Luke Batchelor is a guest author on CONSTANTjourney and a future Canvas team member. We’re excited to get Luke here in Birmingham full-time and are always thrilled to watch his journey toward arriving here. Click here to learn more about Luke and the rest of the team, or take a look at Luke’s own website.

Luke

There are plenty of things that are less than pleasant about feeling powerless to move forward. Right now I am completely at the mercy of the British Visa Office. My entire life depends on decisions they are making or have made in New York, and my part in it all…to sit and wait.

There are plenty of instances when characters in the Bible have to wait for God to move. The entire Jewish narrative is of a nation awaiting salvation. They wait for deliverance from Egypt. For their arrival in the promised land. For the coming of the Messaiah. But what’s important to realize, what’s important for me to realize is that God wasn’t absent in the times of waiting. He brought his people food in desert. He heard their cries and answered.

In this time of waiting, I am trying to stay upbeat. A great teacher of mine, the pastor at Trinity Vineyard Church in Atlanta preached recently on bringing God into the mundane of our lives. He warned against our tendency to set benchmarks for ourselves. Places that we want to be, things we want to do, that once completed, will revolutionize our spiritual lives and bring us into communion with God like never before. I am having to wrestle with that urge daily. I wake up and wait for the mail, expecting every day that my Visa will appear on my doorstep, and tell myself how great life will be when I’m in England doing what I’m meant to do. But I have to live my life today, and I would hope, live it, even now, in a way that brings me closer to God. For those of you our there already supporting me, you may be as discouraged as I am at the amount of time this all has taken. But I want to be thankful for my time here, not resentful. I’m thankful for the time I’ve had to prepare mentally for my journey overseas. In the time waiting for my Visa, I’ve been able to read unimpeded by other things. I’ve learned about spiritual discipline from Richard Foster, about internal spiritual renovation from Dallas Willard, about the beauty of the call to ministry from Frederich Buechner in Telling the Truth, about the uniquely Christian hope provided by Christ’s ressurection in N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, and how cool it is to travel in Europe from Bill Bryson. God is teaching me. Preparing me. Making me sit still for a change. Resting my soul and challenging my spirit. In a few weeks, it’ll all pay off and I’ll be gone, but for now I’m living today, in Rome, GA, in my parents basement. It’s not that bad after all!