Finding an end

I spent most of this morning at Santa Maria Virgen cutting wire. We had just a few more rebar structures to make, and we needed wire ties to hold them together, and we had a large coil of wire and a pair of wire cutters -- so I set to it to make wire ties. This involved playing out wire between my left and right hands to a length of six to eight inches, snipping off that length, and doing it again. And again. And again. Just the kind of solo, repetitive work that encourages thought and contemplation. At one point I even thought it was like saying the rosary, only with lengths of wire instead of beads.

Well, mostly. The iterations weren't always that smooth. The wire coil had been moved around a few times in the past few days, and it wasn't as neat as it had been at first. Some of the loops had overlapped each other, so from time to time the wire bound on itself. Instead of pulling smoothly, it would kink and get stuck and have to be unwound. And then I would need to put down the wire snips, get both hands into the coil, and shift things around until I had some loops free to snip.

More than once, when this happened, I had a hard time finding the end of the wire I'd been working on. All the loops in the coil looked just the same; the loop that had the end wasn't always distinguishable from its neighbors. In order to start snipping ties again, though, I needed the end of the wire. So from time to time I had to stop what I was doing and go and find the end.

In a way, I feel like that about our mission trip: I'm having a hard time finding the end. In one sense, of course, the end is obvious: this is our last day; tomorrow we leave our hotel early in the morning for the drive to San Pedro Sula and the flight to Houston and the flight to Dulles; and by late tomorrow evening we'll be home. The trip is ended because we only planned to come here so many days, and we have used up those days and that is the end. Plain and simple.

But in another sense this is hardly the end. This mission trip built on relationships that were formed a year ago, when last year's team began work at this site. And the relationships built up here this last week won't just cease to exist because the ten of us are going back to Virginia (and, for one of us, Iowa). We've done a lot of work on this site: if you look at "first day" and "last day" pictures, you'll see the evident difference. But it is still just a beginning, still only the foundation of what we all hope will be a beautiful and serviceable house for the church -- the people -- that meets here. The work of building this church has hardly ended today. And even when the building is finished, the work of building the church won't be at an end, as people are equipped for ministry and trained for service and raised up for prayer and praise. What we've done here, as proud of it as we may feel, is a very tiny drop in a very big bucket, one little set of steps in a very long pilgrimage of faithful people in the Way of the Lord. This is not the end; how could this be the end?

So that leaves me trying to find the end. What sense of conclusion can I give to this trip, to this particular set of experiences, within the larger flow of experiences that is and will be the life of this church congregation? What will round out this week as a whole, while also knowing there is so very much more to come?

One thought that comes to mind is to turn to another meaning of the word "end." "End" means not only conclusion or cessation, but also purpose, intention, the reason for which a thing is done. I look for an end, a purpose, for this trip, and it is not hard to find: God's purpose for us in the church is that we love one another as Jesus loves us, and that in the light of that love we see each other and ourselves as children of God, sharers in God's eternal act of Creation. When we gather as church and act out our love in concrete, serviceable, practical ways, we are fulfilling the purpose, the end, God shares with us. The end of our trip is that we have deepened relationships, and given love concrete form (literally!) in foundations and rebar and block, and learned a few words of each other's languages (including the language of the heart), and made something together that could not have been made the same had we been left apart.

That is the end of our mission trip here. And, of course, it is the beginning of our next steps in mission, too.