2020… what a year!

I think historians will be wrestling out ways to express the overall shape of these past twelve months. Sometimes it feels more like we’ve collectively lived a decade in this single spin around the sun.

Think about it for a second. If you could use one single word to describe this ‘brick through a window’ of a year, what would it be? How would you sum up all the brushfires, murder hornets, swarming locusts, political intrigues and global revisions?

I’m beginning to think this year has really just been an extended Charlie Brown cartoon. We seem perpetually stuck in the frame where Lucy invites Charlie to kick the football. Invariably, despite all her promises and cajoling, Lucy always pulls the football away at the last second sending him reeling across the scene. Like Charlie, it’s as if the world is screaming one collective “AAUGH!” as we hurdle back to the hard, unyielding earth.

2020… what a year!

A Rosary of Themes

Ironically, I started this year with a word in mind. Every year we pray for God to set a theme for our family. We take the first few months of the new year, seeking the voice of God for a word, a prism through which to pray and read and walk.

Over the years its been amazing to look back and see how God was preparing us for the life-shaping and life-shaking events to come. In 2007, I started writing down each years theme, watching them develop and form into seasons. That year of growth was followed by a much needed year of restoration (2008). They flowed like winter slowly melting into spring. 2010 was the year we made contact. Our feet touched African soil and a summer season burst into brilliant life and color.

When we set faithfulness as our theme for 2015 could we have ever expected to walk through the most difficult days and darkest nights we’d ever experienced. Days when I struggled to find clarity and energy. And yet, undergirding it all was that year’s theme God had spoken to us: faithfulness.

In my journal now rests a rosary of themes, beads of experience. Looking back, we really should have seen it coming when we felt the Lord saying “Transformation” as we prayed for 2020.

This year has upturned plans and strategies. It’s trampled underfoot goals and intentions. And throughout these days and months we’ve felt the transforming power of the Holy Spirit at work, revealing Christ’s glory in our weakness and creating space for us to celebrate His beauty!

Praise God for this year is throwing away the cookie-cutters of ministry, the ways of doing ministry that have become ingrained and inflexible (Psalm 104.24). Thank God this year is disconnecting us from the plug-and-play systems that undermine the Holy Spirit’s call to innovate and pray (Romans 12.2). Today, let’s extol His name as we commend His ways, and not our own, to a new generation (Psalm 145.1). Let’s rejoice that He is replacing our tired attempts to repeat what He’s done in other places and times with new things we could never have imagined (Isaiah 43.19)!

2020… what a year!

A Way Made by Walking

Closing the book on this year and cautiously stepping into 2021 I’m reminded of the words of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, “The way is made by walking.”

Friend, its time to stop looking for the ‘tried-and-true-paths’ that promise success and simply follow Jesus into the unknown. It’s time to step into the new thing He is preparing for us. But make no mistake this will require trust. Perhaps that should be this next years theme: Trust. Trust that in the dark His command is a lamp showing us the way (Proverbs 6:23). Trust that in the unknown and unforeseeable His word is a light that reveals our path (Psalm 119.105).

This path may lead us deeper into the wilderness. If it does, praise the One that led us there. This new year’s journey may cut against the current of those around us ready for life ‘to go back to normal.’ If it does, trust Him all the more (Proverbs 3.5). Each step is building up our most holy faith. Every day on this pilgrimage is a new opportunity to stoke the fire of our love for God and one another.

This way is made by walking. 2021… what a year!

“Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.” (Jude 24-25)

As a child I loved to hear stories of great adventures, Hardy Boys braving all to discover the truth or unseen worlds of child kings and talking lions. My real world was one of transatlantic airplanes and the beautiful African rainforest where I caught fish with a spear gun and went to boarding school in the Great Rift Valley, so it wasn’t a lot for my ADHD to color the pages of my life with the adventures I heard in those stories.

When God called me to be a witness of His love to the nations I can’t remember experiencing any reticence. My life was made for high adventures! Why should that stop when I left home?

Over the years my heart to carry the gospel to unreached peoples grew. I would read about distant cities filled with men, women and children where the good news was unknown and my heart would break; seeing pictures of lost people my hands would become stained with easily shed tears.

In college, I met an incredible young woman who spoke as passionately about the lost as I did. And after wedding bells and years of ministry the two became three with number four on the way. Finally, the door to distant lands was open. The far off deserts of Northeastern Africa were open and God’s call was saying go.

Although we never faltered in stepping forward, setting our life in step with God’s call to the unreached a veil I’d never seen before appeared on the horizon. Behind the veil were a growing host of unknowns that hinted at immeasurable risk.

Was I willing to be a martyr? Yes. Was I willing to take my family where my wife and children could face martyrdom?… Those answers didn’t come so quickly. The hyperactive mind that fed my sense of adventure in childhood became a dangerous playground of terrifying thoughts.

Looking back, our years in Northeastern Africa filled our family with the most impressive tapestry woven of great and painful memories. Today, we rejoice remembering as we celebrated Christ with new brothers and sisters and endured persecution in a deeper way than ever before. Without a doubt, we were meant to be there, to laugh with those who laughed and mourn with those who mourned. We were called to speak people’s names and tell them the wonders of our God. We were commissioned to step out from the reached in the known to live Christ among the unreached in the unknown.

Unknown risk is the first veil that keeps followers of Jesus from reaching the unreached. It is not persecution that keeps men and women from proclaiming the gospel, but the fear of rejection and images of suffering the mind conjures up as we stare into the unknown.

We say to ourselves, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding,” but when the time comes to step out like Peter onto the turning waves do the unseen sea creatures of the deep keep our feet planted in the local church (Proverbs 3.5, Matthew 14.29)?

We ask ourselves what are we willing to sacrifice, but the true question, the question that God places before us is, what are we willing to gain? To our eyes the nations are shrouded in darkness where stepping out means risking more than we could imagine. Then the voice of God calls us higher and as we set out eyes above the veil we hear the heavens declare, “the whole earth is full of His glory!” (Isaiah 6.3).

In that place we are undone. Our fears and courage, our unknowns and knowns weigh around us as we recognize we have been invited into the very presence of the Lord, to be known, loved, redeemed and transformed. And falling to our knees, with contrite hearts and cleansed lips we hear God say, “Whom shall we send? Who will go for us?”

How will you answer?