Born for Rescue: A 5-Day Devotionalनमुना

LOVING AND DREAMING ON GOD’S LEVEL

TODAY’S STORYLINE

I may have shared a crazy story about a run-in with the Taliban, but please don’t get the false impression that I’m any different than you. Believe me, I am not.

I’ve seen some incredible things, but I’ve also spent a lot of time shaking—both in my boots and with my fists toward the heavens. Many, many times, I’ve set out on operations that required millions of dollars to pull off with no idea where the money would come from. I’ve lost dear friends to persecution and unspeakable violence—champions whose courage was boundless and who dared to stand up for something they knew would land them between sinister enemy crosshairs. I’ve wept uncontrollably.

Yet I’ve also experienced a level of joy I never thought humanly possible. I never thought that I would walk many precious young women down the aisle to meet their husbands at an altar of sacred matrimony—girls who, only a few years before, had been hopelessly trapped as sex slaves in vast, seemingly never-ending red-light districts stretching so far that it boggles and shadows the mind. I also never knew how the

appearance of a child on the verge of starvation could drastically improve in a few short weeks on a diet that includes eggs and milk.

How did all this happen? God transformed my life and put within me a love for people that I never thought possible. This deep love has been the guiding force for everything that has happened. People have seen this love within me and sensed that it was placed there by Someone besides me. It’s been pointed out to me by many people on trips, by doctors and nurses helping us save lives, and even by Afghan warlords. My stories have been written on the foundation of love—a love that I don’t deserve and that I never thought was possible, yet it has produced impossible stories of hope and redemption in me and in others.

I began loving people that I had not even seen before— people that society often overlooks. The hungry. The enslaved person. The unhoused. The sick. It’s all too easy to walk by them, not knowing how to help—or perhaps it’s all too easy to forget that I have been in various levels of need myself. But Christ graciously reminds me that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40, NIV). Loving the “least of these” is one of the primary ways I love Him.

SEEING YOUR OWN STORY

Unfortunately, the kind of stories I’ve been sharing are not what most people hear in church on a regular basis. Speaking of church, there is a good chance that if you’re reading this right now, you are part of a church. This is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, though, many people in church sit week after week in boredom. They are bored with their Christian lives, so they stop asking God to include them in His great adventure of redeeming the world. They begin to believe that following Christ is a life of dull living, rigid rules, and weekly church attendance. It is not!

This life in Christ should be the greatest adventure imaginable! What if I told you that God wants to do more in your life than you’ve ever envisioned in your wildest dreams? Does that sound too cliché or extreme? If so, then we’re missing the adventurous truth of Ephesians 3:20.

Dreams really do come true, but some Christians have stopped dreaming on God’s level. They forget that they are literally “God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10, NIV.) We are often guilty of asking the Father for too little, and as a result, we experience too little of the work He is doing in the world. Along the way, we sit in the pews and do nothing, which becomes a crime against humanity by the ones whom God put here to serve humanity. None of us usually intend any harm; we simply stop dreaming that we might have a role in affecting eternity—not realizing that doing nothing is affecting the eternal cause, just not in the way God desires. We think the radical stories of adventure and transformation are reserved for a special few and not for the everyday “normal” believer. We’re missing the adventure because the Christian life has become a misadventure of boring pew dwelling.

The adventure of a lifetime begins with accepting for yourself the love of the One whose lifetime has no end. It is not something you accept only once—it is a love that longs to embrace you again and again every single day. Trust me, if you become truly immersed and grounded in this kind of love, you’ll begin to dream crazy dreams of ways to show this same love to those who have the deepest of impossible needs.

LET’S PRAY

Father, too many times, I have been content not only to dream small, but also to love small. I may never travel the world, but this doesn’t mean that You don’t have an adventurous plan to use me right where I am to help others through Your radical love that launches me into God-sized dreams. Let it be so in me today and every day of my life. Amen.