On Staying, Leaving, And Which Is Harder

 

Only Perfect Love

I lie in a hospital bed. Tubes run in and through me. Though I remember that I am in the hospital, I do not know why I am in the ICU of Szent Imre Korhaz. 

It is morning. 

The light glides over my bed, streaming through tall glass windows as it bounces off the high rise cement apartment buildings across the street. 

I know two things: I am alive. I am loved.

Saturday marked a year since I went into the hospital in Hungary. Two grueling weeks in both my and my husband’s life which ultimately changed the course of our life. Before they happened, I would have thought staying overseas was harder and leaving was the easy way out.

But not now. Now I know there is another way to see both.

The truth is sometimes it is harder to stay. Sometimes it is harder to leave. But the hardest of all is to know perfect love so fully that we can walk either path without fear.

Life is seldom what we expect it to be. There are breathtaking surprises which change our lives forever. There are unspeakable tragedies that alter our courses profoundly. The only thing we can know for certain about life is that we do not know what tomorrow will bring.

Thankfully, our hope is not in this life.

I have learned this through my journey overseas and the crisis which led us to return home long before we planned. I have learned this through my mother’s cancer and death. I have learned it in the tragedies which daily flood the news, some more personal than others.

Yet, I thought too, I had learned about letting go of control of this life through the moves and transitions of our missionary journey. I thought I had let go of fear to begin a new life. It would be limitless faith, unreserved commitment and telltale determination which would see us through.

But the heart is subtly deceptive despite our best intentions to know it. Trial and suffering in the form of the unexpected have a way of revealing things. They show us what is really happening in hidden soul places.

For me, the crisis I experienced overseas was both horrifying and freeing. First the horror. Then the freedom. Likely, it would not be this dramatic with you or most people. Yet, what I most want to say is that this freedom is a gift coming in the form of perfect love. So is what comes before it, no matter how horrific.

When the apostle John speaks of perfect love in I John 4:18, it is preceded by a declaration:

‘We have seen and testify that the Father has sent His son to be the Savior of the world.’

He goes on to say that it is our confession of His Son that gives us a dwelling with God and he with us. It is a dwelling bound in love, His perfect love.

And that love is not tied to our staying in or leaving the country of our calling. It is completely wrapped up in the Father sending His Son to save the world.

Ironically, sometimes we move cross-culturally and expand our understanding of the world, only to have our view of God become smaller. His work becomes bound to our mission and host nation instead of the person of Christ. 

But it is in the times of our greatest need, when only perfect love will satisfy. It is then  that we see clearly what our deepest heart loves are. 

These moments are poignant. They come through disappointment, failure, crisis and tragedy. They mark both our staying and our leaving. They lead us through the refining fire, molding a faith more precious than gold. They bring forth the things that will remain when we stand before God and hear the longing of our hearts, ‘Well done.’

They cannot be defined by geography, only perfect love.

For You in the Trenches

prayer

All weekend I have thought about what to write this morning. I think about world events and how they have filled up our newsfeeds, yet I also know that you live in your own world events. You live in places where bombs go off, where corruption runs rampant, where trash builds up because of anger at governments, where babies die too soon and young women and men lose their innocence to the evil of others.

So what do I say to you who live in the trenches; you who sigh as you hear the news, because you know how awful it is, you know how broken it is. You don’t need a bomb to tell you the world is broken. You heard God’s call to a broken world, a world he loves, and you try to live out that call every single day. You have given up what Rachel Pieh Jones calls the Western illusion of safety, instead you walk in the safety of God.

You have chosen a currency beyond fear. Because when fear is our currency, we cannot live effectively. Whether this be around parenting, around work, or around where we are called to live, this is truth.When fear is our currency, we forget that safety is not about where we live, or work, or play.

Safety is about knowing where our security lies, what we’re called to do, and who we’re called to be.

What are we called to when we face a broken world?

We are called to pray. For those of us familiar with the Muslim world, we know that all of life is ordered by the call to prayer. Five times a day the call rings out across cities, towns, and villages. It echoes from minarets calling faithful Muslims to prayer. I am fully aware of the differences in belief systems and truth claims between Christianity and Islam – yet five times a day for much of my life I have been reminded to lift my heart in prayer. And those five times stretch to many times in between until I realize I am slowly learning that I can’t make it through this life without prayer; that the exhortation to ‘pray without ceasing’ is life-giving. That in the midst of senseless acts of violence, in the midst of tragedy, I am called to pray. Called to pray to a God who hears and loves, a God who is present in tragedy and accepts our “why’s”, a God who knows no national boundaries or citizenship, a God who took on our human pain and suffering when he “willingly endured the cross”.

Our God is a Global God; our God is a local God. Just as concerned about the person in my neighborhood who is hurting as he is about the tragedies in Baghdad, in Lebanon, in Paris. That’s what makes him God.

So what do you do when the hurt of the world is too much to bear? You put your head down and pray so deeply it hurts. And then you go to work doing what you know you’re called to do for the day, because you are not the Saviour, you are only the saved and that by grace alone.

So I pray for you this day – in Thailand and Djibouti; in Colombia and India; in Senegal and Singapore; in Montreal and Kansas; in Egypt and in Lebanon, and so many places in between.  Thank you for who you are and what you do. May you know mercy and grace, laughter and joy. May you see beauty in the broken, and hope in the midst of confusion.

*Author’s note: this piece is a collection of several different pieces written on Communicating Across Boundaries in the past 4 years.