Well, I have made it safely home to Korea after a fabulous time in Mozambique! Thank you all so much for your prayers and encouragement, and please continue to pray for me as I process what I’ve experienced in the last three weeks. As dear friends, family, seekers, and the merely curious, I’d like to include you in that processing so you can share in the challenges and blessings it’s already unleashing. There are several concepts that came alive for me in fresh and powerful ways while I was in Mozambique, and the first I’ll reflect on is community. Later you can expect a bit about prayer, healing, brokenness, freedom, and the spiritual world. But community is a good starting place. :-)

Community. Well, I’ve spent the last year and a half reading about, talking about, and living in community. So it came as a bit of a surprise that I first started breathing community in the visitors’ compound of an orphanage 6,000 miles from here. I told you already about the prayer circle we had during my first week there and how opening myself up at a highly vulnerable level and being loved, encouraged, and prayed for really did wonders for my soul. That sense of community was not a one-time deal but an ever-increasing phenomenon as we truly became united as brothers and sisters in Christ. With them, no time was wasted. Just as any action without love is meaningless, it seems that any action with love is meaningful. So whether we were deep frying cheese puffs (I don’t recommend it) or making up silly songs while playing Skip-Bo, everything we did brought us closer together in a way only God could have done. (And no, it wasn’t all fun and games—we also got close by sleeping like sardines in sweaty sauna-tents in the bush, riding in the backs of enclosed pick-up trucks with our arms and legs sticking together, etc.)

Looking back, I wonder, What was the key to our amazing community? There are many church congregations that don’t feel like family at all, so what made the difference in ours? And I think it was that we prayed together. Not just one-liners to help someone transition well or get over the flu, but prayers that touched the depths and breadths of us. Prayers over our past, our present, our future; prayers over our relationships, with God and with others; prayers for our health and healing, at physical and emotional levels; and prayers of appreciation. We got to know each other at a really intimate level through prayer, and as we thanked God for each other and affirmed with spoken words each other’s gifts and contributions and visions for the future, we became tightly endeared to one another as brothers and sisters in the Lord. Even in our separation now, I remember each one with thanksgiving and delight, overwhelmed at God’s kindness for having placed me in community with them and still inspired by each of their unique gifts of ministry.

Another cool thing was that as visitors went back home and new ones came, each one found a place in the family. It was like making a salad five different ways and having it turn out lip-smacking good every time. Each person had a role that was theirs alone, a contribution that strengthened and enriched the community.

So now that I’m back I wonder, How can I find this same sense of community at Sarangbang? Or can I? Is it possible to have really intimate fellowship without the facility of a common language? Is it possible to grow close in prayer when you can’t understand what the other person’s praying? My gut says yes, it is possible. But it’s gonna take a mighty huge outpouring of the Holy Spirit as well as heaping spoonfuls of courage and commitment. Courage to trust others with my vulnerable places, and commitment to keep working at relationships that take a lot of time and patience and energy to grow strong and bear fruit.

My deepest temptation is to feel alone here, isolated by my differentness from others. But when I think about the people in my “Skip-Bo family” from Mozambique, I realize I would have felt pretty different from many of them as well, if it hadn’t been for the unifying power of Christ who made us brothers and sisters. That power was the dressing that made the salad taste delicious no matter what ingredients were thrown together, and that dressing is available anywhere and EVERYwhere in the world. Here at Sarangbang, too. In your family, too. At your church, too. But I’ve got a feeling that when you ask for Him to pour it on, you’d better be ready to have yourself change flavor too. Here’s to community, wherever you are.