that plagued her occasionally.
Then Dan
offered a “real answer”. While he agreed
that it’s been challenging for him to live in community like this, he said that
it’s been difficult to connect with people – our ministry partners, our
ministry “targets” – and then have to leave them. More or less, and certainly not in these
exact words, Dan said that he wants to pour out his heart and be able to have
more than enough to pour out, which is difficult to do on a monthly basis.
brushing my teeth, I was thinking over Dan’s more poignant response. I remembered that each month of the Race so
far, to some extent (ranging from “only out of obedience” to
“pleasepleasePLEASE, God, bring me back here”), I was able to imagine returning
for a longer period of time to all the places we’ve been.
Thetransitions between hello-goodbye-hello have become smoother, only by His
grace. More miraculous than Jesus
turning water into wine is how I pour out my heart over and over again and not
run out; just when I thought I had spent the last drop of love, I find that
there’s still more than enough. For example, Marius
of Bucharest stole my heart last month and this month, Marius of Timisoara (and
well, the Potter’s House in general) has captured another chunk of it; yet
there’s still plenty of it left.
raising people from the dead (don’t worry, we’ve got the rest of this month and
two more coming up) or praying off cancer or seeing legs grow or cataracts
falling, but how my heart can regenerate time after time is nothing short of
supernatural.
the heart that’s been reborn in Christ is like a starfish:
Beyond their distinctive shape, [starfish] are famous for
their ability to regenerate limbs, and in some cases, entire bodies. They
accomplish this by housing most or all of their vital organs in their arms.
Some require the central body to be intact to regenerate, but a few species can
grow an entirely new sea star just from a portion of a severed limb.
– from National Geographic (retrieved June 4, 2009 via Google: “starfish facts”)
and transplanting my heart; making like shampoo – “lather, rinse, repeat.”
