August 11th and the story you don’t know.

His statement, ringing like a question, hung in the darkness.

“I’m about to tell you the honest truth. No one can see the Kingdom unless they’ve been born a different way.”

 

I boarded a 3am flight. I held my mother in an embrace I hoped would last through the empty places at Christmas dinner and the void of common days. I held her twice as tight, trembling inside at the thought of leaving the country of my father, who was bed-ridden and unable to awake from his morphine-induced slumber, even to tell me goodbye. I knew, even before leaving Missisippi, that midnight rising would be the last time I ever saw him — my hero, warring a heroic battle against a canceric enemy that took the toll of everything I ever recognized in him — unless God intervened. That was what I was counting on.

 

Not many understood my choice to go. No one would fault me for staying and living out the final days, the final breaths with daddy, the man who showed me the hand of a father and taught me how to hear the voice of God.

 

But the hand that had stayed me released, and that voice told me to go.

 

One night, not long before, crippled in ragged desperation and kaleidoscope confusion, I scream out to God on my bed. Why would He specifically tell me to go in August 2009, why would He miraculously provide $12,500 the day before Training Camp, why would He open every impossibly closed door so that I could go if my father, my greatest supporter, was going to die? How could I preach the Gospel of hope while my last one was withering away in a hospital bed half a world away?

 

I open my mouth. A wild animal roars in primal agony. My heart rends from my heart in bloody, fleshy chunks. My wild eyes snap on the white, stucco ceiling, boring into the eyes of God.

 

 

 I couldn’t continue living this hellish limbo, uncertain of my steps. I knew what He had told me before the cancer, but I didn’t dare to step into this without absolutely knowing what He was saying now. I felt like I’d die if I left dad.

 

 

I grabbed my Bible almost defiantly, daring God to show up.

 

I snapped it open randomly…

 

Luke chapter nine.

 

my eyes fell on the words,

 

 

 

Fittingly, I walked through the security gate at Little Rock International, leaving behind it the vestiges of everything secure in my life, ironically understanding that nothing this side of Heaven can be as certain as we believe it to be.

 

I knew the choice I made didn’t seem right to many. I can’t explain why it was alright to my family, except that they valued God’s calling even more than familial ties. Which is the greatest gift from God I’ve had so far, and which is the greatest grace they’ve ever given me.

 

I still remember coming to dad and telling him that God had definitively told me that I was supposed to go,

August 11th, 2009. Even though the hands of my heart drove a killing blade into itself with every beat, I also had a peace beyond reason. That peace was something I had not had for many, many months.

 

 

And I remember my dad reaching for his Bible on the nightstand as I spoke.

 

And I remember the way his shaky hands turned the fragile, beaten pages.

 

And I remember the verse he read to let me know what he thought of my decision to go in the face of his coming death.

 

I’ll never, ever forget.

 

Still fresh from God, I heard my father slowly read from Luke 9…

 

 

A woman in the seat next to me, my friend, my teammate. I had no understanding that tremulous, fearful, nauseating morning that we would unearth the scars of our hearts in tandem, that we would wrestle demons together, and that I would one day face the horror of her near-death before my eyes, only to grasp a little more tightly the truth that God’s timing for death doesn’t always come when it should, or come when we expect it.

 

Nine days into my World Race was not when I expected it.

 

In an emerald park on a cold, rainy day in the seaside town of Galway, Ireland, I was preaching the Kingdom of God to the ancestral race my dad was always so proud to be a part of when I was pulled to a garden wall and seated by my two uncommonly quiet squad leaders.

 

That day, I found out that truly following Jesus will cost us something. It will cost us more than groggy eyes at a church service when we should be sleeping. It will cost us more than dropping pocket change into the offering plate as it passes by. It will cost us more than being called names or being unpopular with friends or paying $3 for a chicken sandwich at a restaurant that promotes our “idea” of Christian principles.

 

I found out on that wind-whipped, black-skied day, among the droves of green-eyed people who would never know what I had ripped myself from to be in their midst, that truly following Jesus will cost us more pain than we can ever imagine.

 

In the rain, under a tree, and within the unyielding arms of my squadmates… In the rocking, in the wailing, in the scourging anguish, I found the heart of God.

 

And there was peace.

 

The suffering was like a crazed beast. In quiet moments, from out of nowhere, it would ambush. Jaws like lightning, roar like thunder, pinned beneath the weight of something so monstrous I could barely breathe. It ate me alive until there was nothing left. And then I would wake up each day, miraculously whole, not knowing when the next attack would rip me, skin from tendon, muscle from bone.

 

But in the midst of that immense devastation, I smiled. I sang. I fell into the arms of God.

 

And when I, a week after the funeral, boarded another plane for Romania to reunite with my team, less than three weeks from the one I boarded in Little Rock, I knew that God’s arms would be the ones that comforted me in the animal attacks, because my family would be continents away. Everything comforting, everything comfortable, everything I thought I would need to recover from the loss of my father would be lifetimes away.

 

***

 

After reunions and flights and days of hellish travel, I stepped off a train into the bright skies and crisp air of western Romania. And an understanding dawned on me, one I never expected to really have, one that I wasn’t sure anyone I had known really ever had.

 

 

Standing at a train station in Romania, my pack weighing down my shoulders, the world open before me with no further burdens on my mind, I realized that I was, literally, holding nothing back from God.

 

Nothing.

 

Not one, single thing.

 

I had gotten rid of most of the things I owned. I had left my father on his deathbed. My family was moving, and I had no idea where home even was. I had no hometown anymore. I had no college town anymore. I had no apartment. I didn’t even have a room. I had given my car to my sister.

 

Standing there on that concrete platform, the Carpathians of Eastern Europe watching me, I realized that all I really knew I owned in the world was strapped to my back, and if it got stolen, would it even really matter?

 

I was totally, absolutely, utterly holding nothing back from God. Not my possessions, not my time, not my family.

 

Not even my daddy.

 

I was an open vessel. Chipped, cracked, and falling apart, yes. But I had proven to myself, to the world, and to Jesus that nothing in my life was more important than being at this train station, in this very moment.

 

Nearly three years later, I get it.

 

I know that the reason God commissioned me through the valley of the shadow of death, through broken-heartedness, the crux of affliction and choking darkness, was to bring me to that moment at the Aradian train station, the sole survivor of my old world, atomically blown to ash , silenced by the wreckage of all I’d known.

 

 Understanding that everything behind me culminated in the freedom of what lie before me.

 

And I walked into a new life. Not one characterized by listening to the voices of the flesh, the ones that told me I was reckless and selfish for leaving my father, the ones that told me I didn’t have what it took to make it when times got hard, the ones that labeled me a coward, a corner-cutter, and a flaky disciple.

 

Instead, I opened my ears to the Spirit and decided He was the one who needed to lead me through the wreckage of what I’d lost and the discovery of who I’d find.

 

And in Romania, He loved me.

 

In Bulgaria, He dazzled me.

 

In Israel, He traded my sandy foundation for His rock.

 

In Turkey, He completed my healing from depression.

 

In Kenya, He commissioned me.

 

In Uganda, He initiated me.

 

In Tanzania, He revealed me.

 

In Viet Nam, He established a ministry of compassion in me.

 

In Cambodia, He answered my questions.

 

And in Thailand, He questioned my answers.

 

My Race truly began when everything else in my world died. And I learned to die, again and again and again, over everything. To depression, or selfishness, or not wanting to go the extra mile for someone because I was tired. And when the day came that I descended eastward from the Memphian sky, I stepped into a world that once built me, but no longer defined me.

 

***

 

 

***

 

Three years ago today, I was born.