I’ve been meandering through the airport in Amsterdam waiting for my connection to go home.  The time has been good to sift through books in the bookstores, check out a little Amsterdam history on the IPads in the library (yes, this airport has a library with usable IPads), catch up on a few emails, and think through some of the key themes of my time in Kenya and Zambia. 

If anything, I have had affirmed once again, I am not a front-line person. I deal with systems – human and organizational.  I like negotiating partnerships and helping others develop strategies so that they can effectively do what they are called to do on those front-lines.  I like making sure people feel valued and have the resources they need to do what they want to do.  I like elevating the resources they maybe didn’t even know they had, and putting what is usually deemed most important, money, in its rightful place; necessary but not primary.

So, as I walked and pondered, and spoke in a quiet conversation with God, I wasn’t all that surprised to hear me voice frustration.  I feel like I have stepped into a context of perpetual front-line crisis.  In fact, I think that the world wouldn’t know what to do with itself if it ever got out of crisis mode;  always looking for relief to rear its ever evasive head.  I think those who give and those who receive are both caught in the crisis; the former finding their identity in their capacity to give, the latter finding their identity in their need to receive.  And, it would seem that the only alternatives to this scenario for either party are either a turning of the tables, or a separation.  The discovery and embrace of interdependence is at best an idea, at worse, evoking a response of incredulity.  The system is really rather parasitic – one feeding off the other.

How do I take an organization whose sole purpose for existence is to raise funds in a land of wealth in order to meet the needs that are the evidence of desperate poverty measured by far more than  just the lack of material resources, and turn it into an organization that finds partners who will, for a season, invest in a plan designed to foster self-supporting sustainability in a rich relationship of mutuality – each party not feeding off each other but embracing one another as essential to the other in equal measure in order to discover life.

I asked if that is even a right objective.  Then I recalled the many conversations with those on the “receiving” end. They had a dream.  They wanted to move to a new identity.  They wanted to bury their “receiver” identity.  They wondered if those who gave to them would allow them to pursue their dream.  As we spoke together, hope rose within them, in entire groups.  They realised such a move would mean beginning to look at their situation differently, and one man, chair of one of the national boards, saw that to be a huge challenge but one he was willing to face himself and lead others into; in fact, it was a challenge he believed they could not only rise up to but could also excel beyond.

First step?  Fast and Pray.  Look to the One who appointed times and boundaries so that we would seek him and perhaps reach out to him and find him.

That to me is the beginning of change that leads to life; the life we were designed to know deeply.  That is getting out of crisis mode and learning to truly live.  I think they will make it, and I will be one of the first cheering them on and celebrating with them when they do.