The rain is falling lightly on the windshield as I sit trying to place the digital recorder correctly. “Can you hear me okay?” I ask and then wait through the phone delay for the answer, “Yeah I can hear you okay.” It is a rare gray overcast day in late February in South Carolina. The clouds above hide the ever present smiling sun which makes the 60 degree day feel much colder. The rain makes you want to move slowly and gives the parking lot pavement a glossy shine.  700 miles away, in the West Side of Chicago, it is barely above freezing. The wind whips through the streets with gusts of almost 50 miles an hour and a light fog covers the city. The snow has fallen delicately and sparsely all day. Michelle Thompson sits in her living room attempting to talk intelligibly with a house full of children. Over the phone, I can hear the shrieks and cries of brothers playing, siblings competing, and a home full of joy, adventure, excitement, and tiresome energy. All the hallmarks of the exhausting privilege of children.

“Well, what are some of your thoughts,” Michelle asks. “Well, there are a whole bunch,” I reply, trying to figure out where to start exactly. We share a laugh as the interview begins much like our everyday lives, somewhat disorganized and haphazardly. Where do you begin to tell such a remarkable tale? Michelle and her husband, Curtis, live with their family of 8 (though as foster parents those numbers tend to rotate occasionally) in a small neighborhood of Chicago. Their six children range from teenage to toddler and both work full-time at a local Church. Michelle grew up in middle class America in the hills of Northern Virginia. Curt grew up in poverty in the city of Chicago alongside his brother and two sisters. Michelle has a bachelor’s and Curt an associate’s degree. They both are white. All of these facts and labels and figures are the ways we attempt to define and categorize ourselves and others. We feel it tells us something about that person, about their views or values, or even about their future. The facts and numbers about the Thompson’s life are humdrum and average. There are millions of lower and middle-income, college-educated white people roaming around our great nation. They are hardly unique or incredible. But Michelle and Curtis’s story is unique and incredible. It is that way because Michelle and Curt’s story is not about them.

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If I asked you what your purpose is, what are you striving to accomplish today, tomorrow, or in your life, what would you say? If I asked more bluntly, what are you doing with your life, and why is it important, would you have an answer or would you be offended because you embarrassingly never really thought about it? Is your life one piece of yarn merely stretched out inch-by-inch as the days turn over and over, or is it a strand woven into an intricate quilt, each day another layer that slowly turns a life into a masterpiece? The difference between a life and a mission is really nothing more than purpose, but it is the difference between meaning and fatalism. Many of us wake up and wish nothing more than to roll over and go back to sleep. At least in sleep there is no pain, nor disappointment, nor pressure, nor stress. But ultimately sleep is selfish, helping only the person sleeping. A legacy is created by what we do with our eyes wide open. We crave legacy. We crave meaning. Mostly we only find fleeting motivation. Bills that need to be paid. Stuff that we want to buy. Responsibilities we must carry. No real passion other than the convenient reality that we are alive and we’ve got to do something.

Donald Miller talks about this lack of meaning in his fantastic book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. He found his own life, after writing a best-selling memoir, to be stale, stranded in depression and hopelessness.  If our life is a story, he reasoned, than the story he was telling with his own life wasn’t worth sharing. As he began to look around he sadly found that many people lived the same way. Millions of stories filled with boredom and pointlessness. What may have begun as a hopeful life, full of promise and passion, stalled somewhere and now has drifted into a directionless and overwhelming existence. He compares life to paddling across a large lake,

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can’t see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story.[1]

I have been there. I desperately treaded water for nearly two years after my son was born with special needs. Just staying afloat was my only motivation, as I struggled to find solid ground to put my feet on.[2] Maybe you have been there. Maybe you are there now. Where is a firm foundation you can rest on? Where is the destination you can swim towards? This is a story about valleys, shadows, even death, and a brighter light than all of them that comforts and guides the desperate through the depths.

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“No,No,No,No,No! Be careful in there because Cadyn is asleep,” Michelle suddenly blurts out mid dialogue. For the third time in ten minutes our interview is interrupted by a minor family emergency. You don’t wake a sleeping child. “Oh boy,” Michelle sighs, “I thought this would be a good time [to talk] because I only have two children.” I laugh as she puts on Dora. “The one with the trucks,” she explains. This is the everyday life of Michelle Thompson. It is filled with home schooling, naps, lunch, house work, dinner, bedtime, and changing diapers. It is filled with the same tasks, chores, and work all of us have every day. For instance, once I interviewed her as she was on the way to and from an Aldi’s Grocery Store. Yet, within the minutiae and the mundane is a life that is different. A story that is unique. For most of us, we guide our life in the best direction we know. One straight line made up of an endless series of events, one after the other, strung out through time headed towards some distant destination: graduation, marriage, kids, retirement, etc. It is the best our hands can make. For the Thompson’s, their life is a thread surrendered to more skillful hands, hands that can majestically weave it together with other lives into a grand tapestry. It is a meaningful life because it is relinquished. It is a story worth retelling because it is a story about something worthy.

“I want people to be drawn to salvation. I want people to be drawn to what God is doing in a community,” Michelle explains. It is easy to see why you have to emphasize that. Michelle and Curtis live in West Garfield Park, Chicago as inner-city missionaries. West Garfield Park is the deadliest square mile in all of Chicago and one of the top ten deadliest neighborhoods in the entire country. It is the center of the Crack Empire in Chicago. Gangs, prostitution, drugs, and death roam the streets seeking whom they may devour next. They have had guns pulled on them, an attempted abduction of a child, murders on their front steps, and gunshots pierce their house and car. But they have also seen gang leaders transformed into lives of grace and faith. They have witnessed how God can transform an entire family through the life of a single obedient child. They have seen the power of Christ make drug addicts clean and prostitutes pure. They live each day without the certainty of income. They rely completely on the gifts of others to keep the lights on, maintain running water, and buy food and clothes for themselves and their 6 children. They have chosen to devote their lives to bringing light into areas that most of us fearfully avoid. “As a family,” Michelle revealed, “we often refer [to] our journey of faith as becoming singing songbirds…because songbirds are taught to sing in the dark…I’ve felt that God has lead us as sparrows into darkness.” This is a series of stories about a life given up for something bigger. They are about a life lived with purpose and meaning. They tell the story of a family used to show a path to forgiveness and real change in a place most of the world has abandoned. This is the story of the life of Michelle and Curtis Thompson and ultimately, they would say, it’s not even really about them. This is a story about God.

[1] Miller, Donald. A Million Miles In A Thousand Years. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009. Print. Pg.179

[2] For a more complete picture of this, check out https://bglenney.com/category/life-with-little-brian/.