On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake struck beneath the Indian Ocean near Indonesia. The quake was so big it made the entire planet vibrate and changed its shape. It shortened the day and shifted the North Pole a couple inches to the east. But worse than all of that was the tsunami it generated. The massive rupture in the seabed dragged rocks weighing millions of tons as far as ten kilometers across the sea floor, displacing trillions of cubic feet of water in all directions, and sending multiple waves, some as high as one hundred feet, crashing into the shores of developing nations as far as five thousand miles away. In the end, the tsunami claimed more than 230,000 lives in fourteen different countries. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded.
At the moment the earthquake struck and the waters began to move, Connie and I could not have been in a more opposite place. It was the day after Christmas (Indonesia was thirteen hours ahead), and we were in snowy Idaho to witness the proposal of our son, Gib, to his girlfriend, Janeé. Back in our hotel room, we were cozy and warm and comfortable. Life was good.
Then we switched on the television, and we watched in horror as half a world away, life for millions was turning into a watery, debris-ridden hell. Newscasters, backed by the terrifying footage of floodwaters and destruction, tried to give us a sense of the magnitude of what occurred as reports from on the ground rolled in. As they waited, they encouraged us all to “send thoughts and prayers” to the victims and their families.
I was way ahead of them. I had plenty of prayers and many thoughts for those unfortunate souls. But the thought I had the most, the thought that only grew as the news became more bleak, was that I was helpless. I just remember feeling so utterly helpless! There had to be something else we could do. But it was so far away.
Over the next several days, I remember organizations big and small calling for donations of all kinds—money, blood, clothing, canned goods. But I couldn’t help wondering if there was something else we could do. The answer came from our friends at Operation Blessing, the boots-on-the-ground relief organization whose mission is to demonstrate God’s love by alleviating human need and suffering around the world. The messenger was the group’s COO, Bill Horn.
The phone call from Bill went like this:
John, we are sending a container ship of supplies and a relief crew to Sri Lanka. We need your help. If you and Connie could go with us, you could raise awareness on your radio show and your listeners could perhaps get involved with the fund-raising for supplies and medical aid. There are some tiny towns in Sri Lanka that have been wiped out and they are desperate for help.
This was the “go” opportunity we had been praying for. We wanted to do more. We wanted to act. We just weren’t sure what to do. How would we get there? If we somehow managed to find our way to one of the affected nations, would we just be in the way? Or could we actually make a difference? Bill’s call answered all those doubts. Without much discussion, Connie and I knew what we needed to do. We had to go. It is, after all, one of God’s first commands:
Now the LORD had said to Abram:
“Get out of your country,
from your family,
and from your father’s house,
To a land I will show you.
I will make you into a great nation;
I will bless you
and make your name great;
And you shall be a blessing.” (Gen. 12:1–2)
This idea is deep. We cannot miss it. It is fundamental. We must go. Yes, it’s important to meditate on big decisions, but not without always remembering that we are commanded to go. Particularly in service to others, and especially to new frontiers, which are always in front of us and so never disappear. The internet or friends and family will give you a hundred reasons to remain where you are. Comfortable. We must get uncomfortable. The land that’s beyond the land that we know is always where we should go.
I’ve since learned that the thing that beckons you forward is the Holy Spirit. Indeed, some of the smartest people I’ve known, interviewed, or studied have been compelled, led, inspired—you choose the word—by the power that is available to us courtesy of the Holy Spirit (also known as the Spirit of Truth). It is what led not just Connie and me but Gib and Prima also to accept Bill Horn’s offer and to join the intrepid volunteers at Operation Blessing on their ten-thousand-mile journey to Sri Lanka. It would become one of the most profound experiences we ever could have imagined.
But first, a trip to the doctor’s office to get all the required shots, which tested our faith and our resolve, if only for a moment. As we watched the inoculations go into Prima’s arm, I shared a look with my wife that said, “Are we really taking our ten-year-old to ground zero of this disaster?” We would be traveling to Maruthamunai, a coastal village along the eastern coastline of Sri Lanka where the waves killed 922 people and displaced 11,086. Fourteen hundred houses were completely destroyed. Before the tsunami there were 341 fishing families in Maruthamunai. Among them, 113 people were killed. They all lost most of their boats and fishing nets. Knowing all that, Connie and I remained steadfast, and we set a course—physically and spiritually—for the other side of the world.
When we pulled up to the village in the Operation Blessing jeep several days later, it looked like the town had been leveled by an atomic blast. Two hundred and fifty meters inland there were boats on top of the few houses that still remained. Yes, that means that when the water receded, it dropped the boats on top of the homes. The majority of the survivors were crammed into a church property at the far end of town. And yet, when Connie, Gib, Prima, and I piled out of the jeep, it wasn’t the devastation that captured our attention. It was the giggles and smiles of the hundreds of children running toward the jeep. We were immediately taken.
Gib had been trained as a camp counselor at the Kanakuk Christian leadership camp in Missouri, and within minutes he had a four-year-old on his shoulders and two others hanging off his biceps. When he took off running, he would have a trail of thirty kids chasing him.
Prima, who was quickly surrounded by little girls her age, resembled an alien life form to them, someone their own age who was so tall and blonde. She began teaching them how to break dance. What a scene. These kids were so sweet and full of joy that it made us weep.
Connie shared tears with a woman who had lost her two children and her husband. There was no common language between them. It wasn’t necessary. We were surrounded by unimaginable pain and suffering with the surreal punctuation of laughter and squeals from the children, desperate for a diversion.
We knew from our earlier briefing that many of these children had lost their entire families. Moms. Dads. Aunts. Uncles. Brothers and sisters. Hundreds of their family members had drowned when the ocean swelled and consumed them. Gone in an instant. And now the children were homeless, sleeping on the ground in this makeshift shelter, looking wherever they could, you would assume, for moments of relief and possibly even joy, just as we were looking for a way to be of service on this newest of new frontiers.
The question was how, exactly. We weren’t sure what we were supposed to be doing. It was the ol’ “jump off the cliff and build the plane on the way down” decision. I remember distinctly Connie looking like Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now: hands on hips, surveying the battleground.
“I have an idea,” she said. “Let’s have these kids do artwork of the experience of the tsunami. They are still having nightmares.”
Huh?
It turns out, it’s classic PTSD therapy for young children, but at the time, as a former newsman, I thought it was a classic way to be incarcerated in a foreign country for practicing psychology without a license.
Connie seemed awfully serious as she devised her plan on the fly, so the crew was sent inland for paper and crayons. Within a few hours these kids started creating masterpieces. Connie later would say in an interview, “I knew enough just from being a mom that they needed to get these images out of their heads.” There was only one problem—we didn’t have enough blue crayons. Nearly every single child wanted one so they could draw the water. “That’s what they wanted to do,” Connie said in that same interview. “They wanted to draw the water that had engulfed their homes.”2
That moment, that entire experience watching these young orphaned children express themselves so brilliantly, so beautifully, with the most rudimentary of supplies, was both humbling and revelatory.
It was humbling because these kids, who had just survived the inconceivable, used scraps of paper and the worn ends of crayons to create works of incredibly personal art that moved everyone to tears.
It was revelatory because it sparked an idea. A way for us to help beyond thoughts and prayers, beyond even our time with boots on the ground in Sri Lanka. After the trip, we published a book full of the children’s drawings that described the people we met, the stories they told, how we tried to help them, and how this trip ultimately gave us, as a family, more than we gave. We called it Shades of Blue: The Tsunami Children’s Relief Project.
Eight months later, that little book had raised $336,000 for the Tsunami Children’s Relief Project. Operation Blessing made sure the money was used to build hundreds of new fishing boats to replace those that had been destroyed. Without boats the men were jobless. Without boats the families could not feed themselves.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Give a man a boat, and he can feed an entire village.
Every now and then someone will show up at one of our concerts carrying a copy of Shades of Blue. It takes me right back to the moment we first met those children. What if we had talked ourselves out of going? What if we had remained comfortable, treading the familiar ground of our own known frontiers? It would have been understandable. Prima was only ten! What made us think that it was safe?
At the time, we didn’t know that we were fulfilling God’s command given in Genesis 12:1–2. I wasn’t familiar with the scripture at the time. Nor did I have revelation of the force that compelled us to go. It’s now clear that we had, indeed, experienced the tugging of the Spirit. The Spirit of the living God had asked us to go somewhere and do something we wouldn’t normally want or choose to do. It gave us the power to get uncomfortable.
I have tried life with and without this power. I much prefer operating with high octane fuel in my tank. You will too. And when you learn to “pray in the Spirit,” perhaps in your own special language, it will be jet fuel to your life.
The truth is that the Spirit of the living God is guaranteed to ask you to go somewhere or do something you wouldn’t normally want or choose to do. The Holy Spirit of God will mold you into the person you were made to be. This often incredibly painful process strips you of selfishness, pride, and fear.
—Francis Chan, Forgotten God3
One of the functions of the Holy Spirit is to bring to our hearts a revelation of the future. If we need to know things that are to come to pass, and the ways in which they will come to pass, the Holy Spirit is the One to reveal them. We need not go to a fortune-teller or to an astrologer. We can go directly to the Holy Spirit.
—Lester Sumrall, The Gifts and Ministries of the Holy Spirit4
But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.
—John 14:26 KJV
The power evident in these words, the power derived from the Holy Spirit, is available to us all. The wiring is done. Flipping the switch is our choice. With Connie’s help, I flipped mine. I hope I can help you flip yours, so that you may feel what Connie and I continue to feel as the Holy Spirit of God continues to mold us into the family we were made to be.
For as the Spirit tugs at our hearts, enlivens our spirits, and fills our minds with possibility, wherever it pulls us, we should go!