Loosed

 "NO," Elizabeth speaks up. Everyone looks at her. In Elizabeth’s day, it’s not appropriate for her to do this. She is so far out of line it's embarrassing. There are traditions to keep. The tradition is for Zechariah's son to be named after him, to follow in his footsteps, to become a priest himself. Elizabeth shatters the status quo with her interruption. 

"NO."


She and Zechariah have had plenty of charade conversations as her belly grew large with John. Elizabeth has read all of what Zechariah wrote regarding Gabriel in the sanctuary. She believes her man, and she stands by him at this moment. Elizabeth obeys first when she says, "Indeed, he shall be called John.” 

Everyone gets upset. This is not the way it's done. But Elizabeth knows that her baby boy will not follow his earthly father's path. Instead, he will follow his Heavenly Father. She closes her eyes and presses back the tears mixed with fear and joy as the room erupts into a family feud

.Elizabeth's statement is dismissed entirely. The guests look to Zechariah. Elizabeth watches her husband as he makes the move that catapults them into a story so much bigger than they could know. It's Zechariah's turn now.
He steps into obedience as his hand inscribes their son's name on the wax-coated writing tablet. He’s grown used to communicating this way. He's learned a lot over the last nine months. He holds up the tablet so all the befuddled guests can see what he has written. 

His name is JOHN.
 

Right there, right then in the obedient moment, Zechariah's tongue was loosed. "And he began to speak in praise of God" By late that evening, even without social media, this story was being talked about in all the hill country of Judea. It was really big news. 

My calling to full-time missions came to me when I was a young girl at summer Bible camp. No matter what I did later in life to forget or ignore it, that moment, that call never did leave me. I knew He was going to send me. But first, I sent myself through some heartache, taking the long, lost, and the somewhat disastrous road to missions. I married an atheist. That's how far I ran. But when my atheist later came to love Jesus in deeper ways than I had yet experienced, God showed me what was possible even when I had such little faith. For me, it was a loosening that took time. Like a rusted-on old metal bolt that has to be taken off, so were my thoughts about myself and others, my lack of belief, and my tendency to dwell in fear and worry.  By the time God had called us into full-time missionary work in Mongolia, we were just about undone, just about loosed enough to be redone. 

We needed one more act of obedience to get us to the other side, and it wasn't ours. 

To say we were close to my mom, dad and sisters is not enough. We spent our days together—the three sisters with coffee and babies running around. Mom and dad were the hub, and weekends were spent at their house eating all their food and letting the cousins run wild on the farm. As a family, we were as tight a bolt as you could get. When the entire crew followed us to the airport on January 9, 2009, the day we left for Mongolia,  it was an act of obedience to the Lord. By this simple action alone, we felt they were catapulting us out into our next life. And this is no exaggeration. It was not easy for them to let us go, but if they had not, we may not have been able to serve so long and with such freedom to immerse ourselves in the call. Those last hugs, the tears, the final goodbye were a loosing of such proportion that I could feel it in my soul.

The image of my family waving us forward as we crossed through the security check is burned into my heart partly because of the emotion that's wrapped up in that picture and partly because it was the moment I stepped into the calling. And how could you forget something like that?