Spring Tour

First – my apologies. For some reason, I fell off the blog wagon but I am happy to report that I am still here, just a little delayed.

What does it look like to follow God into the unknown? I thought that I could have answered that last fall. It is mildly incredible to me that what seemed like the biggest leap of faith six months ago now seems like a baby step compared to where I am now. In two days, Chris and I and the Cunningham family will take off toward Las Vegas to begin the Spring Justice & Worship Tour. The interesting part? We really don’t have a tour.

For a variety of reasons that we still cannot figure out, we haven’t been able to get the bookings we expected. This is somewhat humbling to admit, feeling like we failed, running over and over again other ideas that we could come up with to get additional bookings. We’ve exhausted most of our resources and the door has closed on so many of them that we are left wondering what we did wrong. The oddest part about it all though is that we still feel like God wants us to do the Spring Tour, with or without tour dates.

Last Monday we spent some time praying about what we should do with Phil and Amy and felt that God still was asking us to go, bringing us the scripture of Abram’s departure from Harran in Genesis 12. Sitting around, waiting to see what panned out just didn’t seem right. Go where you ask? East, starting with Las Vegas. Then what, you ask? We are not entirely sure. We are trusting that God will speak to us as we step out in faith. We are doing this without the funds that we really need to support this tour and without tour dates to rely on getting any additional offerings.

It would be a lot easier to just say, “Oh well, this just didn’t work out like we planned so let’s give up” (especially for a planner like myself). In some moments, I am frustrated, wondering why God would not help us set up this tour the way that we had pictured it. Then I remember that God is God and His plans are better than our plans. We thought all along that this tour would look a certain way but God always has the best plan, even when we don’t get to see it. Sometimes, it feels a bit foolish to set out without really knowing where to go or what to do yet there is this part of me that expects to see God use us on this journey.

One beautiful thing that we all have talked about is that the flexible timeline can allow us to serve more in the cities we visit. This tour may present just as many opportunities to get our hands dirty in serving others as opportunities to do the Evenings of Justice & Worship. We are all a bit frightened, a bit uptight, and grasping tightly to the promise that God is going with us. So, another leap into the unknown with a wild, adventurous God? Our answer is yes.

P.S. I feel that it would be so much easier to save this post and share it after the tour, after God proved His faithfulness and I compiled stories to share, but that isn’t where these stories begin. They begin in the quiet evenings where we humans wrestle to lay hold of a deeper trust in God that moves us into action, despite all the earthly signposts tell us to pull back. Thanks to Phil and Amy for choosing to take this leap with us – we love you.

Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.

Proverbs 19:21