squad leading is funny. for the past 7 days i have been traveling non stop. first from rwanda to nepal with the entire squad. a couple pit stops in ethiopia and india in between and just a few hours to not quite settle in in kathmandu before flying right back out. one of our guys, for reasons i won’t explain here, needed to go back to the states, and needed a leader to fly with him. out of the three of us, it made the most sense for me to go. i wasn’t the most excited, but i told Jesus that i wanted to practice loving real hard this year; He told me this counted.
trying to mentally prepare for 5 more days on planes, Jesus was speaking to me about process. He’s not just a God who meets us at the end of a thing or a season or our lives or when we have our stuff together. He’s a God who walks alongside us the whole way. He doesn’t just want our end results; He actually delights in the process of us getting there, or He wouldn’t have made it this way.
so here He was, whispering to me about finding joy in this process; that He wanted to meet me in the midst of it; that He actually wanted to do it with me. He said that He wanted to bless and love me along the way.
COOL, i thought. so i did what any normal person would do.
i gave him some suggestions.
leg room on the planes would be nice, God. oh, and defs please a dunkin donuts in one of the american airports por favor. seemed like some solid requests to me; stuff i wanted, but nothin too crazy; just about what He could handle.
the flights start, and i have MEGA leg room seats on each one. emergency rows, random upgrades to extra-legroom-@-the-front-of-the-plane-class, that front row thing that is basically the airplane equivalent of a ballroom where the baby beds fold out of the wall. so that’s cool; shoutout to God; oh, and right by my gate of my final US layover…a dunkin donuts! as far as i was concerned, the story coulda stopped right here. i felt so heard and loved and cared for by The Lord in these little things i had asked for that i wouldn’t have asked for anything more. and i was about to post this pic of how good God was for giving me this blueberry donut that i had been craving for the past 2 months of africa…and He was.
but He wanted to give me more.
on my way back to nepal, i had a 24 hour layover in hong kong. i had no idea what i was supposed to do with that, but i was able to leave the airport. i kept hearing Jesus say that He wanted to take me on a date while i was there. what did that mean? i booked the cheapest hotel with an airport shuttle i could find online and called it a day. i get to the airport, and of course there’s actually no airport shuttle. (that would have been far too easy, and not near as good of an end to this story.) i could have done the normal thing that a random white girl in a big foreign city she’s never been to should probably do and taken a taxi. but that would have also been too easy. so i, at almost midnight, for some reason, decided to take the public bus system to find my hotel. (don’t worry – it was legit and safe and stuff.)
i stumble around for a minute, asking questions, and buy a cheap bus ticket to a stop that they tell me is close to the place. i get in line to wait for the bus. i’m waiting for a while and a couple buses leave. i decide to ask the girl in front of me if i’m in the right place and hope she speaks english. i am. she does. she offers to take me most of the way; her home is in the same direction. we sit together on the bus and we talk. we become friends. she asks what i am doing so i tell her. she tells me that she is a christian too. (alert – that’s not normal. i am in hong kong…in other words…china. this is getting really cool.) we talk about Jesus and missions and where i’ve been and how she went on a mission trip to cambodia last year. i ask her what she does – school? work? casual answer? she performs at disneyland. we continue to talk as we ride and i ask her what she suggests i do on my one day in hong kong. she gives some suggestions and then she looks at me.
“do you want to come to disneyland?”
(how can a girl say no?!?!???)
YES.
so she would be working, but told me how to get there, and said she’d meet me at the gate at 11.
and that’s what happened.
and me and Jesus played together at disneyland all day.
i haven’t even told you about how when i got to my hotel, my entire room was soccer themed and there was a foosball table and a soccer net and ball to play with in there. or how it was overlooking the beach and also the whole city. or how i went on a run along the city/sand and was interrupted only to learn tai chi from the adorablest little chinese woman. oh, or how there was ice cream for dessert on literally every flight of this deal as well.
the point of all this is,
God is a DAD who really loves to love His kids. we get so caught up in doing things for God and with God that we way too easily forget to just BE His son or His daughter.
think about it this way:
what human dad doesn’t wanna take His little girl to disneyland?
why wouldn’t God as well?
He’s not all work and no play, guys. He actually LIKES that we’re kids.
He delights in our wonder, excitement, awe, playfulness.
He also delights in our asking and our faith even when it’s really really small.
Jesus said that if we had faith just the size of a mustard seed, that we could move mountains. (Matthew 17:20)
He wants our faith to be bigger than mustard seeds, but mostly He just wants us to have some.
the day before i flew to hong kong, someone had told me that there was a disneyland there. i wanted to ask God to toss me a free ticket, but i really didn’t. it seemed too far off; pretty impossible; askin too much.
but nothing is impossible for God. and He actually wants us to ask Him for things.
and (this is biblical) to ask and ask and ask and ask for things.
He likes to be our Dad. He likes to give us things.
and He’ll tell us no if He needs to;
but sometimes He likes to surprise us with gifts.
just to show us how much He loves us.
this was His own little way of saying to me,
“I see what you’re doing! I see you! I see it all! you’re doing well and thank you!
now just take a break and be my daughter and play with me!”
(and He knows i love to play 🙂 )
so often we ask God for a donut when He actually wants to take us to Disneyland. i’m thankful that He’s not limited by my confidence in His ability or by my boldness to approach Him as a good Daddy.
He’s the most majestical One there is.
