When does a group of complete strangers become family?
When they know your deepest secrets, your biggest fears, or who your closest friends are?
When they know at least one of your secrets?
When you realize you’re all each other has to look at for the next 11 months?
When you are fighting homesickness and missing holidays so you might as well just get along with them?
When you remember you chose this and you need to “suck it up”? (Thank you Peter)
What about when you allow these strangers in? When you allow them to laugh with you, to grieve with you, to share life with you.
Even actual family members will remain strangers if you hold them at a distance.
Our squad launched at the beginning of July. I remember looking around during our first night of worship together before we left. 57 teammates, ready to take on the World. That’s a lot of stinkin’ people! A group of people who either randomly or very thoughtfully picked this race, this month, this route. But a group who was very divinely put together by God. How beautiful it was to be worshiping Him together. But to me they were still just faces.
It would be impossible to feel “close” to them all. Even after spending a week getting to know them at Training Camp a month prior to Launch I still felt completely overwhelmed by the amount of new friends.
Fast forward two months. We are at our month 2 debrief in Moldova. (Holy cow, done with month two already?)
Debrief. Literally just our squad and God at a camp on the back roads of Moldova.
Side note: I’ve always been the type to get anxious when I’m about to interact with a big group of people.
This was still the big group that I had been overwhelmed by at Launch. Excited to see the familiar faces, but anxious and still unsure how I was supposed to feel “close” to them all.
So often Jesus will intervene when my over zealous mind gets away from me. Are we not all the body of Christ? What more do you need to feel close to them, Lauren?
Duh.
Just like I had two months before, I looked around on our first night of worship together. Dang. I didn’t just see faces anymore; I saw the face of God. What a moment. When you look around and you don’t just see a group of people, you see family. They may not know my deepest hurts or biggest fears (yet). They may not know the names of my closest friends back home. But what are those anyways? Just random facts about my life.
They know so much more. They know my here and now. They know my past two months and they will know my next 9 months.
In that moment I realized how small a group of 57 people can look when you feel just as close to the person sitting next to you as you do the person across the room.
Now that I think about it “sucking it up” doesn’t seem so hard when I have an entire family to share it with.
