We are the people of the Globe. Not a city or a state, or even a single country, but the whole wide world–
the one He’s got in His hands.
We are a people made tender by airport goodbyes and flexible by the travel we log after those tears have dried. We are those who open Christmas presents over Skype, who sleep in foreign beds in our home countries, who taste the pain of the missed funeral, the birth, and the regular family dinner after church.
We are a people not of roots like the Oak, deep and strong, but a people of roots like the Aspen, wide and connected, whose strength is in its breadth. A people who taste the bitter and the sweet of yet another transition, those that wrestle with the belonging, those that understand-deep that we are all really aliens and foreigners on this mass of dirt we call earth.
We are a people whose compassion runs deep because we’ve seen with our own eyes the orphan, the starving, the slave; “those” people have become “our” people, in fact. We might be men and women of last year’s fashion, but we are also people of this year’s front line.
Our kids may not be on the cultural cutting-edge, but they have walked the cliffs of big-faith and hard-truths and they have witnessed a God who shows up. Again and again. And again.
We are men and women whose hearts bleed for those with different skin, and we are people that experience the Bride in houses and underground and among mud walls. We are those that struggle, that fail, that adventure, that hope.
People of both dramatic stories and mundane survival; people that go and let go.
We are those that have tasted life outside the boundaries and walk forever marked.
And we will continue to walk all over this whole wide world–
the One He still holds, in His hands.
*****
I wrote the above as I struggle with what it means to fully embrace this idea that missions is planted-deep in my heart. I believe fully that God can and does work in all corners of the globe, from suburbia America to African hut, and I do not belittle those that stay home by any means. It is honorable work to follow Jesus and love well, wherever that journey may lead. However, I am personally finding a new confidence in accepting that for whatever reason, God has birthed a heart for the globe in our family. And there is great hope in knowing that I’m not the only one.
