Off to Albania, The Family Tradition Continues

This afternoon, we put younger daughter on a plane (ok, really a church van, that was going to the airport) to that wonderland of eastern European vacation spots, Albania.

For those of you who have suffered along with this blog for more than two years, you may remember that this is Daughter Number Two to pick this lovely location for a summer mission trip.  We are completely pleased.

Daughter will be traveling about 5,700 nautical miles from home; LA to London to Tirane.  But maybe she will be doing a whole lot more traveling than that.  It’s not just about a different culture, or people who speak a different language.  Maybe it’s about exploring the world, and really about learning about two crucial things.  Thing 1: God’s love for ALL of the entirety of the world, including this place called Albania.  Thing 2:  Understanding more about God’s love for each of us, and what He may be doing inside our souls.

I am amazed by this girl.  When most of the kids her age are obsessing over the demise of Lindsay Lohan, or completely absorbed by their little local social circle, or finding ways to waste hundreds of hours on Facebook all summer, this girl wants to try something else.  Can she articulate to others her motivation for traveling more that ¼ of the way around the globe, just to hang out in a little country without the ability to flush toilet paper for two weeks?  It’s no Hawaiian vacation.  What is going on here? 

Maybe, just maybe, it’s what people refer to as “that still, small, voice” , calling her to serve and make a difference.  Even if it seems like a small difference.  Playing games with kids, sharing a laugh, going to church where you cannot understand a word but strangely get what is going on, making a meal, cleaning up.  Little things.  Little things that make a lot of difference.  You will never know how much your just showing up means to the folks where you are going.

But strangely, mysteriously, God’s economy is often not based on grand events, or things that change the world in a day.  His sense of what is important is usually found in the small events of life.  A smile, a hand up, really listening to someone, loving when it’s not easy.

And so, my prayer for this group of teens and leaders:  

God, go with all these great kids and leaders.  Give them a real sense of purpose.  Help them to understand what is going on, even when they have no idea what people are saying around them.  Build solid relationships of trust and service.  Keep them free from mishaps and injuries and funky germs.  But most of all God, give them lots of laughter, because it seems to me that so much of what your Kingdom is about is found in laughter.  We laugh because we know You are there in the laughter, and you love us more than we could ever imagine.  It’s amazing.  And for our girl, give her peace and joy deep inside her soul.  Fill her with enthusiasm, even in times when she would rather be napping.  Fill her heart with laughter.  Amen.

This 4th, This Land, Our Freedom

Tomorrow will be the 4th of July.  BBQs with friends, flags and bunting, a parade down Main Street.  Bikes festooned with red, white, and blue streamers.  Fireworks just after dusk.

But there is so much more going on here - and it really takes place in the ordinary of everyday.  Its the making of freedom, the slow forging of liberty.  Its the way we live our lives.  We get up, get dressed, go to work, care for the elderly and the less fortunate, and in the process, we make, hopefully, something good.

Today I came across a piece by my favorite columnist, Peggy Noonan, and it talks about words that were edited out of the Declaration of Independence: 

And so were the words that came next. But they should not have been, for they are the tenderest words. 

Poignantly, with a plaintive sound, Jefferson addresses and gives voice to the human pain of parting: "We might have been a free and great people together."

What loss there is in those words, what humanity, and what realism, too.

"To write is to think, and to write well is to think well," David McCullough once said in conversation. Jefferson was thinking of the abrupt end of old ties, of self-defining ties, and, I suspect, that the pain of this had to be acknowledged. It is one thing to declare the case for freedom, and to make a fiery denunciation of abusive, autocratic and high-handed governance. But it is another thing, and an equally important one, to acknowledge the human implications of the break. These were our friends, our old relations; we were leaving them, ending the particular facts of our long relationship forever. We would feel it. Seventeen seventy-six was the beginning of a dream. But it was the end of one too. "We might have been a free and great people together."

 A free and great people. And interestingly enough, all these years later, Britain and the US are again "a free and great people together" in so many ways.

This 4th I am thankful for my country.  But more than that, I am thankful for those men and women, now stretching back more than 234 years, who have lived and died and sacrificed to make this land one of the best places to live on the planet. 

May we not waste this legacy and heritage.  May we use it wisely in future years to bless this planet.