I skyped with my cousin Josh last night, me in little old Round Rock, Texas and Josh in Wuhan, China, a city of 10 million over 7,000 miles away.
I yawned, tired from a long day. He yawned, not yet fully awake for the long day ahead. Today is his birthday.
Every time I Skype with Josh I smile, smile like an idiot, a wide, goofy grin. Justin talks some. Josh talks a lot. Maybe he’s a little bit lonely.
Man, I love to hear Josh talk. He tells these beautiful, Spirit-soaked stories. He is a herald of light in a dark, shadowy place.
I doubt Josh knows how much his stories mean to me, how much it affects me to hear about a girl in China who prayed on her knees in a hospital, a girl ridiculed for her actions, praying for a bleeding man while others laughed. To hear that the bleeding man and his wife asked the praying girl about Jesus because Jesus spilled out onto them while she prayed.
Stories like that move me. They remind me that God’s people are fighting with light and that light is winning.
Sometimes I skip around the Internet and get the impression that no one, not one Christian person, is getting it right. People talk about why they’ve left the church or they rail against all the abuses in the church. I hear Bible class teachers sigh, saying “We have no idea what we’re doing.”
But you know what? I think lots of people are getting it right. Right enough. I hear Josh’s stories and I compare them to my own, the crazy things God’s doing right here in Texas, and I see dawn. I see light and love and victory creeping over the hill. I see broken people, cracked pots, leaking the glory of God all over the place.
Josh is a cracked vessel. I’m even more cracked than he is.
And yet.
God is spilling out. He is finding His people. He is winning glory. He is making His world new.
I’ve seen it. I’ve heard eye witness accounts. It’s happening. And I refuse to be so cynical as to miss it.