After a productive couple of days, I found myself – yesterday – sitting alone in the office for a few moments.  The white-noise machine was humming and there was nothing else but the rhythm of my pulse ringing in my ears and the clicking of the keyboard beneath my fingertips… the steady staccato interrupted periodically by the need to backspace or select & delete to correct an error or a misprint.

Many tasks had been scratched off of that day’s to-do list and as for the greater list… the one that’s still looming, well… there’s still work to be done. But for a few moments, the weight of that list was offset by the thoughts… the hopes… the dreams… the promises of what will begin two months from now.

I wonder…

• I wonder what it will feel like when the plane touches down at Charles-de-Gaulle, knowing it’s not for a 2-week stay.
• I wonder what it will feel like when the car exits the highway into Châtellerault for that first time.
• I wonder what it will feel like to take an early morning walk down by the Vienne River, breathe in the musky air as the current ripples and bubbles its way downstream and pray over the city that God has called us to…
• … to greet the boulanger (baker) or the caissière (sales clerk) at our local grocery store for the “Nth” time… to get to know their name and to somehow be both an example and conduit of God’s love.

I know that I have the opportunity to do that in the city where I live now, and I do. But this is my hometown. I didn’t choose it… I chose to stay. Our family will be in Châtellerault, not “by default” but by choice… God’s choice and our agreement with that choice.

(btw… that bandstand photo, that’s part of our city, Châtellerault… by night. Isn’t it beautiful!?)

…and I wonder!

I wonder… and I wonder. Oh the two words look the same, but put together in that short sentence, they don’t mean the same thing.

• I wonder = I try to guess, to imagine… to conceive in my mind what it will be like.
• …and I wonder = I’m a bit… no, let’s face it, a lot in awe of what we’re on the brink of. To think… that we get to be part of God’s great Kingdom and secondly, that we get to play such a part in it, through our involvement in Short-Term Missions… and I say like the Psalmist:

“What is man, that thou art mindful of him?“
Psalm 8.4

It’s like that song that Jason Crabbe sings… “Who Am I?”

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Enjoy your day today.

Whoever you are and wherever you are reading me from … know that you are important enough for a “King to come and die for.”  For that very reason… be conscious – today – of what you do by default and what you do by choice for they are not the same, nor do they produce the same result.

You are too important to simply live by default.
Live by choice. Lead.