It is Time

Final GBU Bible Study at UTC

The ladies (sans Natacha)

I finally looked at the calendar today and promptly fell into a panic attack. I've been putting if off for a while now, counting specifics days and weeks and all, and was only made aware of it being a month away from my July departure on June 8th when someone told me. That was not a happy moment, and I can't remember who you are but you shouldn't have done that. Oddly, I am not weepy but stalwart, resolute in pressing forward with my various calls which brought me here until the very end. It's what one has to do, or at least I have to do, to not do the following...

I'm canceling my ticket home. I have mulled it over for multiple evening conversations with myself and honestly, it's not that I don't trust God to be faithful to continue his work here without me. But it feels, I think, quite selfish to leave. Christian Americans who read this blog (and any others of course), I would like to say this to you (and myself as well)--you've got it good. In fact, easy. Pick a corner of a town and you've got a church before you. I recently read an excellent book which records the following: "For a religious marketplace to exist, a society cannot have state-established, supported, and regulated churches." The authors follow with this a few paragraphs down: "...when religion becomes disestablished, it opens the doors for creative religious entrepreneurs to market their alternative faiths to religious consumers. The general public, likewise, is freed--at least in ideal--to choose among options. Disestablishment in the context of a new, pluralistic nation [America] led to a religious marketplace."* I will be the first to admit I am guilty of this on many levels and deciding on where to attend church is a very serious question for me. But, welcome to America. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, welcome to France, where there is no marketplace but rather a population cynical of church due to a sordid Church-State past (among other reasons) and maybe oh, 4-5 Protestant churches within my town or an hour+ beyond. My wrestlings with selfishness become clear. I also leave behind this--

Yesterday Corine and I plopped down on the grass next to the Oise River. We began to talk and she shared what she was learning from her quiet times, how it's "bizarre" that the particular questions she is asking every day continue to be met with response in her Scripture reading and meditations, encouraged by a Lecteur de la Bible her grandmother sent her from Cameroun! She began unfolding to me the story of Job and this was not my time to ask questions but to simply listen. To have this young, sincere, tender woman of Jesus teach me from her heart what God has been teaching her through Scripture of himself.

Earlier in the day, during lunch with Natacha, Corine, and Marie-Pierre, Natacha delivered as promised the teaching and worship of Passion: Paris. With great gusto and laughter, for which she is now in my mind famous, she covered all the points taught and again, this was not my time to talk. It was my time to listen and encounter this dear, fervent young woman teach her sisters of how God would use them.

So you see. I am leaving a lot. And it is selfish. But maybe you also see that it is time. A year is too short, and I struggle with a bit of jealousy reading of a brother leaving an Asian country after 3 years. Three years, I thought, what a dream! Time to really sink into a place, a people, to know the rhythms of the lives of those we love far deeper than I can within a year. This week, however, the same moments that made me want to cancel my ticket also told me, You can go. You can go.

In peace, then, I will go. And leave in the hands of my most capable God the lives, the hearts, the unfolding stories of those whom he said before time, I have knit them into your skin Jennifer to love but I have knit them into my hand to keep always.

In love, I came. In peace, I go. And for this I am a most grateful woman.

*Divided by Faith:Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America; Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith