This morning my wife Sue, oldest daughter, Jo, and I left home at 3:00 in order to have Jo at Boston’s Logan Airport.  She had to be there at 6:00 AM for an 8:00 flight to London.  This is the first leg of her journey to Uganda this summer, where she will be doing her college internship at Agape House, an orphanage run by a friend of her faculty advisor.  Like much of sub-saharan Africa, Uganda has been ravaged by the AIDS epidemic, and many of the children at Agape are AIDS orphans.

Jo has done short term missions trips on four continents: South and North America with her whole family, Asia as part of a college course on human trafficking, and once already to Africa when she went to an orphanage in Kenya for a month during her senior year of high school.  For some reason, though, this time it was hard letting her go.  This is by far her longest time overseas – two months – but it’s more than that, too.  This is the first time we haven’t all been together for a summer.  Since 2005 we have been spending our summers working at a camp in northern Maine.  Furthermore, when she returns she will be going into her senior year at Nyack College.  This trip is a reminder to Sue and me that someday she’ll be going on the mission field permanently.

Of course we’re proud of her, as we are of all three of our girls.  Proud isn’t really the issue.  This is a huge stretch in testing our faith in God.  For the last few days I’ve been wrestling with whether or not I really believe God can take better care of my girl than I can.  It’s easy to say that he can when we’re not being stretched too much.  To say it now is to truly put my faith where my mouth is.

I have blogged before addressing the illusion of safety and security.  One thing recent history has shown is that there is no place that is truly secure:  not the finish line of the Boston Marathon, not a one room Amish school house, not a suburban movie theatre, nowhere.  The only real security is in the will of God, and that’s only when we completely redefine the word ‘secure’.   Like CS Lewis said about Aslan, “He isn’t safe, but he is very, very good.”  And, with this in mind, it is a bit easier to let her go. 

After all very little of value is accomplished without risk.  Harriet Tubman, I learned recently, lived to be 92 years old.  What if she had played it safe?  What if she used her traumatic head injury and lack of education and her gender as excuses?  What if she decided that the risks of slave owners and snake infested swamps were too great?  Might she have added a few years to her life?  Maybe she'd have lived to 94.  (Actually, I could argue that she couldn’t have added years to her life by playing it safe.  Jesus said, “How many of you, for all your worrying, can add a single cubit to your life span?”)  Regardless, what if Harriet Tubman had played it safe?  How many slaves would have never seen freedom?  As Mark Batterson says in his devotional book Wild Goose Chase, “The purpose of life needs to be more than just to arrive safely at death.”

So, it is with these thoughts in mind that Jo flies to Africa for the summer with our blessing.  Obviously, we pray for -and are concerned about -her safety.  But there is no guarantee that she would be any safer here with us. Besides, there’s no holding her back at this point.  She has a calling on her life. And we eagerly look forward to the stories she will come home with this August.