Personal: Here's looking at you, kid.

When I think about how fortunate I am to have the support of so many people, I just get excited about the vision of reaching Sweden with a message of change and hope.

But more than that, I'm excited by this process of raising the support in the first place. I was gently but firmly reminded of this as I read an email from a extremely smart woman this morning.

In it, she quoted Oswald Chambers, which I'll reproduce in part for you here:

We should never have the thought that our dreams of success are God's purpose for us. In fact, His purpose may be exactly the opposite. We have the idea that God is leading us toward a particular end or desired goal, but He is not. ... What we see as only the process of reaching a particular end, God sees as the goal itself.

It's hard to keep this perspective, as my support-raising window winds down. With so little time and so far to go, it's easy to not only get discouraged but to also start working in the motivation of my human fears. I can forget, and am grateful to be reminded, that this process is where I am finding God. Again, it's a daily thing. God is not waiting for me at the finish line; he is not elsewhere. It's all right here.

Personal: Answering the Call

There are so many ironic and/or funny things I could say about a phone right now. I've spent the summer glued to mine, checking voicemails and email and making tons of calls and waiting for callbacks.

But when I see this picture, I think more about how ubiquitous public phones were even up to a few years ago. Now that we're firmly in the age of cellularization, I've noticed that the pay phone stalls are fewer and farther between.

In some not so old movies, the pay phone is what drives the plot to action: there's someone who waits in the shadows for someone else to get closer to the phone, and then they call (that's how I learned that you can call a pay phone). The tension builds: will the intended person pick up? Will someone else step in? What if they ignore it?

I think that there are lots of ringing phones surrounding us these days--I know, because I'm on the other end of just one of them--and it's hard to know which ones to answer, which calls are for us, which calls are for anyone and which calls are just for the protagonist of a particular story.

So I've been praying for wisdom, discernment, and peace for everyone who hears the calls that I've made. Maybe you know it's for you to support. Maybe you know it's for you to pray. In whatever shape it takes, I hope that you find the strength to answer the call in the way that's best.

Personal: What matters is living in the mess.

I am a self-confessed nerd. Long after I was supposed to have grown out of them, I kept reading The Magic School Bus series. There was something so exciting about eight-year olds the size of red blood cells or a big yellow bus that became a space shuttle. I was fascinated by the science of everyday life.

And since repetition is the key to all learning, I still remember what Ms. Frizzle would yell as she turned her classes loose on the surface of the moon or in the ventricle of someone's heart:

Take chances! Make mistakes! Get messy!

My poor parents must have hated this stage of my development because I refused to clean up after myself. My room was an exercise in chaos theory (still is, actually). I grew experimental strains of bacteria in the bathroom. I needed to see things for myself.

I don't have to make all the mistakes in the world for myself and I can learn from others' experiences (which keeps me alive most days). But I think that a crucial part of being and becoming a real human is a willingness to engage with the mixed-up, crazy world around us. We grow to know a God who loved humanity so much that he too came here to be in it and show us what it is to interact and take chances. I can't escape my need to follow Jesus into and out of these same daily encounters, and to find him right there with me in my messes.