A Reflection

My beautiful wife finishes her last paper this week. In a matter of days, she will be Karri DeSelm, MBA. Those three letters are the culmination of two years of life, two years that have redefined the way we see the world. We chose to move away from home, to leave jobs, to say goodbye to friends, to entrust the expansion of the Kingdom in Fort Wayne to our sisters and brothers in Christ, and pursue the cloud of smoke, the pillar of fire that we saw spinning before us.

We did this because we believe something about the world.

We believe something that has brought us the most inexplicable joy, the most severe heartbreak, the most soulful doubt, and the deepest sense of wonder that we’ve ever known in our lives.

We believe something about the world that requires faith, hope, and love from us every day when we leave our house and take the Burundian air into our lungs; an air that is laced with the dust kicked up by unshod feet, the drifting scent of exposed garbage and over-worn clothing, and the exhales of a nation who have learned to shoulder their poverty every day.

We believe something about the world that is discarded as foolishness by the skeptical unbeliever and the overly comfortable believer alike.
We believe something about the world that was proclaimed by a host of angels to a group of shepherds, who may as well have been Burundian cassava farmers, Kurdish nomads in Iraq, or homeless, abandoned men and women on the benches of Love Park in Philadelphia.

We believe something about the world that forces us to shout defiantly into the seemingly endless chasm of injustice, of systemic evil that allows Herod or President al-Bashir to wipe out entire generations, that causes doctors in Bujumbura to strike for a liveable wage while our guard’s father, brought in vain to a now-vacant hospital, lies in his bed with only over-the-counter medicines to mend his broken body.

We believe something about the world that is heartened by the words of Isaiah, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the LORD rises upon you and his glory appears over you.”

We believe something about the world that was believed by a teenage girl on a donkey with a social stigma on her head and a baby in her womb.

We believe something about the world that was difficult to believe for Jews under Caesar, difficult to believe for the innocents who hid in their homes in Rwanda, difficult to believe for the brokenhearted mothers who lost their children in the streets of West Philadelphia.

We believe something about the world that means changing the way we eat, the way we dress, the way we talk, the way we drive, the way we vote, the way we cry, the way we worship, the way we commune, the way we read, the way we dream, the way we suffer, the way we give, and the way we resist the powers of this world.

We believe something about the world that affirms the God of Genesis 1 and 2, of Job 38 and 39, of Isaiah 49 and 60, of Revelation 22.

We believe something about the world that, in this season of advent, causes us to look at all of the hurt and brokenness in the world and take up the posture of the people of God for generations – expectation.

What do we believe?

We believe He’s putting it all back together again.

And why? Why do we believe this when all the darkness in the world seems to conspire together and snuff out any possibility of hope? How can we believe this when the Caesars of the world seem titanic, when the Herods of the world seem more violent, wealthy, and unwilling to change than ever before? What news, what headline could possibly justify the complete reorientation of our lives around the singular vision of the healing of the nations when they insist on furiously raging together? Why do we believe this about the world?

Because.

Unto us, a child is born.