In a hotel room in Alabama with Karen, I find myself thinking about the distance.

We’re down here from Indiana, visiting two of our families who reside in this state.

One of them is here temporarily: Christopher (a.k.a. Captain Christopher Baer, US Army),

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Connor Raymond Baer

his wife Sheena, and their two-and-a-half-year-old son Connor are at Fort Benning for a few more months before taking up their next assignment with the 101st Airborne in Kentucky (and deployments). We spent the Labor Day weekend with these Baers.

Then over to Montgomery, where Ryan and his family live. Including three grandchildren, the last of which is six-week-old Cooper.

This has me thinking about distance again, though not the distance between Indy and Bama. Specifically, what weighs on the heart this evening is the distance between Colombia and family.

Candidly, I hate it. The distance. I loathe it. When I flash back to leaving the USA for Costa Rica in 1988 with two little boys who would not grow up near their grandparents, I remember the cold, hard feeling that I could not stand to do this.

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Cooper Allen Cox

In sixteen years of missionary service, I never experienced a single other net sacrifice than this. Everything else was opportunity and gain. But my Christopher and Johnny would not know their Grandpa and Grandma as kids should. That hurts. That qualifies as sacrifice.

Here we go again.

The thing for which we believe God has prepared us means we will live for six months of each year very far from these six children and these eight grandchildren. What is more, sons Christopher and John and their families have just now been posted—improbably!—to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, just five hours from our Indianapolis home. So close for some precious growing up years!

And yet it is time for us to move away, just in time to miss it all.

We could emote about all the fabulous ways the Lord has knit together details over these last months. But we’d be dishonest to suggest that everything fits just as we’d dreamed. It doesn’t.

I do not understand the hidden calculus that makes sense of this. But these things I know:

  • Serving Christ is not about self-preservation and the avoidance of pain. It still—what a countercultural thought here today!—requires sacrifice.
  • Things have changed since 1988. Back then, we got on a plane with two infants in arms after tearful airport goodbyes and left for the next four or five years. In contrast, UWM’s plans for us have us living for six months of each year in Connecticut, within range of most of our kids and grandkids.
  • Skype is a magnificent provision of God. In 1988, we phoned home once a month for a few minutes if the budget allowed … and never when the tropical rains were pounding on our tin roof. You couldn’t hear a thing then.
  • Chasing safety, comfort, and even proximity to family is like tracking down a mirage in the desert. You really only finally claim what you have been willing to release.

Karen and I are the farthest thing from heroes of the faith and we’re not taking the steps we’re taking out of some weird calculation about postponed enjoyment. But these days we find special poignance in Peter’s conversation with Jesus, as recorded in Luke 18. In fact we cling to it.

And Peter said, ‘See, we have left our homes and followed you. And Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God,who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life.’ (Luke 18:28–30 ESV)

It only seems right that friends who interact with us in this space should know something of the cost of discipleship as it comes to our two little lives.