God digs camping.

this quote near the end of the book may be the greatest encouragement i receive from reading irresistible revolution, since it speaks to where i am right now. we leave in 23 days for our summer adventure and there are a whole lot of details that we are continuing to just leave to God. at the moment, we will be pulling out in a big mongo van loaded with our camping gear, which means tents instead of an RV, which has the children whining and taido and i shaking our heads and saying (as much to ourselves as to our children), “just wait and see what the Lord is going to do for our family this summer!”

but if we weren’t headed to canada, i hope we would be headed to the festival hosted by the community in which the author of the above mentioned book, shane claiborne, lives. i hope lots of you will go and meet my sister and her family there. and tell me all about it and bring back little dreams to central arkansas (or wherever you happen to live) that are big enough for us all to share.

note: i almost titled this post, here come the quotes, b/c i have a tendency to type out long quotes from books i’m reading, but i will spare you because besides the fact that it’s a lame blog post title, i have set up a new blog for that purpose. mainly because the quotes are really for me to remember and access. but of course you can use it too. but just for fun, here’s part of the passage on the bit about God loving campouts!

In an age of million-dollar mansions for God, it’s hard to imagine that our God prefers tents. But God has always had a thing for camping. In the Hebrew Scriptures, such as in Exodus, God “tabernacles” with the Israelites, a word that essentially means “sets up camp.” God was with Rizpah as she set up camp on the rock next to her children’s massacred bodies, collateral damage of kings and their wars (2 Sam.21:1-14). In the baby refugee Jesus, God becomes Emmanuel (“God with us”), crashing in the manger. And it is in the life of Jesus that God puts skin on to show us what love looks like. John’s Gospel calls this incarnational act “pitching God’s tent among us.” And then God wanders the Galilean countryside with “no place to lay his head,” a stranger looking for a house of hospitality to welcome him.

And to think, the israelites and jesus didn’t even have therm-a-rests.