Living on Mission: Episode One

Episode One: Making the God Connection

It's just dirt. Go ahead, reach your hands into it. There's something childlike (you might even say childish) about playing in the dirt. Your mom and dad may have told you not to do it, but there was this other voice inside you that often told you to do it anyway. Maybe it was the unconscious knowing that you are dust, and to the dust you will return. Maybe it was the secret knowing that God himself played in the dirt when he created the first man. Or maybe it was just more fun to obey that inner voice!

Under the dirt, waiting for your discovery is a seed. When you walked in you didn't know it was there – all you saw was a box full of dirt. So it is with most of our lives; the best things seem to lie hidden, buried under other layers waiting to be seized upon at precisely the right moment.

Almost as if from beneath layers of dirt and residue, God's voice seems to call out to us hoping we will be brave enough to reach towards him. Hoping we will forget the other voices that tell us to keep our hands out of the dirt, he calls for us to sink our hands deep into the soil, searching for the seed of promise he longs to give us. At times the beginning of the process feels an awful lot like groping in the dark, wishing to somehow hit on the something indescribable that we felt stirring in our souls.

But the feeling of success when you finally make the connection is incomparable. The difficult part is maintaining the connection once it's made, because there will always be other prizes that vie for your eyes, your hands, even your heart. But there is no greater prize than this connection to God; no greater seed of higher promise than the one he buries for us to find. He grasps you more than you'll ever grasp him. But his grasping is not that of command and control, rather it is the liberating call to live your life fully, finally, alive.

You've connected to the source of life – and so life can never be the same again.