I don’t often spend 30 minutes in tears in front of our sound system and my laptop screen. It’s not like me. So this afternoon is unusual.

I’ve just been ambushed by ‘Bring Us Home’, a musical enactment of the biblical Joshua’s story. It’s part of the amazing 2011 album called Music Inspired by the Story, which I’ve loved since it was released those five years ago.

But today, out of left field, the Joshua story ambushed me. I was having a quiet shave at the time, if you must know, before migrating to my easy chair and my laptop.

You may want to take a look at this phenomenally creative work of visual art that a certain makenshi has given us in order to drive Joshua’s story through even more of our senses.

So why does this music devastate me on this Fall afternoon in Indy? Hard to say …

It might have something to do with a compelling sermon I heard Sunday morning when I took a visiting friend from England and South Africa to Indy’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church. We plant churches in this city we love, we were reminded, because God is glorious—beautiful, compelling, outlandishly relevant—and we want our city to experience his glory as we are experiencing it. That struck home, as Karen and I have seen our own lives washed over by God’s beautiful glory. And we want it to count.

And then, candidly, this week has been a challenge. Reality regarding the difficulty of selling a home and raising our support has hit particularly hard in a way that’s probably passing but, nonetheless, real. I feel, on this quiet afternoon, a bit like Joshua leading his Israel toward and into a land that’s been promised and yet remains so very contested. There are giants in this land. Big, humungous giants with thirsty swords.

And then I feel a little weary of talking about Karen and me, as though we were the thing.

We are not the thing.

God’s loving and just glory is the thing. Karen and I are leaving what we know and heading into what is strange and alien not because of some heroic impulse. Believe me, heroism was a memory by 29 years old.

Rather, my life—now Karen’s and my life together—pivots around an oddly concrete calling (I am so very ambivalent about that much-abused word) to be broken vessels containing  God’s sloshing-around glory in the Majority World rather than in the place that it is so easy for us to call home. Dirty little secret: we are both card-carrying homebodies. Yet there is this divine (we’ve tested it enough to know that about it) compulsion to go.

So, for some combination of these things and probably others that I cannot perceive, I found myself dissolving in grateful sobs this day as I first heard Joshua call out his giants and call to his Yahweh as he and his homeless buds made their fifth, sixth, seventh stomp around Jericho’s walls.

‘Yahweh!’, my heart cries like that braver man of old. ‘Yahweh … !’