Introduction
April 1, 2005 was a Friday. It was also my first day as the National President of Youth for Christ/USA. I remember it distinctly. I spent the first day on the job in my home in Lenexa, Kansas, a location where Mary and I had lived for almost twelve years. Our official journey to Denver wouldn’t take place until Sunday, but I was “on the clock” on Friday. I had been “on the clock” for twenty-eight years in a variety of business contexts. YFC was officially my seventh career move, but it felt like unfamiliar territory. I woke on Friday morning to the fresh reminders of this reality. God had patiently and unavoidably drawn me into the ministry of Youth for Christ/USA. For many years I had been a volunteer, a vantage point that confirmed the significance of the ministry as well as illuminated the challenges of such a step.
On my first Friday morning with YFC, I spent time reading, thinking, anticipating and praying. My collection of professional experience and my personal journey with Christ seemed to flood light on this pathway in my life; and yet I felt overwhelmed and underequipped. And so I sat at a keyboard and wrote. It was a prayer I wrote—a paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer. I wrote it to the YFC/USA community.
To friends and to strangers. As my fingers moved across the letters in front of me, it was as though I connected to the very people I was writing to. Within a couple of hours June Thompson, my very capable assistant, had electronically distributed the document throughout the YFC network . . . and with that a Friday email was launched.
In a week or two we had officially named it “The Friday Fragment,” and shortly after that the prayers morphed into a more introspective and reflective theme. And it was this transformation that escorted me to a place of heightened sensitivity to the unique and personal ways that our heavenly Father illuminates and connects the disconnected and isolated moments and experiences in our lives. It was this reality that drew me to the theme, and far more importantly, to God and to His master plan for life and living.
I also love the metaphor of fragments when it comes to the mission of Youth for Christ. Young lives are broken and disconnected as never before. Many of the functional and relational issues that used to characterize third world countries are now reflected in urban rural communities in North America. As we discover God’s pattern and His plan through the pieces of our lives, we will understand the richness of His love and the power of His transformation. The mortar and cement that connect these broken pieces are nothing short of the power of God. And as we discover, embrace and rely on this power, we will see transformation and celebration. This is why and what inspires me to write.
A fragment.
Just a piece… a small component of the whole. A splinter off an entire board. A journal entry without a history.
“I know in part; then… someday, in ways too powerful and beautiful for words, I will know fully.”
The apostle Paul’s words explode across the page. Yes, today we know only in Fragments… 400-word sound bites that expose only one piece of the breathtaking mosaic, only one brush stroke of the masterpiece, only one measure of a brilliant symphony, only one pixel in the heart-stopping picture, only one color in the sunset.
That’s why… Fragments. It’s all I know. It’s all I can comprehend.
It’s all my mind can contain. But it is why I write. It is why one entry is about my personal struggles, another expresses my complete joy, and still others plumb the depths of family pain… it’s just a part, my one-week thread in the tapestry of life.
But make no mistake… fragments fit. God the Father takes ownership of the context that provides the perfect place for every piece to slip appropriately into.
God makes a flawless quilt out of the patches of our lives. We see only isolation; He, and He alone, sees the symmetry and majesty of the whole.
Now in part… but someday I will know fully as the light of eternity bursts through the beautiful collection of pieces that have been masterfully and sovereignly placed together to create what I could never have conceived. But until then… Fragments.
