A word of explanation:
When this week began, the Silver Team was scheduled to spend the next several weeks in Pennsylvania, Georgia, (maybe) Louisiana, and Florida before wrapping up our Fall season. By Wednesday night, between COVID outbreaks and hurricanes, our schedule had been completely cleared except for our final conference in Florida. With a month of downtime, we made the difficult choice of sending team members home with a plan to regroup before traveling to Florida in November. This is the last thing any of us wanted.
Here’s what I’d like them to remember while we’re scattered.
Dear Silver Team,
We all entered this ’20-21 travel season with a sense of uncertainty. There were huge gaps in our Fall schedule. Nobody knew what was going to happen with COVID. Was masking and distancing working? Churches were just starting to figure out how to meet again after months of no services. Would anybody be interested in scheduling a conference? If they did, would anybody show up?
There was a lot to be anxious about.
But as soon as I met you, the team, and got to know you, and saw you work, pray, laugh, play… and just BE together, I began to struggle with a new anxious thought:
What if this wonderful, amazing, talented team never gets to travel?
I was watching you train, seeing you bond together, hearing you share your hearts, and (in some crazy turn of events) getting to pour into you and help shape you. And the thing I found myself worrying about (besides the usual stuff like health and money and do I have something on my face?) was that you guys would put in all this work and never get to serve as a team.
The thing I was most worried about… was that you guys would put in all this work and never get to serve as a team.
A few weeks into training, I got the opportunity to preach to you and the other teams. I was struggling to know what the message was that I needed to give you. Well, God moves in mysterious ways, and it was ultimately a Taylor Swift song that got me thinking about the Exile.
I learned a lot from that study, and the idea of Christians as Exiles continues to percolate through my soul. But one epiphany for me was learning about Ezekiel, one of the Exilic prophets. If you rush past the intro material, you’ll miss it: Ezekiel, who had spent his whole life preparing for the priesthood, had reached his 30th birthday. But instead of celebrating by being installed as a priest, he is sitting by the Kebar river in Babylon, an Exile far from home.
And that’s when God spoke to him.
Guys, we don’t really know what next month will bring. Hopefully, in less than four weeks, we’ll all be on our way to Florida together. I wish I could tell you with absolute certainty that everything will be back to normal by then, but with the way things have gone so far, that’d be naive. Some of you remember how we left Alabama in March. It feels like we’ve seen this film before, right?
I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.
Taylor Swift
But if Ezekiel teaches us anything (besides the fact that ANGELS LOOK REALLY WEIRD!!!), it’s that the most devastating interruptions contain the most incredible possibilities. I’m not saying that God is going to start sending you visions of angels with four faces and wheels full of eyes. But what I do know is that the Exile is exactly how God gave his people their lasting identity, their Scriptures, and their Savior.
You see, Jesus was an Exile among exiles. And what he offers is not “the victorious life”, going from strength to strength. He offers us the way of Exile, of weakness, of apparent defeat. If you feel out of place, like you’re supposed to be somewhere else right now, missing your tribe… that’s really ok. Lean into that sense of displacement.
But don’t imagine that getting back with our team and our routine is going to completely soothe the angst. Jesus will heal the ache, but not before he heals everything. Until then, this longing for what we’ve lost, for the ones we miss, is our regular reminder that we groan along with creation, and Jesus has promised to bring us home from Exile.
I miss you guys. I can’t wait to get back with you and get to work. And even though we won’t ever shed our sense of Exile in this life, I’m also looking forward to the sense of homecoming that our reunion will bring.
Until then, do good things, and do them well.
The Lee Family 