TANGY TEARS IN TRANSIT.

As I knotted myself into a ball, murmurs began to pierce through the air of this stale familiar location. Prayers surrounded me from every direction. Cries. As tears poured from eyes, the sound of wailing resonated up to heaven. And I was thrown back to a day many months ago...

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forget that day in early January; and to tell the truth, something inside knows that I never want to. It was a typical British winter day close to the first of the year. The clouds in the dreary gray sky had already given way to a chilled darkness despite the fact that it was only mid-afternoon. And there I found myself, sprawled across the floor of my bedroom, head planted into a dirty faded cushion. Next to me a string of fairy lights slithered by. No power surged through them. No soft glimmer. The candles in front of me stood as strong pillars. Unlit. The room was silent. This was not a time to create a peaceful environment. Not here. Not now. For God had come down to meet with me in the mess of life. There, on that floor, our spirits connected and tears poured from my eyes.

And I wept.

With all truthfulness, I’m not quite sure whether it was me weeping or God himself. It was a moment so dark and so real. A moment I wanted to escape and yet one in which I longed to remain. The Spirit had planted a hunger and craving so deep in my heart that nothing of this world could satisfy. The programs. The schedules. The rhythms. The people. All these ‘good things’ were now barriers that needed destroyed so that the cornerstone could once again be laid upon a sturdy foundation. In that moment, words could not express what I felt.

Discipleship is not an easy thing. So often we want to magically be transformed into holiness without first passing through the fire. We run from the burning and the stretching and the molding. But God waits. And waits. He waits until we ask him to show us that this world was not created for us, but for his glory. It’s a dangerous prayer that passed through my lips just days before that fiasco on the floor.

And, I suppose that this is essentially what Transit is all about. It’s not about the communities that can sometimes seem so unsupportive. It’s not about the leaders that can appear to be sinners more often than saints. It’s not about the egotistical teachers who think that God is speaking the secret of life through them. Instead, it is about an army of pilgrims…of nomads…of imperfect individuals who Christ has called to be disciples in this place, at this time. It is a time of learning, truly learning, that knowing God must be the foundation on which we build our lives. It is a time of seeing that only then, when we see our Father’s heart, will we be able to love and spread his love through all the earth. It is a time of drawing us to the conclusion that “no man liveth unto himself.”