What a Long, Strange Trip - Out in the Rain

"Clearly, you've never been to Singapore." It sounded almost like a challenge. So I began to familiarize with Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia. I decided it wouldn't be a bad place to live. In elementary school I had kind of had a fascination with Chinese and Japanese culture, but it had long since waned. It was fun to pick it back up in a way. But I hadn’t mentioned anything to anyone at that point.

 I was still sending out résumés all over. My wife suggested that maybe we look at moving to Colorado Springs. I said it wasn’t far enough away.

Meanwhile, there is a pretty good Mongolian Barbecue in Twin Falls. Go figure. A couple of weeks after Jack Sparrow’s observation we went out as a family to eat there. Now, Asian food has never really been a favorite of my wife. When we got home she reminded me of that, but said that this time she had really enjoyed it. She said she had been thinking about the whole “not far enough away” thing. As she ate, she was thinking that she could eat Asian food every day. And then: “I could even love some place like Singapore.”

I had a couple of interviews set up, but none of them panned out. Then I went to fulfill my final obligation to the United Methodist Church. I went to be a one-day Camp Pastor for the Senior High camp at Sawtooth. I did not feel like going. It is a two-hour journey from Twin Falls to Sawtooth. The entire length of the trip, I was asking myself why I hadn’t found some way t get out of it. I was not in an emotional space to want to go. But I did.

When I arrived, I was greeted by many hugs. It was healing. Then they began the first activity of the morning. It was Rob Bell’s “Nooma” video, Rain. It tells the story of Rob out walking, with his one-year-old son in a backpack. As they are, walking it begins to rain. Hard. Thunder, lightning, the whole thing. Rob’s son begins crying, then screaming in terror. Rob just keeps on walking, oblivious; he wants to get home. But after a mile or so, Rob stops and takes his son out of the backpack, and just hugs him close. Trying to comfort him. It was an amazing moment for me.

It was at that moment that I felt like God had taken me out of the backpack. I was riding along on God’s back, with the rain and thunder and lightning all around me, and I felt like God was oblivious. But finally, God had stopped. He was holding me close, whispering that he knew the way home. Everything was going to be alright. And I believed it. I still do.

We had left a guaranteed job, following what we thought was God’s leading. Then, what we thought God was leading us into evaporated. We felt abandoned. We were in the middle of a storm. And we felt God wasn’t listening. Now, finally, we knew that God was listening after all.