Holy Places
[bl]I[/bl] have a new friend on Facebook. We’ve never met, but we understand a piece of one another’s heart because our feet have both walked the orange roads of Uganda. Our eyes have seen the same poverty, our arms have held orphans, and our hearts have felt the longing to fulfill the desperate needs of a culture looking for healing and development. My new friend was expressing her deep sadness in anticipating her departure from Uganda after a few months of serving and loving among those beloved people. My heart felt a sharp pain as I read her words and recalled my own leaving.
The hardest places to leave are the places God leads us to.
Because those are the places where you are shaped and molded into a new person. Those are the places where your heart expands, your mind is open to new perspectives, and your eyes begin to really see.
The places God leads us to are holy, set apart from the places we travel to on our own will.
But here’s the wonderfully divine thing about God: he meets us in the places we go on our own. When our sin or stubbornness or selfish desire takes us to places he doesn’t intend, he will not abandon us. He will come to us, enter into our ways, our sin, our brokenness – like when he became flesh on this earth. He is good. And present in all things, in all places.
But the places where God is present and the places where he wills you are very different.
When you’ve experienced both, you feel and know the difference. They are both special. They are both spiritual. But the life that pursues God will find herself following God, rather than God finding her. And these places where she follows God requires great faith. Because sometimes these places are new or mysterious. Challenging or confusing. Like going to a land you have never been. Or traveling to a city to deliver a message of judgment from God. Or carrying a child that is from the Lord, not a man. Or fellowshipping with a Gentile. Or dying a humble death on a cross…
…Or leaving a job with great pay, in order to take one that is more right for your family. Or leaving behind a life you love in order to learn how to really live. Or adopting children after your nest has been empty for years. Or stepping away from church activities and programs in order to be more available to those who need to taste and see that the Lord is good.
It’s often difficult to anticipate a holy God. Because his ways are so different than our ways. We want higher, he wants humble. We want fast, he wants eternal. We want an easy journey, he wants a holy journey. We want to fix, he wants to redeem. We want what we think is right, he wants what he knows is good. We want perfection, he wants a genuine heart.
His ways truly are higher than ours. The places he is going are better than the places we are going. So why do we struggle with saying yes? With being available? With joining him? Do we not trust him?
Do we not trust our life to the very one who breathed it in us?
The places where God leads us, takes us, pulls us aren’t always fun filled, but they are spirit filled. And it’s this presence of the Spirit that keeps us longing for those places, drawing us back to serve more, love better.
Africa is not more spiritual than America. It’s a holy place on the journey of people seeking the will of God. And that is what sets it apart. In the hustle and bustle of American culture, those holy places are harder to find. We get lost in our schedules and religious practices, and we find ourselves following culture and traditions more than Jesus. But our faithful God comes looking for his people, enters into their buildings of worship, hears their cries, forgives their sin, and draws them closer to his heart. But it’s when God’s people begin pursuing him with genuine worship, available hearts and willing hands that radical living, going and helping take us to those holy places where God intends us to walk and live.
When my friend moves back home and wrestles with her identity and is challenged by old ways and perspectives that is what I want her to know. Her heart will long for Africa because it changed the way she sees and knows. She will never be the same.
My prayer for her is that she will live differently in her own culture because of what she now knows. That she will discover the holy places in the land she calls home. That her longing for Uganda will keep her heart soft for the purposes and intentions of God.
And maybe one day we’ll actually walk the orange roads together.
