Booster Rocket.

“It occurs to me, as it sometimes does, that this day is over and will never be lived again, that we are only the sum of days, and when those are spent, we will not come back to this place, to this time to these people and these colors, and I wonder whether to be sad about this or to be happy, to trust that these hours are meant for some kind of enjoyment as a kind of blessing. And it feels, tonight, as if there is much to think about, there is much we have been given and much we have left behind. The smell of freedom is as brisk as the air through the windows. And there is a feeling that time itself has been curtained by darkness.”

Through Painted Deserts, Donald Miller.

It is so bittersweet to be a booster rocket. Pastor Levi has said that right now, Fresh Life church is like a rocket ship, and in taking off, it uses these huge tanks full of fuel to generate enough force to get out of the atmosphere. However, when the fuel is spent, the rockets detach, so that the shuttle itself can carry on and complete its mission. My intern director has said that he noticed a significant positive change in the attitude and enthusiasm of those on staff at Fresh Life during the time that us interns have been here. Frankly, we were like the huge booster rockets strapped to the back of a shuttle. It’s weird to think about how a booster rocket must feel as it puts in all this work to get a space ship into space itself, just to have to detach and watch the ship sail on to greater and greater things. I imagine it would be a kind of bittersweet satisfaction, if only because that’s exactly how I feel today.

It’s the last weekday of my internship here in Montana, and I’m watching a staff advance (not a staff retreat, cuz Fresh Life never retreats, although it’s the same concept), but this time I’m not a part of it. I wasn’t invited to the thing, but I get to watch it because I’m doing set up work in the room next door, which just so happens to have a live stream of it going on. That being said I’m separate from this event, which is as it should be, and its the incredible group of people inside the staff advance who are going to carry this church forward. It’s been pitched as something that is going to change the life of the church and launch it onwards like a space shuttle, which is timely considering the church is launching 3 new campuses in 8 days.

With anything else at this church like this event over the last two months, I would have been in there, waiting and preparing expectantly for that launch forward, but today I’m in the other room. I took a break from working to read, and came upon that passage at the top of this post, and it honestly brought me to tears. The thing is that my “day” as a part of Fresh Life, like all things, has come to an end. It was amazing, it was life-changing, and I have faith that the work the other interns and I did will have a huge effect to see those stranded in sin find life and liberty in Jesus Christ. That being said, I have to realize that from now on, I won’t be inside it.

At least for the foreseeable future, I’m going to be in “the next room over” checking out the live stream. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I’ll ever stop watching the amazing work God is doing through this church, but at the same time, I’m no longer a part of it, and that’s ok. If we’re keeping with the space shuttle metaphor, neither the booster rockets nor the shuttle itself could complete their intended purposes if the rockets stay attached longer than they’re supposed to, and myself and the other interns have hit that point. And so, I sit here, with some tears still in my eyes. I will miss seeing Fresh Life red on everything and Fresh Life stickers on every car. I will miss having cold brew accessible 24/7 in the office. I will miss Chris Gwinn, and Colton Born, and Caleb Raney, and so many others. But I trust something.

I trust that the other interns and I are not like booster rockets in one sense. A normal old booster rocket is pushed of the spaceship, and falls, crashing and burning, back to the earth from whence it came. This is done in such a way that they land in the ocean, and while they are picked up, it’s to either be reused or destroyed. It is in this aspect that the metaphor does not hold. We are people, and the sacrifices we have made this summer are not just for the sake of Fresh Life church. A while back, I was talking to some of my oldest friends from high school about how we’ve all kind of gone our separate ways, and one of them said something interesting. “Ya know, we’re farther apart than we’ve ever been, but I think we’ve stayed on parallel tracks the whole time.”

I might be going away from this church like a booster rocket leaving a space shuttle, but I’m still pushing forward, for the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness. I’m going to run my race parallel to this amazing church I’ve been a part of for the past two months, and I can still watch the live stream. However, going back to Nashville and using what I’ve learned here in combination with the connections I have there for the sake of God’s mission for the church is the absolute right next step for me, and I couldn’t be more stoked to see where it takes me.

Like this:

Like Loading…