What would it look like to have a grace-filled, creative, unconventional, diverse path to empowering and equipping people to become the healthiest, most mature, most powerful, most free, most connected to God version of themselves possible?

What would it look like to acknowledge that living out the kingdom isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition?

What would it look like to root everything in the expansively loving heart of a God who wants to walk in intimacy with his kids, and that they know him so well that they can’t help but live amazing lives and do amazing things?

I ask a lot of questions. My journal, which I often refer to as my history book, is full of questions. Questions for God. Questions for myself. Wonderings and musings that aren’t directed towards anyone in particular.

I’ve been known to pray in questions. This would probably annoy you, but God likes this about me. The questions are invitations to mystery and wonder, and he’s really good at showing up in mystery and wonder. When I ask questions, he goes into action. My assignment is to then pay attention and notice his answers. Sometimes the answers come quickly and are easy to understand. Sometimes the answers take years, decades, even longer, and I really don’t understand them at all. Or maybe I do, but I don’t like the answers. That happens too.

The questions at the top of this post have been living in my heart from some time, but they also have residence in my history book. They’ve shown up over and over with slightly different wording. To be honest, I don’t really think they’re my questions. As in, they didn’t really start with me. I think they’re his prompts because there are things he wants to show me that I might totally miss if I didn’t have specific questions attached to them.

Those questions are flammable. They burn. And they make me burn.

“What would it look like…?”
“Build it. Let’s find out.”

“What would it look like…?”
“Call them, They’re waiting.”

“What would it look like…?”
“Cultivate it. You were made for this.”

I’m still trying to understand what that looks like. I know it can’t be explained in a few concrete sentences. It’s much richer and more complex than that, and there’s so much tension, so much glorious wonder and mystery and tension.

I have no desire to be a religious voice in the world. Few ideas appeal to me less. I just want to connect people with their Source, the God who loves them beyond comprehension. I want to connect them to their true humanity: beloved, frail, dependent, blessed, the heartbeat of God walking around in fragile dust suits on the earth. I want to equip and empower people to walk in all that is theirs because of Jesus, and I want Jesus to get what he paid for both through them and because of them.

God has a thing for the ornery ones, you know. The ones who are a little more trouble, the ones who are wired for the unusual, the ones who were born speaking a foreign heart language and can’t seem to find their people. The ones who were never made for the mainstream and don’t understand why anyone would choose vanilla when you could have bubble gum cookie dough chocolate swirl with whipped cream and extra extra sprinkles…and also the ones who would die on the hill of vanilla in the face of pressure to choose something far more…colorful. The ones who can’t stand to be bored and think there’s surely more than what we’ve been told. People like me. People like you. We’re all his favorite and he loves our quirks and our inconsistencies and our humanity. He grins over us far more than we realize.

Dept. 61 is for us. It was born in a story, but I believe it existed in God’s heart long before it came flying out of my fingertips and into an old blog post. We are the sons and daughters, the treasured and beloved. We are the rescued and the rescuers, on a lifelong assignment of reconciling the world around us to Love while we’re still on the journey ourselves.

Bring your questions. Bring your belovedness. Bring all your glorious you-ness—even the parts you don’t really understand or like. There’s room here for you. We’ll figure this thing out as we go along.

And we’ll never go alone.