The past few days, we’ve really gotten into the swing of a schedule as a team. (Thank you, L0RD, for being in one place this month and a true schedule!) We’re alternating between working with kids and working in the backyard space building fences, painting, and doing some gardening. The small fences are to keep the little ones away from the pond in the back and create space for a playground to be built eventually. A few days back, I was painting these not even knee-high posts with my teammate Rachel. We’re using white paint, which looks so bright and fresh against the green of the garden!
As I was painting a post, I recalled something my other teammate Janet said just a day before. She was telling us that these white picket fences are very symbolic for her, and I was thinking about what white picket fences had come to mean in my own mind. Immediately, I thought about the American dream. The sparkling “ideal” life of having a steady and lucrative job that provides the means for a two-story house and supports a loving husband, myself, two darling children (a boy and girl, of course), and a dog named Rover. How nice! A cute and comfortable life with a storybook ending and enough money in the 401k to land my husband and me a spot in a retirement complex in Florida!
Okay, so this is a little exaggerated, and having any of these things isn’t bad! Yet, people SLAVE their lives away to try and attain some vision of a safe and comfortable life, for some security for the future, and I feel what I have seen in my short 22 years of life already tells me that there is more to life than working toward dreams of retirement like we’re working for the weekend.
I want to live my life NOW, in contentment and satisfaction, abiding in relationship with J3sus, whatever that looks like and wherever that takes place.
I look at my m1nistry host and his family, operating a daycare, taking in kids off the street, teaching English and introducing stories of the B1ble and of J3sus to these children, being a presence of hope and love in the community. Our host and his wife, out of a passion that comes from his own story as a kid on the street, are doing what they know to do to make a difference here. I am inspired and floored by their lives to live my own life with all my energies toward building the Kingdom of God. I hear his stories about Vietnam and the corrupt government and their monitored, scant freedoms… I go to an underground church here where the dependence on J3sus and the gratitude for Him is blindingly evident in their worship and tight-knit community. I’m taking in all these things and I KNOW life is more than what I am told it should be by American society.
My life is meant to be more than just marked by selfish and vain ambition, seeking my own pleasure or plans. It was created for more than building a safe and comfortable life in the AC of the American dream, blocked off by white picket fences that keep me in my own little world. Separated away from the reality of the REAL world where people are broken, captive, and hopeless, walking in sin, tragedy, and emptiness.
In painting the little white fences we’ve built to keep the small ones out of the pond, I realize how much the L0rd is saying He has so much more for me than the deceiving, fought-for “American dream.” He is inviting me, and I believe He is inviting you too, to consider what He might have planned beyond what our limited minds can fabricate. So as I’m here in Vietnam, I have already begun to walk past the metaphorical white picket fence in my mind that keeps me fearful of following J3sus outside the yard of my own understanding. It’s SO inexpressibly worth it to follow Him anywhere He might lead, even if I can’t see the destination ahead. In this place of not knowing, my trust is deepening. I am being led, hand in hand, by the One who is holding all things together.
My future is blindingly bright because it is all flooded with the Light of the Son!
I can’t begin to imagine what the chapters of my life hold beyond this one on the Race, but the more I truly know I can trust Chr1st J3sus, the more those details don’t really matter much. Wherever I am—wherever we end up down the road—I am an amazed witness of the beauty of this man, the reigning King J3sus. And I will live each day to behold that more and more and invite others to behold H1m as well.
Friends and family, I pray He would draw you into the freedom of this understanding I am only just beginning to grasp! I pray He would reveal Himself to you as He has so captivated me with the truth of all He is!
He is everything! And He is worthy to be followed, so worthy to be trusted with our lives—in the biggest and smallest of things. He cares. He created you with such detail and purpose. He LOVES you and came in pursuit of relationship with you, that you might say yes to life with Him, now and forever. It’s all for relationship with Him, all for His glory and for the richest good our lives can possibly encounter. HE is the richest good our lives could possibly encounter. And He invites you to come taste and see He is good, invites you to let Him into your life and interrupt it. As C.S. Lewis says, He doesn’t just want to renovate a few rooms of your life, He wants a total tear down. A complete gut-job and demolition. He wants to be the Cornerstone your life is built upon. He wants to make your heart and your life His residence. He wants you! Start to ask J3sus what that means in your own life. Who even is J3sus to you? Is He an afterthought or your sole mindset? Is He just a cool guy or your Rescuer and lifeline to any hope and purpose at all? What could it mean to give J3sus your whole life, abandoning and surrendering all things to His control and design? I am asking these same questions, and the answers may be HARD. But it’s all worth it in the light of eternity.
Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
Oh, fear the LORD, you his saints,
for those who fear him have no lack!
The young lions suffer want and hunger;
but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.
-Psalm 34:8-10
Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.
-Revelation 3:20
Truthfully it’s all about Him. Everything is for Him and unto Him because He is perfect and good and just and Almighty.
Then I looked, and I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice,
“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might
and honor and glory and blessing!”
And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying,
“To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”
-Revelation 5:11-13
