Tree House

We recently visited some friends in Bangalore, which is a large city about an overnight train ride away from Chennai, most well known for being the headquarters of Microsoft in India. We went because our friends there are practicing the kind of devotion to Christ that we are interested in learning about here in India. I came into the weekend thinking that I would walk away with some great spiritual encounter and a lot of informed theology. I thought I would leave with a deeper sense of our purpose here and an action plan of how to move forward.

Instead, I helped build a tree house.

There are 4 kids in this family and the two youngest are boys aged 12 and 8. They had already kind of started the tree house, but soon decided to start over. So, most of the day on Saturday we moved limbs around and tried to tie things together to make it more stable. As always, you have to add on some cool amenities like a climbing rope to the top, and a swing made out of small limbs (which I very proudly designed and built), and mats made of weaved palm leaves. All the while, the father of this family was helping the kids along and getting them whatever supplies they needed. He had no other agenda that weekend, just there to be with his family.

It really got me thinking about God. I've been trying to learn more to see him as my Papa and the one who has no other agenda than to hang out with me and all his other kids. In this dad, I saw a good glimpse of our Papa. It made me think that when the world gets redeemed and Christ comes back, we may be looking for all of our theological questions to be answered and to come to a greater understanding of the world and how things work. It's easy to think that we will sit around all day and be taught by God about all these deep philosophical questions.

I hope some of that happens, but I think we might end up spending a decent amount of our time building tree houses with really cool rope swings.