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We have spent the past few days traveling over to Eleuthera and visiting and reconnecting with our friends and ministry partners on the island. As we encounter these relationships, now within the new context of our departure from the island, there have been a range of emotions from gratitude to jealousy.
In some ways its been difficult to see our effectiveness in ministry dried up due to our circumstances. I battle the image of footprints along the surf that make an impact in the sand only to be washed away the next moment as if we never walked there at all. Encountering our old friends, I know this image is not true at all, and that there are lasting ripples of our time here.
Last Sunday night at church we had special music by Kevin singing the Randy Travis song 3 Wooden Crosses. The central lyric to this song as couched in the unknown movements of God in ministry is: “It’s not what you take when you leave this world behind you / It’s what you leave behind you when you go.”
In having dinner with our friends and talking through the vision of the missionaries, even down to the expansive beaches and unique foods of the Caribbean, we have failed to take much of it with us in our leaving Eleuthera. But we can see relationship after relationship that we’ve left behind. Its hard for us to enter a grocery store or even drive down the road without encountering someone who has meant so much to us as we have to them.
We are so thankful for our deployment to this island by God’s grace beginning back in 2001. And for the many twists and turns that God providentially used to draw us ever further down the shore, and with more congregations that have extended our Christian family to today, where it is hard to know why God moves the way he does, other than in recognizing our innate desire for permanence in a world of temporal blessings. As one of my professors once said, “we enjoy today only at the expense of yesterday.”
If there is one thing that I keep encountering its that you cannot live or serve in a manner where you aim as if you get multiple shots. You get 1 shot. As the Apostle wrote: “Be very careful, then, how you live not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.” – Ephesians 5:15-16