It is the second and final night of the retreat, and the outside amphitheater is filled with crying junior highers and a passionate speaker. The battle cry is "Go!" because the lost souls are circling the earth and there are places where the name of Jesus is not known.
"Please stand if you feel called to GO!" The music swells, the call is made, and suddenly dozens of student are clutching a 25 page, full-color Missions Trip Guide for the summer of 2005. Someone has grabbed you by the hands and is praying wildly over you, her brow sweaty, her eyebrows furrowed.
In the worship choruses that follow, you are vowing to be a WorldChanger. You are carried by the crescendoes, hands lifted high above your head, asking to be used, asking for revival.
There has been a LOT of talk lately about mediocrity. about settling. about being luke-warm, and you are learning to fear it all. You are learning to fear smallness and normalcy.
At thirteen or fourteen, you have yet to taste alcohol, but you are determined to be "drunk" on all this passion. Your walk with God has taken on the wobbling, lurching quality of the intoxicated. You raise your arms higher, feel a wild hope rise in your heart, promise God that if He'll let you, you'll change the world for Him.
_____
At 21 years old, my life feels very small.
Most days, I stay within a fifteen mile radius of my suburban home, orbiting the boundaries of my world. School. Work. Church. Best friend's houses. Target.
The battles I fight daily are small ones, not for souls but for her to please stop ignoring me or him to please take one bite of your vegetables. I believe that the work of Christ involves standing between the oppressor and the oppressed, but the truth of it is that it's all I can do some days to stand between the six year old and his big brother, who's trying to beat him with a matchbox car.
I know full well that I have just this one beautiful life on earth and that the days are disappearing fast beneath me. I know what it feels like to ache for my life to mean something, to set the world ablaze.
But here's the truth: I'm in the middle of working on eight loads of laundry. yep. eight. because the piles got high during this last brutally difficult semester of school. I'm sorting through papers and powerpoint notes and binders, attempting to get organized for the next semester of school. I drive to work and I see my sweet kid's faces, and I ask her again if she needs to go potty. I cut up strawberries, scrawl in my journal, open textbooks again and again, and it all feels so small.
_____
There has been a shift in our culture and I feel it. Our collective conscience seems to have awakened to the reality of injustice. We are learning that that we can't simply speak about the living water, without also building wells; the good news to the hungry includes both the bread of life and actual, physical loaves.
I love the ways that people and organizations and ministries are orienting themselves toward clean water and adoptions and food drives and making the world better.
Remember the whole Kony 2012 thing?? Yeah, I sobbed through that whole video. All those children. All those signs. A generation coming together to change the world. Sex trafficking videos? I bawl my eyes out. Adoption stories? I weep.
But then, there it is again. That quest for bigness. I feel it in my heart now in the same way I felt it as a fourteen year old. It is intoxicating and burdening and I am impassioned to do something great. Start an organization. Raise a billion dollars. Change. The. World.
And then my phone chimes again to remind me that I have a pharmacology exam in two days, dinner needs to be made for the children, and I should probably keep working on those laundry loads. I feel the smallness close in on me again.
_____
Here's the thing, though. As I step into this new year, I am reminding myself of something that I desperately need to remember.
The usefulness of my life is God's concern.
Not mine.
My responsibility is not to change the world. It never has been, and it never will be.
and it's not yours either.
Our responsibility is to lean into the wild love of God. To be moved by it. To step humbly and obediently into it's bigness and find ourselves different there.
Whether the things I do change the world is not my concern. My job is to let my heart expand in His mysterious, perfect love so that when I meet the orphan or the widow or my neighbor or my sister or my enemy, I have something to give them.
God's love is power and hope and healing, and it has changed the world before. It will change it again.
It will change the world every day of my small, big life.
Praying that 2014 is marked by intentional love, radical grace, and the freedom to walk confidently in whatever we are called to.
