Red Dirt Roads, Brown Dirt Roads

Soon, we're going to New Mexico. I announced the team yesterday; still have some details to work out. We did a concession this morning, me and Sgt C, and now there's some money in the bank for the trip. Jesus calls us, and He also paves the road. Or at least shows us which way to go.

I heard "We Rode in Trucks" today, and it took me to New Mex, to the backseat of the truck while Efren was driving those red dirt roads, sitting there with Mrs. Butler and my girls, feeling alive, knowing I was where Jesus wanted me. Loving it.

And we have dirt roads here, too -- brown and dry because it doesn't rain in Montana anymore. After a concession full of pancakes and Hawaiian Punch and sausage gravy, I turned west towards Big Ditch instead of towards home and went looking for my horse -- me and my rezzed-out chi'dii clanking around through the buffalo grass, chasing horses, watching foxes, driving into ditches that hide in the tall grass while I'm watching foxes. The horses went where I wanted them to, but Apples was lame, so I walked him over to Lodge Grass Creek to see if the water would help.

I ended up in water up to my knees, filling my new boots, with Apples splashing around and thinking I was crazy. He bit me. I yelled at him. But we both had a good time anyway.

I was walking him back when some little girls showed up on their bikes, and we talked our way through town, back to the corral, them on their bikes and me walking my horse, and people drove by like it was normal because it is. The girls came to my house with me after that, and we played Twister and Trouble and ate popsicles, and it was perfect. It wasn't a red dirt road, but it was right where I was supposed to be.

This summer in Alaska was beautiful -- mountains and roping and wildflowers and cast iron, riding Pecos, listening to my jingle-bobs and the familiar sounds of people I love working hard around me all the time. The people I worked with looked so much like Jesus, loved so much like Jesus, hung onto me even when I was a mess. I wrestled with my brokenness and my calling and the very origin of my faith, and they hung onto me through all of it. And in that, I realized that Jesus was hanging onto me, too.

There are a lot of things I want to do. I want to know the world because I've touched it, to understand courage because I've seen it, to see the depth of what people survive and choose to thrive in spite of. I want to go to South America and Africa and the Outback. I want to see Jesus' love in all these different places, to realize the depth that it has, the significance. When Jesus is the very breath in our bodies, the One keeping our soul tied into our skin, everything shifts, I think.

And right now, I am in Crow Country, in this place I love, and the sun is headed for the Big Horns, but I can't see them because of the fog from the Gilead Fire in Wyoming. It is so dry; it has been dry for so long. But the mountains are still there, just like Jesus was still there when my doubts made everything so hard to see. He hung onto me. He says I am worth the ransom He paid, worth the blood on His hands.

You are, too.

To be loved when we don't deserve it is the greatest gift of all...and it's the story of our very existence.

In giving Him ourselves, living for One greater than we could even understand, we find the reason we were made. There is epicness in the very fabric of our stories.