The Bigger Story

    I’m tired today.  It’s the kind of exhaustion that makes the mind numb and the bones ache. We’re on the road, seeing friends and family one last time, and some of the goodbyes we’re saying feel like funerals.

It’s too much. Too much. I’m weak, weary, and completely overwhelmed.

If it were just me, I might be tempted to just leave all this missions stuff behind. It’s hard, hard, hard, and we haven’t even left the country yet.

But it’s not just me, or even just my family. This is bigger.

   Way bigger.

It’s 120 teens in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. It’s missionary families needing pastoral care. It’s men, women, and children waiting for the Word of God in their own languages.

It’s precious people saying, “We can’t go ourselves, but we can give.” It’s the warriors praying us forward and the partners cheering us on. It’s the couple, the one with pictures of missionaries all over their walls, who gave us their own bed for five nights so we could be rested enough to keep moving. It’s our family, smiling brave through their tears.

It’s the story that began in the Garden and will roll on until the end.

But mostly it’s the God who is calling us, drawing us close, whispering peace over our breaking hearts.

This isn’t our story. It’s his. And it’s huge.

And surely, a God who can write a story so much bigger than us can take all the grief and exhaustion and write into them themes of purpose and joy that are bigger, wilder, and beyond anything we can ask or imagine.

I’m still tired, fragile, and weary to the core, but that’s ok. This is not about me, or about any of us, really. I can rest my soul in a God who is big enough to write grace into chaos, pick up our broken pieces along the way, and show us little by beautiful little how we fit into the Story of stories.