The Writing on a Box

There is a very important cardboard box in the back of my closet that I pull out from time to time to help me remember.

 Almost a year ago I came home from an interview with a wonderful mission organization that I deeply admired. The interview went well and I was in the interview process with another organization that I also had a missionary-crush on. Living a deeply missionary life has been my dream for a while now, and it still is a something that I hold very dear and ache for each day.

 But that day I came home from this interview with a need to map out a vision, large so that I could see it, touch it.

 There is a verse in the book of Habbakuk that has moved me since college.

 “Then the Lord answered me and said:
Write down the vision;
Make it plain upon tablets,
so that the one who reads it may run.

 For the vision is a witness for the appointed time,
a testimony to the end; it will not disappoint.
If it delays, wait for it,
it will surely come, it will not be late.”
Habakkuk 2:2-3

 We must know where we are going.

 So I searched my house for a large piece of paper, and considered taping many pieces of paper together to make a large chart, as I had seen a friend do in Haiti once. But then I found it – an empty cardboard box that had once held a coffee pot (perfect since I love coffee). I pulled it apart and laid it open on my bedroom floor, brown side up.

 I laid out my choices in different colors of ink. A few different mission possibilities. Stay where I am. Or move to Nashville.

 That day, on the back of a cardboard box was where most of my decision took place to move. New words, desires, and hopes unfolded from beneath my fingertips. Stability, a time of growth, rest, baking in an oven to be sent out again. A time out of which streams could burst forth in the desert. Community, healing, living with a missionary heart in the midst of the world. 

 When I could see it and touch it and spread my arms out across it, it seemed to actually make sense. Nashville.

 When I packed to move, I made sure that this folded-up cardboard box was stuffed in the back of my car with the rest of my belongings. Because we are so human and forgetful. And boy have I forgotten – at least once a week, usually for weeks at a time. I have questioned. I have squirmed. I thought of a hundred reasons to not come, and I have thought of a hundred reasons to leave.

 Today I took out that cardboard box again. I needed to be reminded of why I am here. I needed to remember.

 “Write down the vision. Make it plain upon tablets, so that the one who reads it may run.”

 The purpose of the vision is so that I may run. Run instead of walk. Run instead of jog. Run instead of slowing down to wonder where I should stop – because I already know where I am going.

 Today I give up my slowing down, my meandering, my wondering, my walking. Today I will run.

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