More than comfort

Ryan's been in Mozambique for the last week and a half. There were four days of online-correspondence-silence, and then I got an email from him, describing how he had been in the more rural areas, showering with a bucket and cup, sleeping in the tropical heat on mats on a concrete floor or under nets but still getting bitten.

I savored that email, as much for the assurance it gave me that he was alive and well (though exhausted and covered in bug bites) as the wake-up call it was for me, pattering about our Stanford apartment trying to get baby things ready.  I had been spending a good few hours on Amazon looking for things like unbleached cloth diapers and foldable tubs for infants; and then with Ryan's email I was transported to a different world, where babies and adults alike live (and even thrive) without ever doing online research for purchases.

I was reminded of the calling we had received in college for missions, and with it, the calling to live simply, to live closely to God's heart. A part of me was thankful that I was living in such easy circumstances at 8-months pregnant, but another wanted to be awoken from my comfort-induced complacency.  Oh, but it's one thing to say I will happily live with mosquitoes, and another to say, I will let my kid be bitten too.  And yet what a small, small thing that would be compared to the much harder choices missionaries have had to make!

Gary Thomas quotes Abigail Adams in Sacred Parenting:

It is not in the still calm of life... that great characters are formed...Great necessities call out great virtues.

What grace we need to value eternal gains more than comfort and superficial joys, to see and live forand love something bigger than ourselves, and what greater grace we need to do so with a little child and to teach him to love the same.