When you give these girls paintbrushes and an abandoned bus, truth spills off of their fingers.
So, we load a few of these art loving, adventure seeking girls into a borrowed minivan and spend a few hours letting them loose on the world.
Fill the drive up with confession and grace, with theology questions and plans for summer missions trips. Pull up the "highlight verses" and quotes that we would have shared at cluster and mark them onto this giant canvas instead.
And, at first, they don't quite believe me. Really, we can paint it? Won't someone care? But, this is the Pacific Northwest, where we happen to keep abandoned school buses in the middle of the desert until they are covered with layers of words upon words upon words.
So, paint brushes are pulled out and old spray cans are co-opted as pallets, and they fall into a comfortable silence as they work. Words about peace and courage and doing small things with great love. About light and life and the quirky ways that they have been created. Truth that is no less true for the fact that, a month from now, you might never know that we were here.
Because, today, they live it as well as paint it.
On narrow, well worn trails, and steep paths where we pull ourselves, hand over hand, along a rope that someone laid out before us, they are courageous and they are gentle, they are fierce and they are fearless and they are kind.
And, I pray that they are learning to see themselves the way that their leaders see them, the way that their Creator sees them. Because, these precious lives were not by accident.
And, that is the magic of it.
That, when the waters were first carving these rocks, when these rocks were first starting to cool, when the universe was still too small and too hot to measure or grasp, before time began, there was a Creator who put this spark in them.
This spark that we pour out out on bus that is twice as old as any of them, and on a path that has been worn by hundreds and thousands of feet. This spark of Grace and Light and Love, these hearts that want nothing more than for everyone to be invited to the party. This was put into these kids on purpose.
Into these girls who are already talking about who we could invite "next time," who are wishing that the boys were here, who have never quite been able to wrap their heads around the lines that we draw between small groups, between clusters, between genders; who only know that there is time to be spent and adventures to be had, and shouldn't everyone be invited to come along?
Into these girls who do hard things, even when they are scared, and who love deeply, even when they know that it will hurt.
Into these girls who know that the Holy Spirit in them means that they can breathe Grace and Mercy from the very core of their beings.
And, into these girls who can come back with tired legs and hungry stomachs, who have washed theirs hands in the spray of a waterfall and then dirtied them again scrambling up a shale covered slope.
Because, when you give these girls paintbrushes, truth comes spilling out.
