Ideally

I've been thinking of this word alot lately.
Ideally.
What is it really?
Is it a cross between what we want, what we desire, what we assume, what we expect, and what we perceive?

And then, after you've sifted down to what you'd call a reasonable definition, sculpted in your own mind, what would be your life, ideally?

I'm beginning to wonder if we can't use the idea behind this word to understand what's most hidden about ourselves, things about us that aren't seen on the surface.

Ideally, I'd like to shoot and provide for my family throughout the Spring, Summer and Fall, and then ship down to Haiti over the winter to do God's work.  (I've reserved this spot for you to interject your smirk or your laugh, or your Amen....)
In images, in building, in relationships, in discipling, in conversations and friendships, in serving and loving, I want to walk the way I think Christ would, not if He were in my shoes, but if I were in His...

But what does that really reveal about me?

Most days I completely fail.  Yet, still it's what I find in my core.   People here hibernate with the snow, or they migrate just like the honking geese that fly over my window every October and November.  It would seem ideal, that if I'm going to serve, if I'm going to be useful, this would be the time.

The bank would flatly disagree, and understandably so.  I need to use this time to strategize and plan for advertising, to reinvent myself, and bottom line....pay that mortgage.

But when I start to think of what God, the creator of the Heavens and the Earth, might have planned for me, ideally, what good works He may have prepared in advance for me to do, I get the sense in His economy, the picture may look entirely different than mine.

Did He create me to ho-hum through life, to migrate north and south, honking all the way?  Did He put me on this Earth so I might live a long and fruitful life of making timely payments on the mortgage?
Did He bring me into being so that I might just survive, get by, squeak along?
Or could it be that I'm here for something more? Something of greater value.  An eternal investment toward the everlasting, instead of paying down the note on something that is just withering away.   It all winds up in the garbage dump someday anyway, doesn't it?

My challenge in the coming days is to step outside of my idea of ideally.

Maybe, playing the game will change once I change the way it's played.

Here is a montage I put together of a little girl that I met on my first hike up into the mountains of Haiti.  You'll see in the video there's a few shots of me giving her things, a necklace, some hair ties, soap, things like that.  I had to take them back from her a few hours later, because I found out that she is a slave to one of the families up on the mountain, and they were just going to take them away from her as soon as I left.  It was the first time in my life that I met someone who actually believed she was 'less-than' everyone else.  My heart has been broken for her ever since.
I don't know that she's ever been afforded the idea to think of what her life might be, ideally.