I’ve got my laptop open at 1:30 AM, in a small church in the foothills of the South American Cordillera Mountains. After months of insufferable heat, the chill in the sanctuary is more refreshing than biting, though my nose sniffles and my fingertips are cool. I should be asleep with the rest of my team, preparing for another day of ministry in the twelfth country of our nearly yearlong missions journey.
I should be more joyful to see the stunning snowcapped peaks in the morning, to meet new friends Fernando, Montserrat, Carolina and Javi in the park. To be thrilled to present the hope of the Gospel to these students who radiate with laughter and goodwill.
I should maybe even be catching up on two months of blogs I’m behind on.
But I’m not. I’m awake and my mind continues to trudge along.
Chile, and South America as a whole, is a rugged land I formerly dreamt of one day visiting. Now that I’m here, yes, I feel the rush of entering a new place, but I feel a creeping hollowness. The emptiness in the lack of emotions I feel strolling the murmuring streets of Santiago rings loudly, like the sullen, leaden bells of Donne’s mourning churches.
My mind races back to life on the homestead, amidst the tangled tendrils of concrete and glass, in whom the speed of people and machinery pulse in an almost constant beat. Yet the beat of a madman, one in whose arms I spent countless hours praying. Weeping. Wondering how to break free.
Here I am, serving God’s Kingdom as he reaches into the darkness of austere tradition or solemn broken-hearted secularity. I fly on busses with a cacophony of passengers and smells and strange, straight-to-dvd Hollywood castoffs. This year alone, I have flown in planes, ridden innumerous busses, taxis, diablo rojos, moto-taxis, pickup trucks, subways, cable cars, walked up steep mountain paths, and ridden in dugout canoes, in search of the eternal picture, in search of the harvest.
Perhaps it’s because even from the start, the journey has always had a finite end in sight. This constant movement, constant change of house and haven (by my count I’ve spent the night in 34 different beds or seats), could never satisfy, could never allow me to truly connect, to truly feel at home, at rest. I drift off at night thinking of my own bed and down comforter, the quiet of my own room, the temporal safety of a home with a deadbolt on the front door.
I find myself obsessing about myself and my longings and my loneliness and I get sick to my stomach.
I spend so much time in my own head that I miss opportunities to love a screaming baby one more time, to watch the amusing inventions of a 4-year-old who tugs on my shirt and exclaims, “¡Oye, Tío!”
I can’t break the funk as I look to the heavens, the stars of the Southern hemisphere henceforth unseen, and pray to God, wondering how to find him in the mess of who I am and what I’ve seen this year. I long to go back home, to the land of data plans and Chipotle and personal space. Yet I can’t let go of the people I’m constantly leaving behind each and every month here. I trust God has a plan for each of their lives and mine, and yet I struggle to believe it in my heart, to truly hand over the children, widows, addicts, homeless and lost into His hands.
Christ said in His Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5), “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” A mentor once showed me how the mourning referenced here isn’t necessarily the mourning of the death of a friend or family member, but mourning for the brokenness of the world at large. This year my world has been broken for the world; I see it in images that are chiseled into my memory and in smells and tastes and sounds that are burned into the recesses. I pray for comfort in this season of mourning, this season that seems made of sackcloth and ashes before the Lord.
Certainly not all memories of this year are broken-hearted – there have been a myriad of fun experiences and incredible moments of the Lord working through myself and other people, broken hands serving a broken world in the name of a perfect King – as shared in previous posts.
But I still seem to wander morning and nights in a haze, a fog of weight, carrying the stories of so many people, stories I can’t yet tell, stories I might never be able to justly describe. I stall in the miry fog of wondering how to reconcile what has passed and what comes next while missing the rays of beauty and light that surround me in the present.
In 46 days I step off a plane jet bridge and into the USA. I know the Lord still has plans for the next month and a half. I know, but I still don’t fully trust.
So I decide, here and now, that I’ll hope with anticipation for the Lord to rock my world in the next six weeks. That he will show me what He is up to in this world, like I’ve never seen. I will be the father of the afflicted child in Mark 9, exclaiming, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” And then watch as the Lord unfolds beauty before my eyes.
