Kingdom Come

Our team is so much smaller this year that the first few meeting felt a little like a toddler clomping around in Dad's oversized shoes. What do we do with all of this space? How do we function as a small-ish team of eleven, rather than an army of twenty-two?

What do we do in a world where counting heads requires a glance, not a calculator and a roster?

We use long layovers for scavenger hunts. Pull in close to tell stories and give instructions. And, then we make the team even smaller.

Pro tip: don't wash your passport and then try to travel with it. Very sweet consulate officials in Atlanta will smile and laugh at you and then walk away to solve your silly problem.

Because, there is nothing that will tear down any misplaced assumptions of knowing what a trip will hold faster than standing at the boarding gate of a third and final flight with a seventeen-year-old who is being told that trying to get through customs on that passport will get her deported.

Yeah. No, thanks. That is not the kind of story that we want to go home and tell.

So, the two of us spark a flurry of phone calls early Sunday morning. Is it fixable? Where is it fixable? What do we do in meantime?

And, then we take a deep breath. Because, the only thing that we can do is wait and pray.

Pray for the team that we sent ahead of us. Pray for grace from passport officers. Pray our way through last minute but amazingly gracious Southern Hospitality, while we label bags for a craft show, and through countless rounds of HGTV.

Somehow, our story becomes their story, this mostly obscure high school trip a thing that all sorts of people are talking about, praying about, invested in. All because we got stuck in Atlanta.

But, we make it.

We step around that final corner into heat and bright sunlight, and something in our souls unfurls. Uncurls a little more when we catch glimpses of blonde heads over the compound wall and find ourselves wrapped in the warmth and welcome of a team.

And, I hold on to this moment, because this is a little of what eternity will feel like, this joy that will fold over us like a blanket. This sense of completeness. Of having all the time in the world.

The Kingdom of God will be a little bit like Haiti. 

(Because, Haiti already is a little bit of the Kingdom of God. Already; not yet. Tension in the middle. This theology of a coming reality that is already real.)

The stories we have built up inside us will come bubbling forth, good, bad, and beautiful; until we can see the Glory that is painted across it all.

We will eat. We will talk. We will play and watch and laugh, and our hearts will ache with the beauty of this thing.

We will grow quiet, sometimes. Pull up a circle of chairs and murmur about the things that we have seen God do, not just now, but in moments that stretch back to the beginning of Creation. We will glance around in awe and wonder, and we will know that this God, our God, is so very, very Good.

And, then, we'll wake up the next morning - if we ever need to sleep - and we will get to work.

I don't know exactly what work will look like in eternity. But, I know what work looks like now. I know the messy, sweaty, joyful, painful reality that is building relationships. The Shalom that we create one heart, one moment, one plate of food, one whisper of truth at a time.

I know the Divinity that shines through when we reach out a hand, figuratively and physically, to pull each other over obstacles. When fears are faced together. When names are known and stories are internalized. When nothing tangible is too precious to be shared and everything intangible is too precious not to be.

And, that's the sort of work that we get to in Fond Cheval.

My kingdom would have gotten us here faster, would have smoothed over the bumps in the road, would have greedily snatched up every moment that I could eke out of these eleven days. But, this isn't my kingdom. This is His.

This is His Kingdom come.