Romancer. (Knowing God, Pt 1)

Last month through a random series of conversations, a challenge arose to talk about who God has shown Himself to be to me outside of who the Bible says He is.

First and foremost, God is a Romancer.

I’m a girl always on a mission–even when I’m relaxing I’m still plotting out a mission in the deep crevices of my mind. So about five minutes ago I was walking to my room at the American Recreation Association (keep reading) in Kampala to get my computer charger, and something stopped me dead in my tracks. This never happens. Nothing causes me to turn around. Few things can divert my focus, so this just about knocked me off my feet.
It was an overly fragrant jasmine bush…and it smelled like heaven. One flower is now sitting next to me on my breakfast table along with my fresh brewed coffee (non-instant coffee is hard to come by here in Africa) and pineapple that tastes like divinity.

So many times on racers blogs, we write about the tough lessons, the rough stuff we’ve seen, the pain we’ve walked through with people. The stories we write wrench hearts and make for tear-soaked faces. But, so much more than God showing me what breaks His heart throughout the world, He has shown me how radical of a Lover He is. He romances me in the strangest and smallest of ways. So if you’re one of those people who struggles to look at God as more than a Dad but also as a best friend and romancer, then let me be the first to tell you how much He loves you, that you are His bride, you are His beloved.

…

Here’s just a random sampling of ways He has loved me this year.

1. Uganda– Let’s begin with why I’m at this place at this moment. Rewind about five days. No two teams were originally placed together for ministry this month, but somehow Team Wreckonciled ended up living in the same compound as us because of a random series of events (*2),and their awesome team leader‘s pastor from Texas happens to run an amazing non-prof (*3) in South Sudan (*4), and he happens to be staying in Kampala for a few days. Now, Joy was meeting with him and lovingly offered for me to come stay the night with her in the hostel for our free day. On the race, you never pass up an opportunity like this. We arrive here, and as you can see from their website, this is no hostel. We have hot water. We have our own beds with CLEAN sheets. We have a REAL toilet. We have mosquito nets that fall idyllically like curtains around our sleeping area. After seven months in third world countries, you know there is no other word for this other than romantic. They have Reese’s peanut butter cups and Sun Chips…and jasmine flowers. Only a God who loves to love me better than I love myself would give me this right when I needed it most. And outside of his radical love for me, I can find no other reason that He would want to bless me so much.

2. Kenya–Now, the Creator of the Universe and everything in all of eternity goes out of His way all the time to work all things together for good. He’s the craziest maestro. Like I said in Kenya Recap, He took me on a motorcycle ride and let me dance in sunflowers. Say what?!

3. Thailand– He brought me back to Phuket. Enough said. Back when I was seven years old and visited for the first time, I prayed constantly that He would give the chance to come back someday. Even through the crazy fifteen years that spanned between that prayer and my arrival, He wrote down that I wanted to go back. And so when I was sitting up at 4am in El Salvador and received an email saying our team would be in Phuket for month 6, I could not contain my excitement (which now comes in the form of tears). That’s LOVE.
And if that wasn’t enough, He gave me the world’s most beautiful beaches 14 of the 21 days we were there. (Yes, I swam there one morning).

4. El Salvador–a pool. There was a POOL at our house. There was a track up the road where I could run every morning just as the hot morning sun rose over Santa Ana.

5. Honduras–an entire month of being pursued by Him. Several mornings I would set my alarm for 5am, groggily bundle up, bumble down the road, climb through the brambles and mud to the edge of the pond, and hop back in my sleeping bag to watch the first rays of morning light break over the hillside. There is something so intimate about the silence of fog in fields when no one else is around to see it. He authored those mornings just for me. (*5)

6. Peru–volleyball. Every day.

7. Ecuador– chai lattes and a beautiful city.

8. Dominican Republic– a beach day, a track, and more than that, a little girl who LOVED me and who needed love.

Now these are only the really random things I can recount on the fly of how He has drawn me into His heart this year. But truth be told, He does it to me everyday all day–from providing hot sauce to multiple months with crazy-middle-of-the-night rainstorms on tin roofs. In a year where I went into this knowing it would be a year of abandonment, why would He provide so many things that are exactly contrary to abandonment?

If you have an answer outside of Love, let me know. Because every time I come to one of these moments, my heart and soul pour out “God is Love.”