Some days I'd rather eat raisins

Today, my team and I huddled in a tiny room with a team of women Ten Thousand Homes has been walking with since 2009. We’ve eaten countless cakes together, shared thousands of hugs, and we’ve danced… Oh, how we’ve danced!

I cherish them and their calloused hands that cook for and serve more than 300 every week. I’ve proudly imparted my spiritual gifts of the body roll and the shimmy to them. We giggle in the kitchen while they use their crazy African superpowers to stir the giant pot of pap, and while I contribute my well-refined superpower of taste testing. We’re real family.

Today, in that room with those women, we celebrated life and our relationship together. Then we talked about changes, growing pains, and how we are all affected when God calls us into greater things.

We talked about how obedience brings blessing and abundance. And we talked about the painful pruning process that often comes first.

None of us were unmoved.

Tears threatened all of our eyes as we remembered our past and looked toward our future. It was a beautiful and a raw process. We had heard God for tomorrow, but it didn’t make today easier.

Today I wasn’t just relying on my friend Sibongile’s translation.

I was relying on the One who writes new things by new mercies every morning.

I was speaking to a group of women who give their lives to help other people live just one more day.

They walk up mountains to deliver medicine, and they pass out plates to fill starving stomachs. They literally thank God every morning that they woke up that day because so many people do not. And they walk to those funerals too.

I was speaking to wilderness survivors about pruning for the Promised Land. And my spirit was sputtering and groaning and praying that they could grasp the promise of tomorrow’s feast beyond the desperation for today’s plate.

I wondered if their minds would go to the places my mind has been going lately.

Would they would stomp and cry out, with their desert feet pointed at the Promise Land and with their mouths full of manna, for what it was like before?

Would they remember the steady routines we settled into before we heard God’s voice, and would they crave that?

The Israelites did. During a 40-year hike through the desert, these set-free people of promise began crying out for slavery. Even if they were bound, beaten and broken when they lived in Egypt, at least there was enough food there and they knew what each day would bring.

The South Africans do. They’ve only been set free for 20 years, and that’s not enough time to rewrite a culture’s identity. I live behind security bars and don’t drive alone at night because people who’ve been oppressed are oppressing. They wave a destructive banner of false freedom and imprison themselves in counterfeit justice.

I do. Everything I’ve been capable of dreaming of and believing for has been shaped by what I’ve seen, what I’ve tasted, what I’ve known before. My perceptions and realities have been shaped with the mindset of a former slave following a cloud.

Those things that felt like fruit and abundance before - the safety, the steady, the known, the fathomable miracles, the happily ever afters – have to be pruned away. I have to stop craving Egypt’s fruit because Freedom’s fruit is amazing beyond belief.

True story: Some days I think I’d rather eat raisins.

I get a glimpse of the best that’s yet to come, and then I look down at the terrain and time between me and those perfectly plump grapes on the vine. And I suddenly think the pruned off, dried up fruits will satisfy me just fine.

So then I write a blog, and ask you for help.

A new thing is coming. We’re huddling in rooms having hard conversations; we’re traveling to learn from other ministries; we’re casting new vision and we’re starting to get a taste for freedom food.

I am honored to be a part of a new thing starting at Ten Thousand Homes, and I’m prone to want to run backward for a mouth full of raisins when I run out of understanding (i.e.:  sanity and/or any of the fruits of the Spirit) of how to take the next step toward promise.

We weren’t meant to live as foot-stomping, raisin-craving former slaves.

We’re made to be new creations with the minds of Christ.

We have minds that can rewire us to crave those fat, juicy, (and preferably seedless) grapes of promise when we allow them to. We just have to stay connected to that Vine, that Living Water, so we don’t get stuck on what’s being pruned off.

I don’t have the words to share about the new things yet, but I am asking you to pray with me and for me. Pray for words, people and practical steps to come together around this new thing, and pray for my heart and mind to stay focused on the fruits of His promises and purposes. Pray for us all as we transition into new things, and pray for freedom’s banner to be the one we wave over our families and our futures.

Thank you for praying. I’m believing that, together, we will taste and see that the Lord is good.