…without ever having to say goodbye.
I said goodbye tonight to a batch of brothers and sisters I’ve come to truly love this month. I’m starting to hate goodbyes.
I’m at a point right now where I want to say, “I’m done. I quit, God. I just cannot love any more people with all my heart for one measly month at a time. This is torture, and I can’t do it any more.” The only thing that keeps me moving is knowing that God’s got a bigger heart than I do, and that all I have to do is ask for more and He’ll fill me up. This is not the first time I’ve hit this spiritual wall. This is not even the first time on this race when I’ve come to God and said, “this is just too hard. Why are you putting me through this? It’s taking more and more effort to pursue you, and life isn’t giving me a chance to recover, and saying goodbye hurts, and I’m not experiencing you like I expected, and I JUST WANT TO TAKE A BREAK.” I don’t really get why it has to seem so hard to follow God. I don’t honestly know why it can be so exhausting sometimes just to read a single passage from the Bible. I can’t truly understand why some days praises come easily to my lips and other days they must be extracted by force. What I do know is that every time I’ve said it’s too much, God has asked me to just take one more step – and every time I deepen my commitment to Him by a tiny bit more, I discover that He’s a little more beautiful than the last time I saw Him.
Life with God is a thrill ride, and every twist and turn is more amazing and wonderful and exciting than the last, but it’s all uphill. You can choose to press forward, climbing farther and farther out of the atmosphere and relying ever more on God to provide every sustenance you need, or you can stop climbing and roll back downhill to the bland and boring world behind and below. The one thing that is not permitted in a life with God is brakes. You can’t slow down and take it easy. You can’t stop for a while and catch your breath. You are on this ride for keepsies and it’s either moving forward at God’s pace, or backward as fast as you can run from the pain of being transformed. I’ve been transformed this month. I’ve been given a joy I didn’t know was possible just in being surrounded by children constantly. I’ve been stretched to the breaking point and asked to learn real lessons through the most distracting environment I’ve been in since leaving Miami in January. I’ve been shown through highly stressful moments in life that I still have a lot to let go of. I’ve been FUNDAMENTALLY MODIFIED to see how God uses even the things I don’t want to experience as valuable lessons – that He is absolutely, inescapably, everywhere, and that my options are limited to accepting Him or running away. You can’t put God on the back burner. Transformation HURTS. There is a lot of pain associated with being remade into the likeness of God, even if you enter into it willingly.
The Kingdom of Heaven is not about sitting around waiting for the Rapture to take us all out of this crazy world filled with sadness and hurt. The real Kingdom is about straining every moment of our lives to be so filled with God that we become unreserved instruments of His dominion while we’re still on earth. I found a little piece of Heaven chillaxing here in the middle of San Salvador this month, where God is real and active and transforming more lives than just those of the children living in the homes. I want to take hold of Heaven, with hands that have been so thoroughly transformed that they’re no longer even recognizable as human, and rip it from the sky and plant it on earth and say, “HEY EVERYONE LOOK HERE! CAN YOU SEE GOD WORKING? OPEN YOUR EYES TO THE TRUTH!” I want to be an active part of bringing the Kingdom right here, right now, to this planet. I’m not going to wait for God to come back before I get busy making this place His. I’m not going to be content with tiny little pockets of Heaven spread out all over the world. It’s time to bring Heaven to all of Earth.
