There and back again

Well I'm back from Namibia, and gone and back from TLC and now getting ready to leave for Soulfest later this week. It's been pretty wild, all this traveling, but every time I seem to learn something new about myself or ministry or something else. The Education of Life, I think they call it. There's no way to explain or summarize everything I've been processing through so far this summer in one blog post so I'll hit some highlights and leave the rest for the ongoing conversations.

Probably the biggest thing I've been interacting with is the sovereignty of God. God sovereignly arranges the events of our lives to bring about His desired ends. This much I know in my mind and I've even begun to base my life on it, but as I continue this journey with God I continue to discover to an increasing fullness the true extent of His sovereignty. While the choices and decisions of the immediate moment seem to be mine, God has ordained them all. God put together our team, planning a unique experience and purpose for each person. God designed the relationships we would develop and the people with which each of us would enter into conversation. God foreknew the pain and emotion those relationships would cause, as well as the lessons that can only be learned on the other side of pain. God uniquely chose me and the 5 others in my Kombie to be in a death-defying car accident and walk away virtually unharmed. God ordained it all, before any of it came to be. Why? Well, that answer I will never know in it's entirety so long as I am still enslaved to time, but I can see some good. I can see a student experience for the first time the peace that God's in control. I can see another student share a testimony and interact with people she never would have met if she had stayed on her original team. I can see a hesitant introvert break down walls by risking to love and refuse to rebuild them after hurt and pain. I can't see it all, but I can see just enough to sustain me so that when I see absolutely no good, like sitting next to John Burke in hospice care thinking of his 16 year old daughter who just lost her brother to the same brain tumor, I can still trust that God knows what He's doing, that all this is for a reason, and that there's some good buried in all this pain.

A few people have expressed to me how much they enjoyed my final post on our Namibia 2006 Blogsite (Reflections). Apparently it's helped some people or maybe they just liked the style or something. Some even said I have a talent and should be a writer. I don't know about that, but I am glad it's helped some people. Ultimately I just chase down some thoughts running around in my head and scratch them down on paper. How God has it all worked out that the circumstances He uses to make me think certain things to make me write certain things to make somebody else find and read them and then use them in their heart, that's all a mystery to me. But then, who would want to follow a God they could fully understand and explain anyway.