We Have It In Us

As Chase and I journey toward what the Lord has for us in Kenya, I sit and think about how our stories will meet and come together with our Kenyan friends. As we live and work with our brothers and sisters in Kimana, Jesus will be among the faces we meet and serve. God's presence and very life will flow in and through the community as we work to meet the needs of the people we love. It is only by God's grace that we are able to serve in this way. When ever I get discouraged by the amount of need, I rest in this: God just asks us to trust him. That's all. Day by day. And although that is risky and can be scary, we have no doubt that he will be there with us. As we use our various gifts to attend to the emotional, spiritual, and physical needs of these people, he alone will give us the strength and ability to be Christ to each other. I think Frederick Buechner puts it well in the piece below from his book Secrets In The Dark:

Because of this story of Jesus, each of our own stories is in countless ways different from what it would have been otherwise, and that is why in speaking about him we must speak also about ourselves and about ourselves with him and without him too because that, of course, is the other story we have in us to remember and tell. Our own story.Yet they meet as well as diverge, our stories and his, and even when they diverge, it is his they diverge from, so that by his absence as well as by his presence in our lives we know who he is and who we are and who we are not. 

We have it in us to be Christs to each other and maybe in some unimaginable way to God too--that's what we have to tell finally. We have it in us to work miracles of love and healing as well as to have them worked upon us. We have it in us to bless with him and forgive with him and heal with him and once in a while maybe even to grieve with some measure of his grief at another's pain and to rejoice with some measure of his rejoicing at another's joy almost as if it were our own. And who knows but that in the end, by God's mercy, the two stories will converge for good and all, and though we would never have had the courage or the faith or the wit to die for him any more than we have ever managed to live for him very well either, his story will come true in us at last. And in the meantime, this side of Paradise, it is our business (not, like so many, peddlers of God's word, but as men and women of sincerity) to speak with our hearts (which is what sincerity means) and to bear witness to, and live out of, and live toward, and live by the true word of his holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all.