Come and See

Stephanie and Andrew arrived yesterday, and all the reasons why I crave visitors came flooding back to my visitor-deprived self, like oxygen rushes into your system after you’ve been underwater a few seconds too long.
It’s not that the joy of God’s Work here doesn’t buoy us up. Or that your emails and comments don’t fill us with love and strengthen us. They do. It’s just that the day-to-day here keeps us hunkered down and closely focused on each moment. It’s like our life is a sample laid out on a glass slide, under a microscope, and we zoomed the focus in, almost on top of each moment.

When you come to visit, we stop, pull back from the “burn” range, and review all the things that God has done, and is doing. It gives us a fresh vision of how amazing God is. It makes us see a bigger Hand, a bigger Heart than ours. And it gives us the greatest joy to share it with you face to face, place by place.

I anticipate bringing you to all the places we visit by rote, and seeing it fresh through your eyes. I feel for you, because the sights are shocking and the anguish and despair that you will feel are overwhelming. But it’s this very depth of emotion that brings the Savior near. So near. And then His love takes over and you don’t even see the surroundings, you’re back in the “burn zone” of His service, where you’re being used, but He’s doing all the work. That’s where true joy fills you.

I love to show you and watch God slay you with His purpose and His plan. It’s so much more effective than my words. I can try so hard to express something in writing, and it may, or may not, come out right, but five seconds when God’s at work, and you are living and feeling everything I so wish I could put into words. Wish you were here.

Come and see what God has done: He is awesome in His deeds toward the children of man. (Psalm 66:5 ESV)