Formative experiences. That's what is on my mind today. Tonight is a congregational fundraiser for a mission trip this summer. We've been looking back through pictures and telling tales. Along with that comes an inevitable faith assessment.
Trips are fun. You remember stuff. The cricket looking bug as big as your hand crawling out of a cardboard hut and the sinking feeling you get when you figure out that is your house for the week. Eight hours of painting in July heat and that sinking feeling you get when you realize dinner is a box of cold hotdogs, marshmallows, and chips. You have to start a campfire to cook the dogs.
You remember the kid who spends a hour on the phone with her mom complaining that she was having a miserable time, that no one would talk to her and that she wanted to come home. Then she hung up and within 45 seconds, she was out the door, laughing and playing with her friends. You remember the adults who revert to kids and make the trips gloriously fun. You remember no sleep, bad food, and being lost most of the time.
But what you really remember is the transformation. God seems close...tangible. God's people live in intentional Christian community...prayers and Bible study are as common as breath. Somehow in the mess and the hilarity, God reaches deep into our psyche...into those places we too often section off, protect at all costs. God incarnate becomes reality. But however it happens, whatever happens,we are transformed. And though we fall pretty quickly back into old habits when we get home, we can't ever go back to where we were before. We have been re-formed.
Oh my, I can't believe we ever complained about those hotdogs!! Wow. At least I remember the transformation and not how silly we acted right?! haha I hope you showed the picture of all your bruises from our "team building" activities that day.
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