The final day of my travel blog is here, I made it home. Jose and I travelled together for 37 hours through 5 countries and 5 airports to arrive back at home in Central Iowa by about 1:00 p.m. on Thursday. If you haven't experienced such travel, maybe God is calling you to give it a shot. It really is a very intense time of practicing endurance for the Kingdom. By the time I went to bed in Iowa last night, I had been up for 47 hours and was operating on roughly 2 hours of restless sleep on the Rome-to-Chicago leg of our flights.
But God is faithful. My watch tells me I got 6 hours and 23 minutes of "Poor" sleep last night. But my body says otherwise. It feels really good to crawl out of my own bed at a familiar 5:41 a.m. hour. It feels so comfortable to start my day with my familiar caffeinated Bubbl'r. Those are the 2 words that have been on repeat since I arrived back at home: comfort and familiar.
Our American lifestyle is so comfortable. In less than 18 hours back in my own community, I've recognized the comfort of: my home, my bed, my shower, my bathroom, my kitchen, my dog...food, ice, weather, exercise, my love seat and TV...our favorite restaurant with my super familiar NY Strip steak, prepared the same way it has been for the past 10 years. I'm sure I could go on and on...comfort and famliar.
I'm even starting this day with a very familiar passage that gets me back into my very familiar Bible Time routine: "But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us - not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to His mercy - through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit."
I'm reminded that our God has an incredible love for us, and that love took Jesus to a very uncomfortable and mostly unfamilar place. He did this incredilble work of righteousness - not so that I don't have to, but so that I get the priviledge of mimicking that work. S2S has given my brother Rob and I the opportunity to experience discomfort and unfamiliar not so that we can be saved...but so that we can mimic God's love.
A couple of final thoughts as I turn this blog back over to brother Rob this weekend. First, I'm thinking that I won't likely go back to Zambia again without building something. I'm sure that sounds kind of funny to folks who know me well, because I really can't build anything. Construction isn't one of my skillsets. However, now that I've seen what can be done with a couple of gifted men like William and Jose, a handful of concerned American donors with surplus, a beautiful Zambian church that is willing to sacrifce much, and a God who can bring us all together Shoulder 2 Shoulder...well, I just think I've got to do that again.
And secondly, I do think I am going to help American Christian men understand better that what Paul says in Ephesians 2:10 is so true: "For we are His creation, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time so that we should walk in them." That God preordained this trip to Africa for us, and prepared our S2S team for a couple of weeks in Chipata away from their famlies, and tee'd up a rural African village community for this beautiful expression of His love; well it is simply what God does. He is kind and merciful. He is renewing us all. His Spirit is incredibly powerful. It is time to see what He has in store for S2S over the next 12 months.
Here we go...
