Returning to Bangkok on Monday was a day of great anticipation. Not only were we coming back together with the other three teams on September, but the June and January teams would all be there as well. For about half of us, we got to know the June team at training in April, so it was a great reunion of friends we were coming to. It was voiced by several people that it was odd to look forward so greatly to seeing people again when, really, you’d only known them for 10 days of your life. And yet there I was, calling shotgun on hugging someone first when they came in so I wouldn’t have to fight the crowd. This morning we were singing ‘This is the Air I Breathe.’ It’s a song about our deep need for God in everything we do, comparing Him to be the very air we breathe, so great is our need. In the chorus is a line that says ‘I’m lost without you’. About the second time through, as I’m singing this to God, I just felt Him say to me ‘Then you will never be lost.’ It’s not that I don’t know that, but much like when you know your spouse or parent loves you, you still never get tired of hearing it. Just being reminded that He doesn’t leave me and wherever I’m at; even if I feel lost, I’m not lost because I’m not without Him. As I just soaked in that reminder, I also discovered in it a calling. If I am to be Jesus to my team this year they have to know implicitly that I will be there at every turn with them, even if that turn in the road is them telling me how bad I suck. I have to be a safe place for them to go, in every situation. In short, I have to be dedicated and faithful to each person on my team because God was first dedicated and faithful to me. It will take sacrifice and compromise at times, but it will also produce the love, joy, and compassion we are called to clothe ourselves with in order to glorify God with our very lives. Already in our first month we’ve had to adjust in many ways, and we have voiced much deeper things yet to be dealt with, but each time we take these hard steps, it produces more and more of the true community we desire -one that exemplifies all the same qualities we see in our worldwide family of God.
It was another reminder, much like my experience at the Karen village (see Never a Misplaced Servant if you haven’t read it already), of what it is to be in God’s vast family. Going through the things God has taken us through, whether we go through them together at training camp or in very different ways in completely unrelated cultural settings on opposite sides of the world, we are all bound together by that unconditional love that conquered and conquers all. We all belong to a larger community, a larger family than the one we know.
A major focus of this year, especially for me as a team leader that needs to facilitate the learning process as best I can, is learning to live in community as Jesus and His disciples did. Not just learning to love one another unconditionally, but learning to be loved unconditionally. Not just trying to keep peace, but facing conflict together in the knowledge that we are still loved through our trials and the junk we all carry. Learning to stand by one another in things we are uncomfortable with, lean on each other rather than to doing it ourselves, and to continually seek to serve one another with our lives. Essentially, we’re learning to be Jesus to each other, that we can then be Jesus to the nations. Because how can we be part of that greater community that is God’s family without knowing what it takes on the day to day personal level?
