“Oh, I knew what I wanted all right: to find somehow a life
that broke out of the mold. To find adventure. To get away from … the mental
set that was constantly looking backward” (God’s
Smuggler, Brother Andrew, p. 21).
When I read those words for the first time approximately
three years ago, something deep in my spirit stirred. The sudden movement
caused a massive shift, sending deeply-rooted desires hurtling to the surface. For
a visual, picture the genie from Aladdin coming out of his lamp: “AAAAAHHHHHH! Oy!
Ten thousand years will give ya such a crick in the neck!”
Brother Andrew’s mission, spawned from his own yearnings,
became a story worthy of a first-rate fictional character like James Bond.
However, the writer of Brother Andrew’s journey was not faced with the burdens
of page limits, predictable plotlines, or endings that succinctly tied up all
loose ends. God created a unique masterpiece when He opened the doors for
Brother Andrew to smuggle Bibles into Communist Eastern Europe. It was a
journey fraught with peril, intrigue, and…spirituality.
Somehow, I could not reconcile the God I had been experiencing
with the God I was seeing in action through the story of Brother Andrew. My
spirit ached to see God move in amazing ways—making seeing eyes blind to
hundreds of Bibles, creating connections between the most unlikely of people.
This was the God I had read about and the God I wanted to experience. The
reality that Brother Andrew walked in pushed my boundaries with God and spurred
my hidden desires of adventure, justice, and passion.
From that moment on, I was acutely aware of the dreams I had
stuffed, the unbridled passion that longed to be free, and the restless knowing
that there had to be more than the life I was living. I knew that God had
placed in me a holy restlessness, a readiness to go and risk and move. The
hardest part was waiting on the Lord to open the doors for the adventure to
begin. Or perhaps the difficulty truly came when I realized that every moment
of life could be an adventure with God when I allowed Him to write my story.
