baby steps leading somewhere beautiful

it started with a car ride.

mid-swine flu quarantine about a year ago, we got in a car and drove outside of the city with some of our co-workers to look at a town that the mission was maybe thinking about starting a church in.

if you can believe it, we didn't even actually ever get out of the car after driving all the way out there.

we looked at property out the window while scrunched together with 4 people in the back seat of a tiny car and then we turned around and drove back to the city.

that was my first trip to Khonghor.

fast-forward to late spring. land was purchased, my dear friend Naraa chosen to be the lay pastor, and plans were made.

july came and I returned to the village I only vaguely remembered in order to help put up the church. Two days of hard physical labor, fun and laughter and we had a ger. We had a church.

august brought the opening worship service and dedication, complete with an adorable naked baby crawling around and not enough chairs for all of the people who showed up. of celebrating what is born of prayer and obedience in the middle of mountains and valleys.

there was a week of vbs. of camping out and watching the stars and listening to the joyful shrieks of little ones running around. of watching a tent become a church. of watching a church be built upon piles of glitter and little fingers and toes.

and then there was a medical clinic after church one Sunday with a visiting medical team. a chance to go with them. a chance to spend the day catching up with new friends, to share hugs with the kiddos and to have an all-day conversation with a girl and her baby that dug its way into my heart and stayed there for weeks afterward.

there is the now. the Tuesdays. the tiny steps that have led up to the fact that now I'm going to Khonghor once a week. that now I spend my Tuesdays riding the bus into the mountains and walking across the empty, quiet fields so I can enter into a ger and sit on the bed and teach English to whoever comes.

it is the bread crumb trail of grace and learning and discovering that has led me to a new step. to a new routine.

to watching two brothers study as we sit on the floor together. to marveling at how life is these moments that come together unexpectedly and perfectly and exactly as they should be.


of long bus rides and sloping mountains and cows and goats and horses. of Monglish and flashcards and eight girls crowded around a game of pronoun memory. of a motorbike ride with a stranger to the bus stop after a day of teaching.

of knowing that this is what I get to do. that this is the stuff that unfolds when you wait, when you look, when you live.