I spent last weekend with the church staff at the YWAM base in Cimarron, Colorado. We spent a couple intense days working on the vision of the church, talking about where we’re going and how to get there. I felt so honored to be there, representing my department – the Good Samaritan Clinic – with such an amazing team. The thing that I love over and over again about my church is how real it is, how each person on staff is so genuinely loving and how un-religious we are. I love that we all desire to help people with no agenda other than just helping them. I’ve longed for years and years for a place like this and I’m just so thankful to have found it and to get to be a part of it.

Ten years ago my sister did a DTS (discipleship training school) at this base before she went to Nepal & India for 3 months. Because Cimarron is only 2 hours away from home, we got to visit her a couple of times, packing 6 month old Eden into our car with every baby contraption we owned. It was such a breath of fresh air to return to this scared space on the mountain. As soon as we pulled onto the property, I could feel peace flooding in. And when the team that runs the school told us over the amazing dinner they had prepared for us that they had been praying for our time there, I could feel it. In the book Bittersweet, Shauna Niequist talks about the Irish folklore of Thin Places. Thin Places are places where the boundary between heaven and earth is just a little bit thinner, where you can feel heaven just a little bit closer. I’m not sure about Irish folklore, but if ever there was a Thin Place, the base at Cimarron is one.

My time there was not only significant for me in my role as director of the clinic but also for me personally. I forced myself out of bed early in the mornings so I could spend some time to myself on the porch journaling. I feel like God always talks to me through my journal and the prayers that I write in there end up being the most poignant. I think maybe because writing gives my ADD brain some space to focus.

That time on the porch was such a good opportunity for me to draw a few lines in the sand. Sometimes I have to make deals with God. A few years back I had to make a deal that I was going to stop questioning his existence. Last weekend I had to make a deal that I was going to stop fighting him, stop fighting what he is doing. These lessons of trust have been so constant in my life. (It might especially be that way for people who are a tad bit controlling…) All I know is that Trust has to be my way of life, that every time I’ve trusted him, it’s been so much better than I could have made it myself and it has always been good, even if the road there was marked by pain. Up there on the mountain, in that Thin Place, I made a new deal: that I was going to stop fighting what he was doing and let go of how I wanted things to be. I promised to start trusting again and stop doing things my own way. Trust can still be a little scary, but it feels so much better to know that someone so GOOD has free reign to do GOOD things in my life.