It is Sunday before Christmas, 2010, and we are having a quiet afternoon here at home in CT. We moved to CT a year and a half ago. When we did, it seemed an almost unbelievably rapid shift in our life. Six months prior to leaving FL, we would not have ever seen such a shift coming. And then, in the blink of an eye, we were on our way to CT, a place neither Laura nor I had ever imagined as any kind of a destination for ourselves. Since then, admittedly with some bumps on the road, this place has become more of a home to us that we would have believed possible. And just as we are starting to plant ourselves here, just as unbelievably we find ourselves about to make another radical shift to the other side of the world. We never saw it coming, but here it is. In just over one month, Laura and I will be moving to New Zealand following the Lord on this wild journey that is unfolding before us in the Kingdom. So once again, we are about to give away all of our furniture, get yet another storage unit for various odds and ends that don’t need to travel the world, and take our hands off of the controls to see where the Lord might take us. We are partnered with the Westerfield family and Kingdom Reality Ministries, and that is an amazing honor. This opportunity that we have been given is all that we have ever wanted in the Lord. To have the chance to be right in the middle of history as the Lord brings cultural, social and eternal transformation to the nations… it is all so wonderful. It is a great privilege to be able to run with the Lord as he creates the world anew.
But there is a cost. As we have seen so often before, it actually costs us everything to step into the flow of what God is doing in and through our lives. It is everything that I want, to spend my life in the pursuit of eternity. But what we have found is that it requires us to lay down so many things that are very dear to us. Who knew that our coming to CT would bring us into relationship with people who we would feel totally at home with? Who knew that just as we were beginning to become truly committed in our heart to these friends, when vision for the future was just beginning to take shape and we were just getting settled in for some years to come, that just like that we would be saying good bye? And we have a choice: hold on to those whom we have now become so close to, or once again die to ourselves and let everything go to follow the Lord into the mysterious unknown. Too quickly, we find ourselves once again leaving those we love.
Yet as we have walked this thing out a little bit with the Lord, I have learned something. God is Love. The closer I get to God, the closer I get to Love. The closer I get to Love, the more I become love. The more I become love, the more I find I love everyone around me. There are always going to be some special ones who are particularly dear to you, and those will always be difficult to part with. But every step of the way, as things shift and reform with each new eventuality and change in dynamics, as old friends leave and new faces come into the picture, I find that the perfect picture comes more and more into view. The tapestry shifts and flows, the scene ever evolving into the whole scope of what is intended. And as I get a bigger and bigger perspective of the whole, I am struck by the realization of the Kingdom. This is the Kingdom, and it is in every way coming together. Relationship to relationship, connection to connection, covenant love to covenant love. And though at the time of separation parting feels painful, even final, in reality the web is just expanding. The net is stretching ever wider, the better able to catch the fish. And it just expands. This Kingdom is an ever increasing Kingdom. Of the increase there will be no end.
So leaving is hard in a sense, just as someone dying is sad. But it is only sad in a sense, and that mostly as a result of incomplete perspective. Because there will come a day in Glory when all things culminate. And the great connectedness of the Body and all of its organic life will be seen for what it is, and in that day the love that we share with one another will become what it was always meant to be but could never become this side of things. Where we see in part and love in part here, on the other side we will see one another fully, and the love that we will know for one another on that day will be a perfect love. The unity that we will k now then will be marked with such intimacy and awe. And the joy we will know in that moment will be indescribable, as we realize we are standing at the starting line of an eternity of perfect friendship.
Love really is the greatest gift. The most excellent way and the most powerful force, certainly, but without question it is God’s greatest blessing. It is Him. God is Love. He has given us Himself. He has given us each other. And those are the things that will prove to be our greatest delight. For all eternity, we will be exploring to depths of enjoyment in relationship with God and with each other. The Great Commandment is actually the Great Blessing. No greater joy will you find than when you discover the joy of true friendship. So we find it sad when we must leave those we love and move on into some new frontier. But we also understand. We do not really leave these friends behind; we never let go. As we move forward, and as they move forward, together we take a hold of others and make them a part of the ever-widening circle that is the Kingdom. We are a Kingdom. Though we always, like Paul with Timothy, long to be with those whom the Lord has given us, yet we realize that we can never really lose anything in the Kingdom. We will always be together in the Spirit, and we will always be together in eternity, and that truly is the greatest gift of all. So once again, we find ourselves about to embark on another leg of this journey, and we know we will find new and wonderful friends on the other side, each one a world of discovery waiting to be made. What a wondrous mystery!
