We 💗 underdogs.

A friend with bruises on his soul gave me the word.

Sitting in the departure lounge at Havana’s airport, he mused over what we’d just experienced in Cuba: ‘You just fall in love with the underdogs…’.

Underdogs.

Karen’s and my life is full of them. It’s a beautiful place to be, up to our armpits in the unpromising creatures.

Truth be told, I haven’t thought much about Cuba and Cubans in recent years. Life in other places was overflowing.

But I returned from Cuba to Connecticut just days ago with my heart exhausted and exhilarated once more after spending nearly a week in ministry with and to dear Cuban friends, underdogs every one. I traveled to the island in order to support a colleague who wanted and perhaps needed me to go, scheduled by duty but with only the tiniest overmatched spring in my shoes.

Now I haven’t the words for what it meant back there on that beleaguered island, full of possibilities but overflowing with tired disappointment, splashed with the presence of God’s underdog daughters and sons on humble and magnificent display.

Cuba has gone and done that thang to me all over again.

Cuba, nation of underdogs, God smile upon you and make you whole.

The underdogs who surround us make it easy to love Colombia and Colombians. The path through our first half-year cycle of service in Colombia was a steep one that left us panting for breath in a way that cannot be blamed only on Medellín’s mile-high altitude.

It is hard to return to Spanish, return to a noisy Latin American city, return to full-time teaching and mentoring when everything—including who Karen and I are turning out to be—has changed in the interim. For me, who have often considered that these things are the waters in which I swim best, it was a mixture of six parts exhilaration to four parts near-death-experience. For Karen, it was new-new-new, all day every day, 24 hours of high-decibel cable NEW NETWORK with no off switch and a lunatic for a husband.

Strangely, this appears to be the case.

We are asking God to bring us his finest doctors of the church, youngish stewards of strong minds and tender hearts who are called to serve with a teaching gift in theological communities across the Global South. It isn’t supposed to work, isn’t really the time for it. Young people have other things on their minds.

It takes too long. You don’t make any money. It’s too hard.

Its time has passed. Its time has not yet come.

Yet our days are filled with underdogs as the stream of such people thickens and widens. I leverage the stupendous network of Majority-World leaders that twelve years with Overseas Council has knitted into my life and into my contact list in order to find well-nuanced placement, purposeful mentoring, and long-term opportunity for these underdog people, so full of grace and overflowing with purpose.

Then we build. We build into their lives, we build into the lives of the theological communities they will serve, we build into the next two generations of student-leaders who will be shaped by these underdog colleagues and will carry their underdog faith into corners I will never visit, resilient with the quiet strength of their underdog King.

We are building a community of missional scholars, a global cohort of underdog servants who bear a peculiar and easily second-guessed gifting for shaping the way God’s underdog people will love and engage their neighbor, their space, their world. For the next two relentlessly changing generations.

It’s going really, really well.

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