Rugby players, truth tellers, and the blessing of what we do not know.

I wrote a different spiel than this one. I was ready to publish and something did not sit right in my spirit. As this prompting from the Lord grew, I realized that I had to put what I had previously wrote on the shelf for another day. Too much has changed. I feared that if these changing developments were not addressed it would seem dis-genuine. So we need to call an audible. The truth is for you and me that things have always been changing; it is just at certain points where we become keenly aware of it. That is when we begin to either worry or pray depending on your disposition. We ask ourselves if the ripples effects we now see will crash into our lives in ways we are unprepared for. We think we are safe and then THAT happens. We just got comfortable and then a call comes in.

Life isn’t giving you lemons it is throwing them at you like curve balls.

The longer I've walked with Jesus the more I have found that security outside of Him is an illusion, nothing more than smoke and mirrors to trick the eyes. We convince ourselves there are a ton of things that can be depended besides Jesus. Confession: I do it all the time. Even though the Scriptures go to great lengths to convince us otherwise, it is often to no avail against hearts that wander like ours. We are taught that the rising and setting of the Sun are even dependent on Him… but we, in a maneuver of absolute foolishness, choose to do otherwise.

After a couple good excuses, our hearts begin to build a house halfway on the sand.

If you haven't heard, our sending organization the International Mission Board needs to cut around 800 missionaries on the field before Christmas. Learn more here. The first phase is a sort of honorable discharge, which entails a voluntary reduction (people choosing to return home). All of our organization has been asked to pray and fast by our leadership concerning whether we are led to return to the States to support the cause of missions from there. If there will be involuntary cuts in the future is a bridge for leadership to cross another day.

As for now, the Corsauts have been asked to put a blank check before the Lord and consider returning home.

What follows is me attempting to be honest. As followers of Jesus it is our privilege to be truth tellers. He compels us to be people who tell the truth on G-d in a world full of misinformation. This has a way of bleeding into other areas of our lives and making us people who cannot resist telling the truth, even when leaving out some tid-bit would be for a time somewhat easier.

Ashley Madison is example enough of how lies, under the Sovereign work of G-d, come to the surface given enough time.

We have found telling people anything other than the truth to be exhausting. One might say that the truth sets you free. Those who know us well will testify that we prefer being genuine and transparent rather than some false version of ourselves that is nice and neat. Otherwise you can never really love or hate us accurately.

That being said, this announcement from the IMB has been tough. As the new kids on the block and those who are not proficient in the French language yet, instantly we thought that we would be the first to go if the numbers are not reached through people volunteering for honorable discharge. It is funny, when the days are hard we want to go home and when the days are easy we want to stay. The offer to go home exaggerates everything we are feeling right now. We try to regularly dispel any rumors that Christians are Superman and impervious to any sort of troubling news. We would have you know that G-d uses everything. All the while, our deepest desire is that our circumstances will not dictate to us where we are to be, but that the Lord will speak and that will be enough.

At its worst, the situation creates bad excuses for our flesh, but at its best, the situation creates a fantastic opportunity to hear from G-d and affirm our place in His plan.

Long ago I realized that mature Christians follow G-d well during these seasons and immature Christians do not. This, if it is nothing else, is a season to remind us again how much we need Him.

Let me put all this in perspective a bit, when we came here we did not leave a place we despised, but instead were sent out from a people in Oklahoma that we love. The Lord’s hand had been strong upon our ministry there and we very much would have liked to have done 40 years of life on the border of Oklahoma where we protect the rest of the world from Texans. The uprooting was brutal, yet beautiful. When we said ‘yes’ to the Lord it was through tear stained eyes, not because we were reluctant to go, but because folks there had become so dear to us. We also had a lot of sweat equity in people we were discipling, Churches we were helping, and lost people we had been walking with for years.

We felt like Abraham who left everything he had known for all that G-d was saying He wanted to do.

That is why we left with joy. Even if it was joy mingled with sorrow.

Our invitation was to work in France for the sake of spreading the rule of Jesus’s kingdom here. Our heart was to use these first few years to consider and plan how we might to do the rest of our lives here if the Lord so desired. We are looking for this to be a place we could do our 40 years and then go on into glory.

There is something to be said about Cortez burning his ships behind him. The mission field is too hard to have half your heart in another place.

The reality is that for every advancement, there is a cost. Things that day in and day out haunt us.

For example, right now we do not have a car to drive to the hospital when the baby comes. No big deal. Clothes for French men were clearly not designed for me. I do not have a little sister, but if I did, I would think that all clothes made in France for men would fit her. I miss terribly preaching and leading, but for the time being we are handcuffed by our lack of language until we learn more French. It feels like being benched. By the way, learning French is like being regularly water-boarded. We cannot find stuff to make proper Tex-Mex or BBQ. The fact that Deacon has not starved to death is a small miracle. We miss our family reunions and friends getting married. I would very much like to see my cousin Noah dominate his senior season of Football. Whitni misses being a nurse everyday… and reminds me, everyday. There is a constant attacks by the enemy that are unique to being isolated in a foreign place. Nightmares, depression, etc. In addition, we have been asked by Churches to come back and pastor in the States since we left. This is something before that we wrote off, but now is something we must consider more fully. We miss Kaci Dills. ESPN will not show videos of American Football on its website because it is blocked by France. Like seriously France… COME ON! My wife is pregnant and about to have a baby in a place we do not speak the language very well. None of our family will be here for the birth of our first girl. We have to watch my boys struggle at school in ways that constantly breaks our hearts. There are so many fears about what the decision to work here means for their souls it is beyond reckoning. We live with a hundred unanswered questions every day. I could go on and on.

But let me summarize it like this: “emotion.” We are feeling so much right now… and I would argue that this is a good thing.

If you only plan to follow Jesus when you have all your emotions sorted out then you are never going to follow Jesus when other things pull you in other directions.

Honestly, this is where we are… emotional and without all the answers for all of the questions. I think it is when we live within this tension while abiding in Him that we discover what our faith is.

It was for this reason that yesterday I just stopped.

It was too much, so I just stopped.

I paused.

I took a moment.

Let the dust settle. And stopped.

I let the emotions take a breather.

And prayed.

He has told us His way of calming troubled souls. I reminded myself again that we are fools not to heed his counsel. I have come to learn as a believer that I do not really begin to process things until I pray. Until I set apart an indefinite amount of time to just be in His presence and let whatever He says be whatever He says. Until I come to the Father’s doorstep like a widow who cannot fix what is wrong. I came wore out and ragged from carrying a bunch of stuff that is too heavy for me in the first place. When I come exhausted and am at my wits end, that is when He starts to teach and not before. When all the possibilities, counter-points, and what-if’s have run their course… that is when He shows me that whatever situation I am facing is much worse than I could ever have thought, and that He is incomparably better than I could ever imagine. We tell Him that we think there are 5 ways He might fix it, but He whispers to us that He is the only One. Inevitably when I talk to the Lord, I find that the situation is far worse than I originally thought it to be and yet G-d is infinitely bigger than whatever the crisis that day happens to be.

It is because He refuses to be minimized.

He refuses to be your means to some other ends. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Means and the Ends. Do the math and you will find that the position on the surface of the Earth that my family calls home is less important than who He is. This is why we begin the conversation with our Father with “hallowed be Your Name.” When we are reoriented to the truth of who He is, troubles of our current hour grow strangely dim. He shows us that paradigm so that we exercise faith in the midst of a million lesser reasons to doubt. He is gracious enough to create situations like these so that you might see Him afresh.

He does things this way so that we will know Him.

Let me try to paint the posture of our hearts in a different way. We have met some local professional Rugby players that have quickly become like distant cousins that you used to wish you could always hang out with more. The football culture back home and rugby culture here is so similar it’s eerie. The locker room in football was like a sanctuary for me growing up, so hanging out with these rugby dudes is like short vacations back into a world that is an ocean away. I think I am slowly winning the debate about whether hits in football are harder than those in rugby, but there is no doubt that you have to be one tough cowboy to play rugby.

If Crossfit and Olympic wrestling had a love child it would be rugby.

Furthermore, I have met some guys on the team and there are some guys who are believers and some who are not. As our friendship has developed, we have been praying about doing some Jesus stuff with the team. The other night we had some of the guys over to eat and it was just a sweet time of hanging out and talking about the Lord interrupted every so often with rugby clips on YouTube. To give you a picture, I want to remind you that we live in an apartment outside of Paris. Its crazy small compared to houses in the States. Rugby players are often not the smallest people in the neighborhood. Whitni did a great job cooking like we were feeding 12 giants. We had a packed house and even had to turn some people away because we simply did not have space (or plates) for any more people in our apartment. Whitni’s spiritual gift/passion for hospitality was on full blast.

It was crazy how quickly the conversation turned to Jesus. Some of the guys had spiritual questions and they asked about everything from Israel/Palestine to the “Power team” to stuff about the rapture. We went back and forth between English and French and it was just down home fun.

Somewhere during the course of the night, there was something I told them that night that the Lord has been with great frequency speaking back to me and my heart. That is, what I have called, “the blessing of what we do not know.”

It seems odd at first because often we think of what we do know as the source of blessing and this is true. We do know things. G-d has revealed things for us to know, believe, and live. He is good like that. There absolutely is blessing in what we know, because G-d has made known what He is in the habit of blessing. The flip side of that coin is the truth is that G-d does not make known everything. There are some things that He righteously has chosen to not reveal to you.

It is not because He does not love you, but because He knows how to love you best.

He hides them in the secret counsel of His will and it is for your good. For instance, while talking with the Rugby guys about Eschatology (End times stuff)… we discussed how we are just like the Old Testament saints who looked forward in faith to Jesus first coming when we look forward in faith to His second coming. There are some things we know in Scripture and that we trust, but exactly how each detail is going to sort itself out is in some ways a mystery. What we know is that Jesus is coming back, but what we do not know is the day or the hour. What is more, because we do not know the day or the hour it causes us to live with holiness and unyielding passion. This, I told them, is how G-d blesses us in the things that we do not know. Some of our type-A personalities reading this just felt their heart stop beating.

Just so you know, Jesus doesn’t actually need you to fill a job vacancy as the G-d of the universe.

The call is to be His disciple, not His boss or jury of peers.

G-d actually thinks that Him knowing everything is more helpful than you knowing everything. I have said before, that often when I am asking G-d to reveal all the details of His 10 year plan for my life, that what I am really asking for is for a setup where I will not need to trust Him for the next 10 years. Listen, G-d loves us so much that He has hard wired our next 10 years to be full of times when our ignorance makes us run quickly into His arms. We think it's good when He reveals stuff and it is. I do not want to overplay the idea that ignorance is bliss, but it is good that He withholds things unhelpful for us in the here and now. Not to be silly, but I am not sure what good knowing Abraham’s shoes size would be for me this afternoon. I doubt very little that even the more pressing things He withholds are not almost exclusively so that I listen and obey the Spirit in the moments full of the unknown.

It is mildly ironic to consider that the things we think we know apart from His word are in fact setting us up for disappointment and a difficult adjustment to how the story is really going to unfold.

So here is where we are. The fact that the IMB was going to need to lose 800 people and we may be a few of them may be news to us, but it never escaped our Lord’s plan. The fact that we have no idea where we are going to end up does not change the fact that right now I live in France and need to share the Gospel with my lost neighbors. It does not change my responsibility to meet with some young guys this week for discipleship. The reality that we may have to come home in a few months does not nullify my work to plant Churches RIGHT NOW. We have zero reason to complain. If anything, all of this spurs my sense of urgency.

There are things I do not know about the future, but the Great Commandment and the Great Commission are not some of them.

So, with emotions hitting us like a mac truck, we are walking away strangely unharmed. We do not know if we will be in France, Senegal, or Cincinnati in the years to come, but what we trust the One who knows the names of all the stars in the sky. We have circled the wagons on the truth that our lives are not our own. We have and will continue to pray. The fields all over the world are white for harvest. The hour is late and the day of the Lord is at hand. This is our era of Church history and we hope to make a go of it. We have an unusual peace about G-d putting us where He wants us to be in His world. We find Him fully capable for a task such as this and that He has a track record that speaks for itself.

Many things about tomorrow
I don't seem to understand
But I know who holds tomorrow
And I know who holds my hand