Today I welcome Shawn Smucker, a writer I’ve long-admired for his perseverance, his generosity and his love of adventure. Shawn leaves tomorrow for a World Vision bloggers trip to Sri Lanka. Will you join me in praying for Shawn and the rest of the World Vision bloggers? God is up to big, big things through them! {And Shawn’s words here today? They happen to be exactly what I need to hear.}
It is the 71st morning in my parents’ basement with my wife and four children. 71 days since we returned from four months on the road in a big blue bus. I wake up early and creep from the dark bedroom, trying not to wake Maile or our two youngest children asleep in the small bedroom with us. The door creaks behind me.
I sit at the small table in the main area of the basement without turning on the light and open up my laptop. It is the moon, and I make a list of the things I need to take on my upcoming trip to Sri Lanka.
Eye drops.
Bug spray.
Small gifts.
The list goes on.
The refrigerator hums loudly behind me. I think about something I read recently by Henri Nouwen:
How can we embrace poverty as a way to God when everyone around us wants to become rich? Poverty has many forms. We have to ask ourselves: “What is my poverty?” Is it lack of money, lack of emotional stability, lack of a loving partner, lack of security, lack of safety, lack of self-confidence? Each human being has a place of poverty. That’s the place where God wants to dwell! “How blessed are the poor,” Jesus says (Matthew 5:3). This means that our blessing is hidden in our poverty.
We are so inclined to cover up our poverty and ignore it that we often miss the opportunity to discover God, who dwells in it. Let’s dare to see our poverty as the land where our treasure is hidden.
For the last 71 days I thought my poverty was being in a challenging financial situation. As I wait for a few new projects to start up, I’ve had weeks where I’ve made a grand total of $160, or had to get by with putting $5 in the gas tank, or delayed paying a bill so that we could buy groceries.
But as I sit here in the dark of my parents’ basement, waiting for the tide to turn, the quietest of voices hints at a truth I’ve been trying to ignore.
Your poverty isn’t in your finances. Your poverty is that you want to have your own way, and I’m telling you to wait, and you can’t deal with that right now. That’s where your poverty lies – your inability to trust.
And I know that it’s true, because I want the new projects to come through NOW and I want to find a new house and move out of my parents basement NOW and I want my life to begin looking the way I want it to look.
NOW.
So I make a conscious decision to embrace this poverty of uncertainty, and to seek out God somewhere in the midst of it. I prepare myself to meet people in Sri Lanka whose poverty will be so much more obvious and outward. And I try to be okay with my own less-than-ness, because, to paraphrase the Apostle Mark:
Blessed are the less-than…for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
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Shawn Smucker, author of Building a Life Out of Words, leaves for Sri Lanka tomorrow to blog for World Vision. You can follow his trip HERE or learn more about the difference you can make by sponsoring a child HERE. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.
