Move it

So recently, something happened that I've been praying for diligently and without an answer for over a year...but the answer has arrived, finally.

It all started years ago when I said in prayer, "Lord, I don't think I'll ever go to Africa." Like, me telling God that He wasn't calling me there somehow waylaid my fears that He really might call me to that place...that huge, terrifying, dangerous, amazing place. After that, I couldn't escape the dream (or nightmare) that I would one day go to Africa.

Then I was a documentary called the Invisible Children, which captures on film the struggles and horrors of war-torn Uganda and its smallest victims, thousands of children who daily live in fear. I couldn't ignore this...to ignore this is to ignore the call of God, which asks, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" Oh that I might have ears to hear.

If Jesus calls us to care for orphans and widows, for the silenced and "un-advocated", then someone must answer that call for those in Uganda, and when I look at grace--God's amazing, glorious, great, perfect, unsafe grace--I am compelled to act.

The prayer that was answered took me from being moved to tears to being moved to action, perhaps best expressed by Arthur O'Shaughnessy:

We are the music makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams
World losers and world forsakers
On whom the pale moon gleams
Yet we are movers and shakers
Of the world forever it seems

And so I find myself moving, by grace, towards a place of complete surrender in total freedom. I can fly and nothing will pull me down. May I be a music maker, a dreamer of dreams, a world loser and world foraker, on whom the pale moon gleams!

How is it that surrender feels so free, and that which used to frighten me is now the one thing I cannot escape, and it thrills me to my soul.

And so I will rise on the wings of eagles, for the Lord has not forgotten me, and He hasn't forgotten Africa--we have this one thing in common, and to this one thing I will hold...here I am Lord, send me.