Recently, our LBT colleagues Kory and Cara Fay wrote about the Apostle Paul on their blog located here.  Paul is a monumental character in the story of the Christian movement, to the point that he is almost legendary - but the part I really love is that he was a human being too and just like any of us, God chose to work through him, and by God's grace, Paul was obedient to the call.  But that did not always make it easy.  Something about the way historian Thomas Cahill in his masterful book Desire of the Everlasting Hills:  The World before and after Jesus writes about Paul really resonated with me when I read it today and I wanted to share it with you because it so sums up how I feel sometimes in the path that the Lord has set out before my family and me:

"Dimly we can see him entering a new marketplace for the first time, setting up his modest booth, engaging in conversation whomever he can - potential customers, their servants, his fellow merchants.  We can see him taking a room in the tiny house of a merchant of some neighboring booth, gradually gathering a small community around him, instructing them in the gospel and watching it take root among them.  Then far into the night, sometimes with the help of a friendly scribe, sometimes alone, he scratches his letters to the church-communities he has had to leave behind, trying to find the right words, the words that will catch fire in their hearts and enable them to keep going.  If nothing else, the overwhelming loneliness of this man - always beginning again, always 'a stranger in a strange land,'  always opening and closing his letters by naming distant friends, always recalling the ties of affection to those he has had to leave behind - should impress us." (p. 127)

The part about always beginning and remembering those who we've had to leave behind really stuck with me and for all of you that I have had the awesome experience of meeting, ministering, and living among - thank you.  We have been shaped and formed by our time with you and we pray that our time with you also in some way shaped and formed you by God's grace. 

Much love and God's grace and peace to you.