[just a step] #onthemove

this is the story of how God brought me to The Red Bus Project. 

one step on a life-journey of millions.

The Red Bus the first day I saw it this spring.

I was asked for my heart.

Not parts of it, not corners I could live without. But my whole heart, with every faithless thought thriving. Imperfect, dank and doubting, it was requested. It was overcome. Stand up and walk: your faith has made you whole.

But on that March day as I walked blindly around the brick buildings which held so many well-adjusted, comfortable students, my discomfort pulsed. I felt corned as I stood between the iron mascot and the road, looking onto the quad of a campus I was loathe to step back onto.

Fear pulsed through my blood-stream like life. I was a Red Bus nobody; another girl working another nanny job in a sea of young women all saying they loved children. Fear had taken my car from one end of the campus straight to the other as I kept driving minutes before I found myself on the sidewalk. I had reasoned that I did not need to visit this cause – my life was comfortable. A thousand causes would arise in a thousand more comfortable ways than this one, and there was no need for my drop to fall into the bucket of Caring.

And I had kept driving. The fear of having to drop something in the bucket kept me going while fear of missing the chance made me call my mom and proclaim, as I validated my actions to myself, that there was no need to visit the Red Bus Project. But mothers are wise. They are the wisdom in our stubbornness because they know something sweeter waits for us on the other side. They give us what is best instead of what is easy.

“Go back.”

“Mom, there's no point. I'm coming home. You know, they'll come here again, I'm just not ready to go up there. I can't walk out there alone. I can't go to a campus I don't attend and barge my way into what's probably a sea of people. I hate crowds. I hate meeting new people. I'm coming home.”

“Go back.”

“No, Mom. No. I'm already on the main road.”

She broke my stubbornness the only way she knew how, her second daughter once again putting up a fight just so she could get out of something. The way she got out of everything uncomfortable growing up from dentist appointments to Sunday School. Her second daughter was bucking against God. And so with a voice I wouldn't have responded to at any other moment, my mother pushed me. She commanded me. She spoke life with fervor.

“If you don't go back, you're not welcome home for dinner. I love you, but you have to go back. You will regret it for the rest of your life and I won't let you do that.

Go. Back. Now.”

I went back. And there I stood, between the iron mascot and the road. A sea of details from the Red Bus Project website flooding through my mind, the fingers of my brain thumbing through the files of evenings spent pouring over a cause that loved children as much I did. I stood and breathed in the afternoon air, my coat in the car, my backpack hanging off my shoulders so I could disguise the fact that I didn't attend this school. All I wanted to be was a girl in the sea of a thousand girls, a nanny of many, just another voice saying once again that children were worth sacrificing our lives for. That we were the next generation of parents and that if we pushed away the children now, we were destroying a lifetime of tomorrows.

“Let the little Children come.” Christ said.

I didn't want to come. Tiny and afraid. The parts of me that wanted to join in and speak louder than the silence were being silenced by fear. Fear that I actually would stand out. Fear that I would have to talk with strangers. Fear that I'd be called upon to do something about the fierce love I harbored for children.

Fear that I would be arrested for not being a student at this campus. 
(A valid fear.)

I was afraid of being different. Yet I was too afraid to stay the same.

So I decided to take a step, knowing I couldn't go home proudly or face myself that night. If I didn't go, I would - once again - be giving up a dream. Knowing for another time in my life I would be backing out of ballet class the first day because my leotard didn't match the other girls'. Staying on the edge of the wedding dance floor, wishing I didn't care if I knew the YMCA or not. Watching the volleyball game, too intimidated to learn to serve. Closing the RBP intern application late at night, again, convinced I would never find my own housing in a city foreign to me.

Prayers flowed through my nauseous mind. They flowed through phone messages I hurriedly left for my best friend informing her I was about to walk across a quad. One, single, quiet, college quad. And for some reason it felt like a mountain of thorns and not a bed of soft grass.

Christ took the hand I jerked away all those times growing up, and he led me onto the blustery campus. He led me to the smiling face of an unknown worker, who I immediately confessed to – as if I were carrying a million dollars in my boots – that I didn't attend this school, I had come from somewhere else, and I needed to know it was alright. I needed to know I was allowed, accepted, admitted, alive.

He assured me it was alright.

Fear binds where Christ sets free. Fear takes captive where Christ breaks shackles. Fear stings. Faith hugs. Faith hugs unknown strangers. I was taken into the literal arms of a family of interns, directors, coordinators and volunteers. Orphan care was already in my bloodstream, and so entering where the Red Bus was set up was not walking into a group of strangers but into a circle of family. They did not present to me orphan care as a task to be completed this afternoon if I only wore a bracelet or band. If I only liked a Facebook page. Because it's a larger crisis, it's a longer crisis. It is more than dollars and cents.

It is hearts and hands and cries and laughs. It is smiles and giggles and sacrifice and labor.

It is a way of life, a way of Christ. It's relationships, and relationships are hard and they require decisions I had almost been too weak to make that afternoon. It's borne of a relational God who seeks our own hearts. For show me your faith without works, and I will show you my faith by my works. Show me your heart flowing out.

Show hope.

I was shown their faith by their works. I was shown and not only told. The Red Bus showed with their actions and words, with their hearts and their hands. They showed the sea of a million children. The sea of a million people in need of a Father. They left me with a heart bursting, each intern encouraging me to not let my fears destroy my faith. The housing would come. The daunting application could be filled out. The money would come. The fears would fade. I could be an intern. It was alright.

Be free, my soul. Be free from fear.

I could walk across a quad.

I could move to Tennessee.   

the fall interns ON the bus

The Fall interns today, in front of the Red Bus with the amazing owner of Hemphill Brothers Coach Company who takes care of our bus off-tour.
Each girl took a step outside of her comfort zone and trusted God. Just a step.

#redbusproject

On the move for orphans