I am way behind where I thought I’d be in sharing with you about our trip to Hawaii! We’ve been home for a week now, and each day I sort of wander around and do what needs to be done, but allthewhile I’m lost in kind of a reverie, thinking about God.

Okay, that sounds creepy. But it’s not. It’s filled with surreal joy.  These thoughts aren’t dreamy or delusional. They’re the outcropping of the incredible, concrete things we heard and saw and got to be part of in the Bluewater Mission faith community over the ten days we were on Oahu. (When you click on the link & see the slide show of pictures on the home page, imagine me & Steve under that basketball hoop, looking VERY untanned and New England-y, doing church with these awesome people – most of whom hugged us at one point or another. There is much hugging in Hawaii!)

Amidst all the hugging and warm welcome, we got to hear peoples’ STORIES. We got know men and women who not long ago were homeless, or victims of human trafficking, or strung out on drugs, who are now clear-eyed and excited, working really hard and getting real help – not just prayers and pep talks (although there are lots of those) but also a place to live, friends to love and do life with, a restaurant called Seed in which to work to earn money and learn skills.  Home, friends, a job, hope for the future. That sounds like the recipe for a new life, doesn’t it? I mean, who DOESN’T need these things?

And it wasn’t just this sort of transformation. On a more behind-the-scenes level, we also got to witness the redemption God has brought to the leaders who are making this all happen: how Jesus has taken negative things that have been said to them or about them in regard to their personality/talents/dreams (“That will never work, stop suggesting it,” or “You’re not the person I think of when I consider a project like that…”) and turned the world upside down to create space for them to live into these dreams and THRIVE.  Of course, it’s practically killing them. They’re exhausted and beyond themselves and in water so deep they have no hope of finding land anytime soon, or perhaps ever. But they are swimming. And experiencing, minute-by-minute, that miraculous thing where God breathes air into your desperate lungs and keeps you afloat in the midst of impossible situations, giving you a front-row seat as He rescues people.

I tear up every time I think of it. This is why I’m walking around in a happy daze talking to God, asking Him what this means for us here in New England. Getting excited about transformation and redemption and seeing in real time Jesus’ promise that what is impossible with men is possible with God.  I am so excited about this, I’m having a little trouble functioning like a normal person again. But that’s okay. Being a normal person was never my strong suit :)

If you’d have told me years ago that one day, friends would send my husband and me on a 10-day trip to Hawaii, pay for our flights and hotels (I mean, WHO DOES THAT? Jesus’ people.

That’s who!),  and that the highlights of swimming in turquoise blue surf in late-February

and drinking mai-tais on the beach at sunset would be more than matched by the wonder of painting trim and washing dishes and shopping for 20 lbs of onions and 25 packages of shabu-shabu beef at a grocery store hidden behind a concrete wall (our credit card balked at this – apparently guests of the Royal Hawaiian don’t often find their way inland to make bulk purchases of beef & produce. Which  is a shame. They should!) for a new restaurant founded to bring justice to a community we’d never heard of and could barely pronounce…I’m not sure what I would have said. It’s all unbelievable, and yet it’s true.

Such is life in the Kingdom of God.