Unexpected reflections

I wrote in a previous blog post about the emotional workout of sending group emails to the far reaches of my personal network during the Kilometer 66 launch.  That list reflects my entire adult life - further back, actually, embracing even some family friends from early childhood.  So the mailing took me back, got me reflecting and musing and wondering … sometimes grinning, sometimes flinching.  

Looking back, there are more than just a few relationships that … perhaps the best way to say it would be, that I wonder about.  How things evolved, where we really ended up.  Especially from those years in the trenches, where we often found ourselves slogging it out, doing what we felt we were called to do but not always in the easiest of circumstances.  

Our own lives were, of course, always very much in process.  It’s so easy to look back and just see the raggedness, be reminded of our own deficiencies or growth areas (easier to see in retrospect).  Often, it seemed, our part was to hold steady while many lives came and went within the communities and bounded open spaces we tried to create.  We knew God was at work, but His work often happens beneath the surface, or plays out in ways that don’t look quite as expected.

This pattern extends back beyond my adult years, into prior seasons where it was MY parents creating the space and our little family attempting to hold steady and do life as faithfully as we knew how while an … interesting … cast of characters flowed through.  Later the roles changed and Charlene and I were at the helm, with OUR kids at our side, holding onto each other for the ride of our lives.

Churches and micro-churches, households and community living experiments, small groups and retreats, internships and discipleship programs.  We intended them, hoped for them to be places of transformation and renewal, places where people met with God - as did my parents before us.  

Sure, I know some good stuff happened, but real transformation is messy, even in the best of times.  Add your own growth issues, then throw in the inevitable spiritual opposition mingled with people’s erratic outworking of their identity issues and, well, it can leave you less than confident about how much of it really “worked” at all.

My far-ranging email broadcast brought such reflections front and center.  But with this came a life-giving surprise.