Obey

“What if a global, God-exalting, passionate idealism is exactly what is needed in the lives of individual Christians today? What if these radical Christians joined together in communities of faith called churches that were surrendered to the purpose for God's people that has been primary since the beginning of time?”

 - Radical by David Platt

I'm sitting in my apartment as I write this, listening to the rain lash against the corrugated metal roof (Why is there not a single word for that in English? Swahili is so much easier sometimes!) of the car parks outside (which have currently been rendered all but useless by the weather) and remembering that same sound against my roof in Kenya, glad to know that, despite the weather, I will not be wading through calf deep puddles of water and sewage and trash to get to church in the morning, and none of my teammates will be waking up in the middle of the night to find their entire compound flooded and several inches of water inside their house.

No one's home will have been washed away. No women will come knocking on my door looking for food and clothes to replace what the waters took with them. All of the roads will be drivable and the trash filled gullies will not have been swept clean to pile up elsewhere downriver.

No walls will have been knocked down and no dormitories will be filled with mud. There will be no malaria outbreak, because there will be few puddles and none of them will breed mosquitoes.

When I do get to church in the morning, there will be no donkeys braying outside the window, no herds of goats to pass along the way, and a UNICEF lori rumbling up the dirt road won't drown out the voice of the pastor.

I realize that I miss certain phrases of the liturgy and the awkward sound of the off key hymns and the polka beat that always seems to come out of keyboard.

And then, I wonder. What does a “global, God-exalting, passionate idealism” look like? Does it look the same here as it did in Kenya? Will it look the same in Haiti this summer?

I don't have an answer for that, but I think that, maybe, it is one of those questions that never has an answer, because the answer always changes.

Maybe, “global, God-exalting, passionate idealism” simply looks like obedience. Wherever we are and in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, maybe it is enough to simply, moment by moment, obey.

Maybe that will change the world.