A year and a half ago, I was getting ready to leave on the World Race. Now I find myself at another training camp, another time of preparation for another missions trip, with the same amazing people at AIM that I’ve come to know and love over the last year or more. It’s exciting, thrilling, and terrifying all at the same time. I wrote a blog right before I left on the Race that expresses a lot of things similar to what I’m going through right now – by far the most prevalent lie I’m attacked with right before I go do something wild is the question, “what am I doing here?” It’s an attack at the most fundamental part of my identity: confidence. My whole life I have struggled to find authority in what I’m doing, to hit that moment where I’m just supremely confident that I know what to do, what to do next, how to do it – that whole thing that I’ve come to believe isn’t really part of a properly lived life.
I have come to the understanding that it’s not about what I’m actually capable of. I was asked to do things on the Race that I’d never done before, and today I probably couldn’t replicate a thing about them. But I did them. I made bricks, and wired light switches, and preached and evangelized and played with kids and ran day camps and quit caring about if I could do something, and just did it. And I did it, not from my own strength or from any belief that I was actually capable or fit for the job, but from a place of dependence on God to provide the tools and ability I needed to do what He asked of me.
So here I am, getting ready to lead a team of men and women for a summer, to shepherd their time interacting with most of a dozen groups of youth, to be a student and a steward of the hundreds of people I’ll be in contact with. I’ll be expected to have the answers, to make the decisions, to be a… *gasp* …a leader.
That’s a word that has a lot of negative memories associated with it for me. I’ve done leadership-type things before – usually from a place of believing that I could handle it, that I knew what I was doing, of wanting to prove to myself and everyone else that I had what it takes to be a good leader. It’s probably not surprising to hear that I failed, sometimes quite spectacularly, every time I tried to do that. So here I am, again, and the only real difference is that this time God’s asked me to do this, and I have some amazing recent experiences with truly gifted and excellent leaders to remind me what it’s all about. I have a series of failures as my only leadership resume, and this is not a pleasant thing to think about.
So I’m sitting in church this Sunday, and I’m reflecting on what is to come in light of what’s been, and I go a little further down memory lane and recognize all the thousands of times in my life I wandered off, willfully and ignorantly, seeking things that would fulfill me but of course never did. Being a respected leader was only a small part of my search for self-fulfillment. And I’m remembering how really all my life I’ve known Christ but fled to other things, desperate for a fuller life that had to be just around the corner, and now seeing how futile all of that was I’m this close to saying wow what a wasted life –
and God interrupts my thoughts – I love it when He does this – and overwrites them, and He says:
“Everywhere you ran, seeking fulfillment; every time you turned from pursuit of Me in search of what you thought would complete your life; every choice you made seeking to set yourself up as God in My place; every moment you want to characterize as a waste: I claim all that as time spent in search of Me. There is no path you can take that will not eventually return you to Me – whether through fire, or brokenness, or joy, I will be waiting for you every moment of your life to return to me, and I will claim all of you and all you went through in search of the completeness I designed you to seek, and I will make it MINE, and I will make you mine.”
and I am broken by the power of redemptive Love.
So here I am, heading into a place I’ve never come back from successfully, so far out of my depth I can’t see a single thing I have any control over, and trusting God to do His awesome thing. God does redemption better than anyone else, and He’s redeemed so many things in my life, and I am insanely, irrationally excited to see how He’s going to take this part of my life and make it, like everything He does, into something wonderful.
So I’m going to take the leap of faith straight into the arms of my Heavenly Daddy, and run Him down on this trip. I’m going to pursue Him in the lives of my staff, and the youth I’ll be working with, and in my own life, and on beyond zebra – and every step I take closer to Him, He’ll laugh and smile and dance out one step farther, and beckon me on.
So here I go, friends – come along for the ride!
