When the Burn Wagon headed to Boulder the other day, we thought we were only going to be there for the evening. But then, as we were headed out of town, our bus broke down alongside the road. We pulled into a parking lot, and the next three hours were spent hanging out in the Target parking lot. In short, this time of being stranded alongside the road led to two homeless men—one fresh out of jail—giving their hearts to Jesus. One of them was baptized with a bottle of water, and by midnight we had scattered across the city to the homes of strangers (to me, at least), who had laid down their agendas to take us in for the night. We arrived with nothing more than the clothes on our backs, but were quickly given blankets and pillows as we settled in for the evening.
The next day was a bit stressful, as 15+ hours of work on the bus were seemingly labored in vain by a few of the guys on our team. Still, the day was filled with pockets of grace. It didn’t seem that God was giving us any answers, but was instead inviting us to a deeper level of trust. Not so much trust in our bus being fixed, but trust in His goodness, which seemed to come cascading down the nearby foothills at the most random and seemingly ordinary times.
When night came, we gathered in the backyard of our new friends—whose history with us seemed to reach far deeper than 18 hours—for a night of worship. At one point, the guy who was singing began to play a song called Where I Belong. In that moment, God took me back several years prior, to a time when I was struggling to make sense of life. It was then—when I felt like I didn’t belong—that I first heard this song; it was then that this song became my anthem.
A lot of life has been lived between then and now. There are many things that have slipped through the cracks in my mind. This was one of them, until the other night in Boulder, when it began to make its way into my awareness.
I’ve finally found where I belong, and it doesn’t look like anything I expected; it wasn’t what I thought I was searching for. I would have settled for merely fitting in somewhere and not feeling hopeless all of the time, but I got something so much better instead—an invitation to a crazy adventure filled with reckless trust in the nature of the One who is leading me.
This adventure has been bursting with life in every way, though it has not been without pain. And if I had known that this is what it was going to look like, I’m not sure I would say “yes”. But oh, I’m so glad that I did. I’ve finally found where I belong—in the place of saying “yes” to the extravagant reckless love of the Father that seems to continually chase me down and overtake me.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. ~ Psalm 23:6, NIV
