Living All In

62: Days since I left Pittsburgh for training camp in Atlanta.

56: Days I spent with 18 of the most wonderful women I have ever met

50: Days spent in Nicaragua

??: Days still to come

When I signed up to go to Nicaragua, I was running. Running from reality, from growing up, from the future (futile), and mostly from fear. My college graduation loomed large only a few weeks away, and I was spending entirely too much time wearing suits, shaking hands with other people also wearing suits and talking about where I saw myself. The trouble was I didn’t see myself anywhere. 

While I’m not too proud of my splendid display of cowardice in what basically amounted to packing a duffel bag and running away from home, I do take comfort in knowing I ran to the right place. I didn’t run to a third-world country, or an orphanage, or even into the arms of a smiling child; I ran to my Savior.

You see, my time in Nicaragua wasn’t about planting rice on the side of a volcano to help feed impoverished families or the packages of food we delivered or the dirt we shoveled or the number of times we made a child laugh. It was about learning to live in God.

Christians these days know how to live with God: you go to church, read your bible, say your prayers, and maybe volunteer as an usher or something for good measure.  Perhaps you donate to missions or give up Wednesday nights to work with the youth group. It could even be that every moment of your life is devoted to the service of God. And yet (as I found out), you still might not be living in Him.

Don’t misunderstand me, absolutely none of that is bad or wrong, in fact it’s all great and each and every one of us should be doing more of it. But next to resting constantly in the true body of Christ, it’s all nothing.

It’s easy for us to think of the “body of Christ” as the church – the place you go on Sunday mornings to get coffee and hear someone talk about God – thanks to the English language’s double usage of the word. But the body of Christ described in the Bible makes no mention of a service with worship, a sermon, and activities for the kids. Nowhere will you find the Church described as building (even one with pretty stained-glass windows). Instead, you will find it repeatedly demonstrated as a body, living and breathing.

 Francis Chan tackles this topic in his book Forgotten God, where he paints a better picture of the Church than I ever could:

The church is intended to be a beautiful place of community. A place where wealth is shared and when one suffers, everyone suffers. A place where when one rejoices, everyone rejoices. A place where everyone experiences real love and acceptance in the midst of great honesty about our brokenness.

This is exactly what I experienced with my team in Nicaragua. We gave freely of our possessions, shared in extreme happiness at the smallest of things, cried in each other’s pain, and exposed our utter and complete brokenness. And because of that, I have never felt closer to God.

What we experienced in those 56 days together was the Church as it was meant to be. We didn’t have small group or a set bible study, we couldn’t understand many of the sermons, and much of the time there wasn’t anything for us to do but sit in awe at the beauty God had placed around us. But we were more a church than any building I’ve ever been in or any sermon I’ve ever heard (and I’ve heard some amazing sermons).

What made us a church was how entirely God permeated every aspect of our beings: every conversation included His name, every song was in worship even if it wasn’t “Christian,” every good thing came from Him and to Him went the praise, and every tear was caught in His hand. I didn’t live with 18 young women or 18 devoted servants; I lived with 18 embodiments of Christ.

I know what you’re thinking, because for a while I was guilty of thinking it too: that’s awesome, but you can’t have that in normal life. You can’t just talk about the miracles God has done in the coffee shop or break into spontaneous worship in the grocery store, people would think you were crazy.

 But isn’t that exactly what people are supposed to think of us? Are we not to become fools to the world in order that we might gain God’s wisdom? For “we have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men. We are fools for Christ” (1 Cor 4:9-10).  Or would you rather be counted as one of the “wise” of this world? As one who, “through its wisdom did not know [God]”? (1 Cor 1:21 NIV).

I don’t have to say these things. No one forced me to spend hours digging through my bible for just the right references or crafting each of my words to spell out what I wanted to say. Adventures in Missions didn’t even require me to write this blog. But I’m doing it because I want to change, and because I hope some of you will change with me.

It would be an awful lot easier for me to just go back. To pack up and go back to Nicaragua or dive into missions for the rest of my life would be the fastest, simplest way to regain that sense of living totally in God that I’m striving for. But if we spend our lives looking back at where we’ve been or what we could have been doing if we were still there, we’ll never see where God has placed us today or recognize where He’s leading us tomorrow.

So I refuse to take the easy way out. I refuse to change my location and choose instead to change myself. I choose to live like I am in Nicaragua, like I am with my team, like I am quite literally the body of Christ wherever I go and with whomever I meet.

And may the world think me ever crazier because of it.