Pardon me if I seem a bit weepy. It’s just, I’m that sixteen year old girl once again. She’s sitting on an airplane, first time in her life, leaving behind everyone and everyplace she’s ever known and loved. As the plane begins its’ skyward ascent, an announcement from the speaker mentions that the air traffic controllers would like to say a “good luck and happy travels” to Dayna as she makes her way to a summer in Africa.
My uncle is on duty and his message makes me sob. There’s no turning back now. Underneath the excitement and adventure of hiking around Mount Kilimanjaro, sharing the Jesus Film with the Chaga tribe, there’s a subconscious understanding. This faith step will change me, and when I return to my home, I will not be the same. It's like I am announcing with my uncle, "goodbye Dayna", make way for change.
Since that summer twenty-four years ago, I’ve experienced that deep groaning of unknown journeying multiple times. It’s true, the faith steps I take change me, sometimes bringing great joy and other times excruciating pain. The current anxiety inside of me feeds on the unknown outcome. Will it be pain or joy this time?
This time around it’s foster care. I’ve wrestled with the nagging voice for a few years and now we are certified. There’s a happy baby lying beside me as I type.
Yet I know, this is no picnic our family is in for. There will be pain. There will also be joy. Mostly, I’m confident that this new endeavor will illuminate my mind and heart with more of Jesus. I’ll gain new understanding and insight that will forever change me and my perspectives on things. This often comes with what feels like open heart surgery. As Bob Pierce, prayed, “Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God.”
Luke 9. 51 tells us “As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem.” Of course, Jerusalem meant the cross.
The time approaches for me too, sooner or later I do not know. But I want to know Christ, to become like him in his sufferings, as Paul says, and so to become like him. As I await my time to be taken up to heaven, let me resolutely set out for whatever he calls me to. I trust him, for he is good, even if he is unpredictable. I know he’s faithful to complete the work he is doing in me.
There’s a chorus to a Sarah Groves song that says:
I’ve been painting pictures of Egypt
Leaving out what it lacks
The future looks so hard
And I want to go back.
But the places that used to fit me
Cannot hold the things I’ve learned
Those roads were closed off to me
While my back was turned.
So we’re off, not to Africa this time, but into the vast wilderness of orphans and adoption, foster care and brokenness, diapers and bottles, questions and learning, and oh so much more than I can imagine. I’m clinging to Jesus, the one who holds it all together even when I fall apart.
