Kingdom Journeys
“So often, we get lost in self-absorbed thinking. We look for Jesus in Bible studies and self-help books, and he doesn’t seem to be around. We need to look for him near the trash heap. Every time I’ve looked for Christ in a slum or a dump, I have found him. He is reflected in the eyes of a dirty child. He waves to me through an old woman with wrinkles engraved in her cheeks. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” (Matthew 5:3) he says. Perhaps his point is they are blessed because he makes his home with them. We sometimes get lost in this modern world, far from Jesus and ourselves. God gave us this concept of sacred, intentional travel as a means of finding our way back.”
Why is it that we see God so much in the eyes of a dirty child? Why do we feel humbled at the sight of an old woman whose face is engraved with wrinkles? Because we see ourselves in them.
Our world may be modernized, but our lives are messy. We need to look for God near the trash heap. He knows how messy we are and knows how much we can handle. Why would someone so pure wait besides the trash heap when our garbage is piling up so high that we believe it is undemolishable?
But why is it that the dirtied children and the wrinkled elders seem to live more fulfilled lives than us? We are given soooo much in our modernized world- homes, steady jobs & incomes, cars, anything we can think of, we have the opportunity to get. Can you just imagine for one second, pulling the child covered in mud off of the streets and letting him live a day in the life of us. We have so many distractions in the world we live in. These distractions pull us away from ourselves causing us to pull away from Jesus. We try everything in our power to help us forget about our trash pile even if its just for a minute. But what would happen if we accepted our mess and embraced it.
“Journeys open up our spirit to the possibility of a reality it hasn’t yet grasped. Away from the familiar, our hearts become a place where God can work, a place where only faith will sustain us. Even though our physical travels may not last a year, the lessons we learn will continue to rend our hearts for years to come. The journey is more than an escape from the things that have come to define us in life- it’s a chance to break free from the shackles of an ordinary existence.”
I challenge us all to take a journey to our trash piles. To accept the messiness of our lives. To ask for help because we can’t do this on our own.
The book Kingdom Journeys was written by the founder of Adventures in Missions, the organization which the World Race Gap Year is run by. Seth Barnes said,
“To know Jesus you have to learn how to leave. In the end, the leaving is the finding.”
