"A Conversation With Bilbo Baggins"

A Conversation with Bilbo Baggins

By Amanda Naylor

Alright, confession time…I have an obsession with Lord of the Rings. The epic battle between good and evil, the elaborate world-building of places like the Shire and Rivendell, the ordinary (and not so ordinary) courage of characters like Sam and Merry. It’s the stuff of gold…the stuff that makes you long for an adventure that you know must exist just behind the veneer of the mundane. And within the epic storyline are the truths about life that Tolkien expertly embeds. In the past few weeks, I have found myself thinking about one such truth, one from the ever-so-wise Bilbo Baggins. He writes,

“It’s a dangerous business Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

If you are not familiar with Bilbo Baggins, you might think that he is encouraging Frodo to stay within the safety of his hobbit hole. But that is not Bilbo’s modus operandi. Bilbo is indeed warning Frodo, but the warning is that stepping onto the road could sweep you into an adventure you never even had the imagination to dream of. Adventure doesn’t always come knocking on your door; it often requires you to step onto the road in order to be swept off to it.

I am the board president for an organization called WIND Guatemala, an organization my parents founded in 2007. WIND operates in the Ixil highland region of Guatemala, an area comprised almost entirely of Indigenous Guatemalans and an area that has experienced the atrocity of civil war and the ongoing effects of poverty. WIND stands for “When It Needs Doing” and seeks to be the “wind in the sails” of the work that Indigenous leaders are doing to rebuild their own community. We do not bring any of our own agendas to the Ixil; instead, we empower local leaders to enact the vision they have for theircommunity. There are a few important partnerships that we have, but the one that has become the most prominent is our connection with Colegio Horeb, a Christian school in one of the Ixil villages. When I think about the beginning of this particular partnership, I think about the conversation between Bilbo and Frodo.

In 2011, my parents were on a vision trip to explore new partnership opportunities for WIND. On their way out of town on the final day, they drove by a beaten path, and their driver mentioned in passing that the leader of a Christian school lived at the top of it. They thought nothing of it and returned to their hotel room an hour away. That night, they both felt like God was impressing upon them to return and walk up that path. Even though they had plans for the rest of their trip and even though God’s instruction seemed vague, they obediently returned the next morning, and at the top of the path was the woman the driver had told them about. My parents told her who they were and that God had instructed them to walk up the path but didn’t know exactly why. As my parents spoke, the woman started to cry. She revealed that the night before she had been praying about closing the school doors because enrollment had decreased to twenty-eight students and four teachers that she had been unable to pay for the past two years. She had asked God that if she were meant to keep the school open, that He would send her a sign. My parents had the incredible privilege of being God’s answer to prayer that day!

Fast forward fourteen years and many adventures later. The school is not only still open but has grown substantially. There are now twenty-eight paid teachers and more than 500 students who regularly hear the gospel as they pursue a life-changing education. In particular, WIND has focused on the education of girls in the community who historically have had an 18% chance of graduating from 9thgrade. Since starting the “21 Girls” sponsorship program (which pairs girls at the school with sponsors in the US who encourage them in their education), 100% of the initial class, now in 8th grade, is still receiving an education!

Can you imagine if my parents had not obediently stepped onto the path that day? Can you imagine the deep friendships my parents would have missed? The excitement of seeing thousands of kids hear about Jesus that they otherwise would not have been able to see? Instead, they have had the ultimate privilege of being one of the instruments that God has used to begin rebuilding a community. Stepping onto the road (or path in their case) has caused them to be swept into the adventure of a lifetime.

My parents would be the first to tell you that they did nothing extraordinary that day; they simply walked up the path that God asked them to walk. But you might be tempted to think (like I also have been guilty of thinking) that this is the “supernatural stuff” of the mission field, those miraculous stories that people bring home with them after their time abroad. But I want to push back against this thinking just a bit. Does God do miraculous work on the mission field? Of course! But he is omnipresent and omnipotent; he is just as present and powerful in Graham as he is in Guatemala.

So, what’s the difference? Why don’t we often hear of these types of miraculous encounters in our ordinary lives?

If you have ever been on a mission trip, you know that there is a slowness and an awareness that you are forced to adopt that is not always present in the hustle of our ordinary lives. Things just move at a different pace and give people the margin to pay attention to and invest in what God is doing in their midst. What if we took that same slowness and awareness into our jobs, classrooms, neighborhoods? On the mission field, we expect God to move. What if we carried that same expectancy as we went to the grocery store or attended our kids’ sporting events?

You don’t have to travel to Guatemala to be a missionary. (Although I hope you do!) You are a missionary right where you are. I encourage you to pray each morning for God to give you the courage to step out your door. Pray for the awareness to see the people he places on your road and that he would help you be available to love them well. An adventure awaits you in the ordinary world. And if life is feeling boring or stale, let me encourage you to allow God to sweep you into the epic adventure He is writing!

Amanda Naylor