Kingdom Migration
A few weeks ago I was sitting outside and reading James Smith’s new book, How to Inhabit Time, and I came across this pretty amazing observation he quotes from writer Margaret Renkl:
“Monarchs migrate as birds do, but it takes them four generations, sometimes five, to complete the cycle each year: no single butterfly lives to make the full round-trip from Mexico to their northern breeding grounds and back. Entomologists don’t yet understand what makes successive generations follow the same route their ancestors took.”
Smith was making the point that each of us carries within us, in ways we understand and ways we are yet to discover, an inheritance of “dispositions and habits and even pretentions” from a family line that stretches back well past the bounds of our memories. Part of maturing means spending time in introspection, understanding how not only the history of your experiences but the history of your people have brought you to where you are.
Sometimes we can focus exclusively on the negative aspects of that process. What attitudes or habits haunt me from a past I didn’t get to shape? What can I change today to escape the ghosts of this history? For many of us there is pain within the frame of the rearview mirror.
But the process of maturity also affords us humility and hope. We are able to see from our own individual past without Christ the components of a life he came to redeem. We aren’t saved into a new life as a blank void, as Smith says, but reformed and reshaped, each weakness becoming now a strength we couldn’t have fathomed apart from God’s creativity, as He reframes painful trials into powerful testimonies. The mistakes of our family and the life behind us become vital pieces of His redemptive work. The Gospel story that becomes our own would feel less impactful without the pain Christ scoops up in his merciful embrace. It is this process, of looking at the past and how it is wired into our being, that allows us to faithfully step forward into a hopeful future.
I don’t know any better than the baffled scientists what makes monarchs born mid-journey capable of finding the route to Mexico. But I suspect unbelievers who see where we are today in Christ would feel just as baffled looking over the generations of sinners and failures stretching from us back to our ancestors and trying to explain how we have arrived home.
There’s another layer to this that I think about, particularly for our church. The hope for any plant is that what we soon will launch will outlive us. Truth be told, there’s an uncomfortable level of ambition in that hope. Why wouldn’t we want The Garden to make an impact and leave a legacy? That’s an understandable impulse. But the hope I have today isn’t really in The Garden being remembered decades from now. We are not trying to build a name as much as we are attempting to proclaim one. To my knowledge, no story of the monarch migration stops to name the trees along the journey, but each account mentions the destination.
What I hope and pray for when I think about this church is that the stories of redemption that God writes in the people who serve here and come to faith here would echo down through generations of transformed families and homes and communities. I hold tightly to the hope that where we labor and sacrifice today is joining in the work of Jesus to make all things new in ways only the Spirit could explain. Many of the seeds we plant today will bear fruit in ways we’ll never get to experience or celebrate. But that doesn’t make the journey any less profound or hopeful. Knowing that means we get to pass on the route to those God leads us to. The destination remains ahead for those in Christ, and the part of the journey that is ours to enjoy here and now is an invitation to light up the world with the vibrant praise of a good and faithful God.
- Caleb Saenz
