It's just Me Abby

The backyard sounds are a symphony tonight. The crickets wildly chirp. The owl hoots to me from its perch. It is eerie and yet it draws me. Cars are roaring down the highway, echoing through the woods between us. Gaskets are blowing and police sirens are wailing. Planes are humming, dogs are barking, and little voices I love are escaping the second floor window of my inlaws’ home in Spartanburg, SC.

My family raced Chief and Duckie (my beloved inlaws) to a cabin in North Carolina for Thanksgiving week. Coffee flowed every morning. Fires were built every night. Conversations abounded, too much food was eaten, and the latest season of The Crown was successfully binged.

There’s something special about an escape. Leaving behind work, school, responsibilities, the craze, the mundane. And a magical spell is cast upon the those who get away for a wondrous moment. A devious spell which beguiles us with an enchanted haze of far off dreams. . .

. . .of perhaps permenantly trading the current stresses, messes, and blesses, for an inconsequential life tucked away in some quiet mountain or island town where time moves unusually slow.

But as the getaway week starts and each day is lived, so the week’s end draws near and the enchantment lifts.

I no longer sit in a cozy cabin in North Carolina. Now I sit alone on this back deck in Spartanburg haunted by an owl and my thoughts.

The sounds I hear tonight cast new spells on me. They take me not to dreams but to my past. To a far away place that remains ever so stubbornly near and dear. These sounds take me to Malaysia.

They are the universal sounds of life and of loss, of hope and of fear, of love and of hate.

They are the reminders of a people I love, a best friend I left, and a job I did not finish. They haunt me with regret of the times I chose not to share the gospel. They leave me agonized at the thought of my best friend weeping from the other side of the heaven’s gates asking me why I didn’t tell her.

Has it ever occurred to you that the final commission of Jesus, the great commission, is so great it is haunting?

Not one person under heaven will ever receive God’s salvation apart from true faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But how will one ever have faith in Jesus without ever hearing of him? And how, on God’s green earth, will one hear of this loving Savior without ever being told?

And if you or I don’t ever tell them. . .

. . .then I don’t know what’s more haunting.

Billions of people living, breathing, growing, laughing, loving, weeping, decaying, and finally dying. Broken yet beautiful lives void of a sure and heavenly hope, all too swiftly ceasing to be. Never to know the love of God and hear the warmth behind the welcome into His glorious kingdom.

But just as fear is the stepping stone to courage, so is this haunting the path to action. It is the arousing of our hearts that triggers our minds, that propels our actions, and that moves our lips.

This great and haunting commission is not a suggestion but a command, a lifestyle, a habit that can’t be shaken. If Jesus be the air we breathe and the song we sing, His hope is our natural exhale into the world around us.

While escapes are vital to rejuvenating the soul, they also embolden us to continue our advance on the home front. And as enticing as an abdication from the current course of life may be, I am drawn ever more closely towards the sounds of life, of loss, of love, and of pain. Towards peoples unknowingly crying out for someone to save them.

Because I know the one who can!