Coming Full Circle: A Teardown and Rebuild Job

John 12:24-25 New Living Translation (NLT)

John 12:24-25 New Living Translation (NLT)

²⁴ I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels—a plentiful harvest of new lives. ²⁵ Those who love their life in this world will lose it. Those who care nothing for their life in this world will keep it for eternity. 

Over the last two weeks I have been transitioning back to Houston, my homeland and hometown.  I haven't often thought of it this way but I've spent most of my life right here.  I grew up in the elementary school years in Kingwood, them moved to Dallas and later to Lubbock for school.  After Lubbock I was intent on not going back to Houston, yet I wound up there after graduation so I could go to graduate school at the University of Houston.  In my wisdom at the time, I swore it would be just for a couple of years and then we would go somewhere else.  A full twelve years later, I followed God's call to Everett, Washington.  Now after 5 years, He has called us back to Houston.

It is so interesting to me that God would bring our family full-circle, coming right back to the city we left.  I remember telling numerous people who asked me over the last 5 years that I didn't see God ever taking us back to Texas.  I always described Seattle as the first step in God's journey and imagined other destinations, perhaps even outside of the United States in our future.  It seems God has His own plans.  And in a sense I was right at the time.  Seattle and the Pacific Northwest were just the first step in God's plan to tear down and completely rebuild me.  That is what He always seeks to do, to make things new in you and I.  It isn't a renovation.  It's a complete teardown and rebuild job.

God's Training Ground

I have begun to view Everett as a training ground, and it certainly was.  Language teachers will tell you that the most effective and fastest way to learn a new language is through immersion, where a person is in a culture and has to speak the language to communicate.  For those who want to learn Spanish, they move to Mexico and live there and interact with people on very basic things such as where things are located.  For those who want to learn how to relate to people who are different from them, they go live among those people.  Everett to me was this type of thing.

We faced many things in Everett that we had never seen before, many of them good and many bad.  And God used all of those to bring us to a place where we saw people through His eyes.  We lived in the middle of a vibrant and established city among families who had lived there for generations.  Making friends in such a situation is hard because no matter what, you are an outsider.  Relationships have been formed prior to you being there, so in many ways by many people we were seen as an oddity for quite some time.  I would say some there even viewed us with suspicion because they knew why we had moved up from Texas.  There have been many who have moved to the Northwest in an effort to "Christianize" it, so I think some felt we were just the latest wave.  Overall we were an unknown and might as well have been from another planet.  And in many ways I felt as though we were on another planet.  Things were so different.  Culture was so different.  Yet daily I woke up pinching myself and considered myself lucky to be there in Everett.

Our immersion experience in the new culture of Everett did not just end with merely forming new relationships with others.  We were forced to grasp with many things we had never seen before in our sheltered previous life.  We saw the effect that hard drugs have on people who you would never suspect of being users.  Certainly drugs were on the streets and the homeless population in Everett in large ways has been enslaved by them.  We regularly found used needles on the streets and in the parks where our kids played.  It was not unusual to see someone on the street who was completely gone, zombie-like, living only for the next high.  We saw it in neighbors and friends and watched drugs destroy families.  Witnessing these things has marked me deeply, so mush so that recently a friend made a joke about drug use and I found myself attacking him over it.  It was one of those moments where you take a step back and say "where did that come from?"  And I had to apologize.  Yet in that moment I recognized the deep effect it had on me.

Seeing God in a New Way

I saw God do something quite unexpected after we had lived there for several years.  He had made it to where we began to get connected in our community.  Amanda volunteered full-time at the local elementary school where my sons attended, and I worked as a principal in the same district.  We didn't really do these to find some way in with people.  This wasn't some strategy we cooked up.  It just happened naturally.  We made friends, learned how people thought and why they think that way and what gets them excited and what fires them up.  We shared their joys and their pain and walked through life together.  And we came to love them for who they are and where they are in life.  They became our people and we became their people.  Many did not know Jesus, some thought they did, and it mattered to us.  Yet even for those who wouldn't listen to the message, we loved them anyway.  And we enjoyed our time with them and thought that it would never end.

All along the way God was with us.  When He told us to go to the Northwest, we went with joy knowing that God was going ahead of us.  We relied heavily on Him in the first few months to provide for us, and He did.  We never were without food or shelter.  Even when I felt like a failure as a Dad as we met as a family in an aisle of Hobby Lobby in Everett, homeless, jumping from hotel to hotel, God intervened and showed me the way out of that.  We saw Him working in the churches we were a part of.  We saw what He was doing through kids and joined Him in creating Kid's Club, an after-school program intended to reach unchurched kids.  And we met with Him in the low times when things didn't make sense.  On dark days where we felt void of purpose or the energy to go on, God was there.  He met me many times on mountaintops and near rivers when I would go just to walk and sit with Him.  He was there to put an arm around me on my hard days when I cried out to Him, begging Him to provide relief from the pain I felt in ministry and in life.  He spoke clearly to me in so many quiet moments alone with Him, often reassuring me that I was never alone and that He loved me.  He listened as I would complain about circumstances I faced.  He stayed awake with me on the countless nights where I could not sleep due to high stress at work.  The God that I had known things about became the God that is Father to me.  And it was not He who changed;  it was me.

Kings and Queens of Narnia

Every time I passed our house in Everett or walked out the front door, I would consider the lamppost in our front yard which was imported some time ago from the great city of London.  Its image reminded me of the lamppost from the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  In the story, four kids discover a magical world by exploring deeply in an old forgotten wardrobe in their house.  The entry to this world was at a lamppost.  These four had many adventures in this new land, including being directly involved in defeating an evil queen who had ruled the land for a long time.  They grew up in the land and in adulthood eventually ruled as kings and queens.  They formed strong bonds with those around them and had a fulfilling life filled with purpose and meaning and liberty.  Much later in life while on a hunt they rediscovered the forgotten lamppost and found their way back into the wardrobe in their world.  They even went from being adults to becoming kids again, and they found the world they had left in the same place it had been when they had left it.  But they had changed.  They were children in body only, and mentally and emotionally had become something far different, and greater.

In much the same way our family has returned to Texas as changed people.  We are a little older and perhaps a little wiser.  I do not view the world the same way that I used to.  I do not look at people the same way either.  And I certainly do not think of God the same way.  God used the experience to change us and to make us new and to help us learn more about how to walk in relationship with Him.  We are different people than the ones who left Houston five years ago.

I expect the next adventure will have many of the same qualities that the first one had.  We will have ups and downs, will experience joy and pain, gain and loss.  And God will be there with us wherever we go.  He has promised me that and reminded me already many times that He is with me.  I now have the attitude that I would rather go through all of that, with Jesus, than to say no and miss what He has for me.  Jesus is worth it.

It has been hard to leave the Northwest, harder in fact than it was to leave Houston five years ago.  We have a deep emotional investment in that part of the world and particularly with its people.  Truly God has asked us to do a very hard thing in coming back.  And my heart breaks for those who do not know Jesus and who reject him with their lifestyle and actions.  Many, many people there have no relationship with God.  Many think they know Jesus yet there is no evidence in their lives.  Yet many are curious, which gives me hope.  And Jesus has not left the Northwest.  He has remained behind and continues to be quite active there, working through many dear and faithful servants on a daily basis.  The few Christians that are there are far more committed than many Christians in the south.  There is always hope where He is present and working through His servants who are surrendered to Him.

What about you?

I am hopeful that my reflections on the last five years have stirred something in you.  Many of us think too small when we look for God's work in our lives.  I still hear people say they are looking for God's leading on where they work, where they live, and in their financial lives.  None of those things are bad or wrong, but the context of it is very important. 

Are you looking for a new job because you are dissatisfied with your current one?  Are you not making the money you want to make or you are having trouble getting along with people there? 

With regard to where you live, do you want to move because you want a bigger house in "that" neighborhood? 

With finances, do you desire to see change because you are spending too much and want someone to save you from yourself? 

These difficulties often are not a sign that God wants you to change your context.  In fact, He may instead want to change you and keep you in your current circumstances.

I believe God is challenging us right now to truly throw caution to the wind.  He wants us to pray bold prayers that He would make us better followers, that we would have greater sensitivity to His Spirit, and that we would follow wherever He says to go.  He is looking for servants who will be filled with and follow His Spirit every hour of every day. If you and I achieve this type of relationship with Him, nothing will be the same.  He might take you to a different part of the world, but His real goal is to do a complete tear-down and rebuild.  He will do what needs to be done to make that happen whether it is moving you to a different place or keeping you where you are with a new focus on Him.  If we will just let God have complete control of everything, He will make us into people who will truly carry the Good News into this world in authentic ways.  He will cause us to live in such a way that people will look at us and recognize there is something different and better and God-sized.  He will turn you and I into people who LIVE the Good News.

I challenge you to turn your life over to God in that way today.  I don't pretend to have that all figured out, but I am certain that the Lord wants daily surrender from us, and that in that, we will see Him train us, change us, and will move in unexpected God-sized ways that are unmistakable to us and to those around us.  Will you make that commitment today?