Since Creative Missions 2017 marks only my second trip, I can’t say with certainty that every trip differs. This year’s trip, though, did not repeat the 2016 one. I spent the majority of my time authoring communication strategies and social media plans. The rest of the time featured some website content writing.
I would like to say I loved every minute of Creative Missions 2017, but I found myself assailed by doubt and questions about identity and value. Thinking and strategizing takes time, but it tends to be completed long before the videos, photographs, and designed materials are done. I saw my teammates working and wondered what useful purpose I served. I asked myself — and eventually my team — if I needed to learn a new skill or develop an existing one.
The fact I could ask such a question highlights how community forms during Creative Missions. The freedom to ask vulnerable questions is no small thing. It occurs only within safe spaces, havens where love of Jesus and friendship reign supreme in people’s hearts. For that reason alone, I will treasure this year’s trip to Montana. I don’t open up to people easily. Finding myself able to do so, with little fear, is an expression of God’s continued grace.
The Biggest Story
This year’s trip occurred in Montana, a state I’ve never visited previously. Its mountains awe, and its green plains rollick like ocean waves when the wind gusts. The big, day-lit sky, which lasts until well past nine o’clock at night, causes the heart to marvel at not only the big sky but also the big God who made and upholds it.
To keep the focus on the big God during the week, Creative Missions provided reading assignments and reflection questions. Some of the reading occurred in the Bible; the other resided in a children’s book, The Biggest Story: How the Snake Crusher Brings Us Back to the Garden. Both pieces communicated the biggest story, the story God has been authoring before the beginning of time, a story of redemption and restoration.
This is the story into which my life fits. Knowing God is writing a story, beginning, muddly middle, and end, offers comfort on the days when life seems out of control and dark. I don’t know what’s coming next. Worry and fear beckon, yet a small part of me holds out: I know God holds the story in his hands. He’s all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, and all-faithful. He guards over the biggest story, yes, but he watches over my smaller story, too.
The Smaller Story
I said my smaller story fits into the biggest story, and it does. Learning about the biggest story creates a framework within which to operate. I understand that my life is not meant purely for myself; it is designed for something far greater.
That something is God and others. God shows me what love is in his redemptive story, and I respond by loving in kind. Jesus shows me how to live, seeking God’s will before my own. I pursue the broken and outcast and remind them that God is with them, in the here and now, in the pain, terror, and darkness.
I require those reminders as much as anybody else. My doubts during Creative Missions reveal I don’t have everything figured out. I still rest on my own strength too much; I still put too much stock in work as a source of identity. Having those questions surface was unsettling but necessary: I need to know where the biggest story has yet to transform my heart and mind.
The questions help, too, in identifying next steps as a believer, entrepreneur, and artist. The person without doubt is the one who never grows. Doubt becomes a fertile soil when not directed toward depression and despair. It must keep faith as a stalwart companion so that doubt will prompt forward movement, not backward steps or stasis.
Those movements occur through remembering the biggest story and surrounding myself with a community in which to be vulnerable. Because I voiced my concerns to my teammates, they were able to speak truth into my life. We were then able to contemplate the future and view it with excitement and hope.