Almost There

Two more days.

Monday, our dearest friends will collect us from the back porch of the church that has been our home, figuratively and eventually literally, since soon after we moved to this frozen forsaken tundra  Chicago. I remember that day—it was cold, and I was pregnant, and grad school housing, and then I got anxious because the move was not moving fast enough for me so I single-handedly shot put a very heavy microwave on top of the fridge, pulling a back muscle in the process and then subsequently spending a night of intense paranoia counting baby kicks just in case I had managed to pull one of her muscles too.

We’re a bit more experienced at this whole moving thing now, and we have a system worked out. I organize the items, whether physically or just on paper, and come up with a detailed plan of attack. Then I take our tornado  darling Teresa far far away so Daddy can execute said plan.  This has successfully resulted in 7 fully packed suitcases to take to Zambia and box after box after bookcase after knick-knack to bequeath to our unsuspecting friends, or just rid the world of entirely.

There is such relief—such deep, raw, piercing relief—in paring down your physical belongings to a series of suitcases. Folks keep asking if I think we’re forgetting anything, and the honest-to-goodness answer is that it really doesn’t matter and I really could not care less right now. We’re going to be just fine. And yes, it will be hard, and we will miss the luxury and the simplicity and the efficiency of life as we have known it, but I think it is time for us to try a different kind of life.

We desire an environment that repeatedly brings us to our knees.

We do not desire to experience fear, or pain, or for those around us to experience those things.

We desire to divorce ourselves from dependence on material possessions that delude us into overconfidence in our own agency.
We do not truly desire to go without.

We desire to answer the call set before us and go.

We do not desire to part with those who, by the mercy of God, have loved us truly and purely and unselfishly enough to send us out.

We desire to share the Gospel in deed and word, to put our hand to the plow and not look back, to shoulder our crosses daily.
We look at each other, and our precious daughter, and we desire to be safe.

We desire to never ever pack a suitcase ever ever again.

We desire to never ever pack a suitcase ever ever again.

So we are occasionally consistent.

Our hearts are full and miraculously at peace in anticipation of the journey before us. David keeps sneaking into the yard to practice juggling the soccer ball. I’m “busy” gleefully nerding out and compiling study materials for the beast-of-a-nursing-exam that awaits me on the other side of the pond. Teresa has been dragging this suitcase around for 2 days now, or else demanding that we drag her around inside of it…

And so the dueling desires pick at each other a bit, but the desires of our souls sing louder and louder as we remember, time and again, that perfect love drives out fear. Fear of pain. Fear of want. Fear of loneliness. Fear of danger. Perfect love does that.

So off we go, in all of our imperfection, to teach and heal, but surely also to learn and be healed. Because really, that-- all of it-- that's kind of what the nitty-gritty day-to-day of the Christian walk is.