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Finally Found Where I Belong

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

burnwagonmissions

Burn Wagon 2014

I left my house in Dallas early Monday morning, with California far off in the distance. The following evening, I arrived at a compound on the outskirts of Sacramento, where I met up with a team of leaders from across the country, from Pennsylvania to South Dakota to Oklahoma. Wednesday was filled with trips to the Sacramento International Airport, as students begin to arrive from across the country. In all, there are 24 of us representing nearly a dozen states.

We had planned to take two separate trips across different regions of the Western United States, but both of the vans we had secured fell through at the last minute. As everyone was arriving, we had no means of transportation, just a lead on a 29-passenger 1994 Blue Bird city bus. Currently, that bus is sitting in the field behind the compound, and we leave tomorrow morning for an epic missions trip across the Northwest and Mountain regions of the West.

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I’m not sure that things like this normally happen in real life, but they seem to happen a lot within this community where we’re crazy (and perhaps a bit naive) enough to believe that God can do anything if we step out in faith. A few days ago, we weren’t sure if everything was going to come together in time, but it appears that God has orchestrated everything personally. My friend Mark is an entrepreneur in Rapid City who is leaving behind his new business to help lead this trip. He will be our driver the entire way, as he is the only one with the necessary documents to drive the bus. He hasn’t used his Class A license in years, but he told us that he felt God leading him to keep it several years ago when it was about to expire. It’s crazy to think that God was working out the smallest details of this trip nearly a decade before.

Over the next 3 weeks, we’ll be visiting Salt Lake City, Denver, South Dakota, Montana, and Seattle. We’ll be ministering in churches, as well as on the streets. This is my third trip, and I’ve seen many salvations, as well as miracles, as people were instantly healed of physical conditions. This has taken place on the streets, at truck stops, shopping malls, the ghetto, and the revival center of America: Walmart.

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Another major component of the trip is intentional discipleship for the students that come on the trip. Not only are we giving away God’s love to others, we’re also receiving it for ourselves, because we know that you can’t give what you don’t have. I can look back to the previous trips I’ve been on and pinpoint exactly what God did that plays in to my day-to-day life now, even years later. No longer are we settling for the mere informational form of discipleship. Instead, whatever information we receive or knowledge we obtain, we will immediately get to experience in “the real world” through hands-on application, whether on the streets of Salt Lake City, a Native American reservation in South Dakota, or at a Walmart in Washington State.

This is the way that Jesus modeled discipleship. He didn’t invite the disciples into a classroom; He invited them into His life, took them on the road with Him, and then sent them out.

Find out more about the Burn Wagon missions movement online, or follow along on the journey from my perspective on Twitter or Instagram.