Full Circle: Living Beyond Ourselves

By Tanner Peake and Dick Eastman

We are convinced of the love of Christ and compelled by hope in him. But how do we carry that in the daily grind of our lives? What can we actually offer the world—today?
The problem is not our willingness. It is the challenging task of discerning why we're here at all. What does God want—personally—from me? What does it look like when the love of Christ is carried in my life?
The journey of Full Circle is simple and profound. We discover our path with Christ by finding our circle and responding to its call, one step at a time. Through the stories of friends who have found their own circles and are giving their lives in response, Tanner Peake takes us around the world. We explore the nuance, diversity, joy, and wrestle of living beyond ourselves.
Do you long to live beyond yourself? Are you ready to transform the way you understand the purpose of your life? It's time to find your circle...

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667891392

Book preview

Chapter One

A Nameless God

1.

I left home to follow a God I didn’t know.

This is the Christian story. It is the story of Abraham, who heard a voice calling him from Ur Kaśdim into an unfamiliar land. It’s the story of the 12 disciples, who left their jobs and families to follow a 30-year-old rabbi. It’s my story, as I followed my grandfather’s last wishes to a faraway land—and met God on the way.

It’s your story too, though it’s possible you’ve forgotten. There’s no shame in forgetting; I forget too sometimes. Life has a way of disconnecting us from our stories, fading color into grays, flattening the wild strangeness of the world into stale linearities. We return to our stories because they help us remember.

So let’s go back to the beginning. Let’s make the familiar strange again.

A man named Abram is living in a land of violent upheaval, skirmishes between warring tribes, clans as ruthless as mob families, wilderness as wide as the Sahara. Daily life in the Middle East back then is almost incomprehensible to us. The global population is somewhere around 27 million—fewer people than in Canada today.

No word of scripture has been penned. Jesus has not been born in a manger. Moses has not received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. God has yet to reveal himself as a king, a judge, a father, a bridegroom, or the one who sees. Until this moment we have no earthly record of a single person calling God by name, only stories and whispers and rumors bound by community and geography.

So when God speaks to Abram and tells him to leave home and venture into a new land, Abram might as well be responding to a stranger. His imagination would not be populated with images of a shepherd or a resurrected man. There is only the voice and the response.

We don’t know what made Abram trust this voice. All we know is that he had faith enough to follow this strange God into a strange land.

Imagine an expanse of land that rolls like the sea, a wide place of sweeping plains, where the wind comes fast and cold, billowing in the thin grasses. Your nearest neighbor is miles away, the next one miles beyond that. On the horizon, you see mountains like distant lighthouses—the Snowies, the Belts, the Crazies—framing the wilderness.

This is where my grandparents made their home.

My grandma Emerald was the eldest of seven children. She was tough as nails and curious about the world. Her early life is largely unknown to my family now. Besides my family’s handed-down belief that her father made his living running moonshine, we know that Grandma Emerald’s father died in a car crash at a relatively young age, perhaps the result of a plot to steal cash. Regardless, his absence left a mark on the psyche of my frontier family, and—for good and for bad—Emerald was part of a family of survivors.

My grandpa Lewis was the son of a widowed Montana homesteader. He inhabited a lot of roles as a boy—hands to milk the cow, a spine to lift the hay—but never had the chance to be a beloved son. When he was 13, in the heart of the Great Depression, he left home and joined a gang that captured wild horses and ran moonshine to survive.

He left home early—and not by choice.

By the time my grandparents met, they had already lived through World War I, the Great Depression, and no small number of personal tragedies. Life had not always been kind to them, but now they had each other. They would make their way in the world together.

Lewis and Emerald married in 1935 in front of a furniture display in Casper, Wyoming, and were able to scrape up enough money through the years to acquire 1,500 acres on the Bench, a Montana wilderness that was arid and dotted with sagebrush. The land was too dry, windy, and cold to farm, but it was enough to support 100 cows. Initially, Lewis and Emerald lived in a chicken coop, packed in with their growing young family, a few possessions, and all their hopes and dreams. Sunlight peeked in through two windows by day, and by night a cast iron stove glowed red. After a few years they built and moved into a house that was only slightly bigger, a 500-square-foot structure with some basic upgrades but still no electricity, heat, or plumbing.

For Lewis and Emerald, Jesus didn’t exist. I doubt they had ever heard God’s name. Like Abram, they lived in a barren place with no testimony of the gospel. They knew so little of the world, they might as well have been survivors of a great flood, wanderers after the fall of a great civilization.

One night my grandma Emerald was sitting outside in the roofless outhouse behind their home on the bench. She and Lewis had a few friends over to play cards, but for the moment she was alone. She looked up at the stars. That far out in Montana, the sky flickers with more stars than you could ever count.

Suddenly—she knew there was a God.

I don’t know if you believe in this kind of thing, but this is how she told the story: She began to speak in a language she never knew. In some way, she encountered God. Enough time passed that my grandpa got worried and went out looking for her. He thought she was drunk when he found her. She tried to explain her mystical encounter, but he was bewildered.

Just a couple months later, Lewis was working in his shop. He was alone, his knees down on a gunny sack, doing his chores. Suddenly, he had the same revelation his wife had received when she looked up at the stars—there was a God. He knelt stiffly on the shop floor. His tongue moved with words he didn’t understand.

These two moments altered the course of my grandparents’ lives. The way they told this story afterward, it was as if they might be the only people on the planet who had ever met God. The revelation of God’s presence carried all the alien shock of a UFO sighting or ghost appearance. A few months before, they had thought themselves alone in the world. Now they knew someone else was with them—though they knew nothing of that being’s nature or name.

They began to pray, asking this God in the stars to show them more. They knew they had encountered something large, something beyond them, but they also knew that they had barely scratched the surface.

We need to know your name.

4.

It seems likely to me that we’ve all felt that same yearning. I’ve known Jesus for a few decades now, but that doesn’t mean I have a handle on the incarnate God. Even after all these years, I still find myself at my wit’s end, a man in a wilderness, looking up at the stars.

I need to know your name.

There’s a human honesty in a statement like that, a meek expression of need that won’t go away in this life. I think the Lord loves that prayer. After all, he keeps answering it.

For Abram, he revealed himself as El Shaddai, as his exceedingly great reward (Genesis 17:1). There’s something universal in the way God pursues this man, something I see repeated through the ages and even through my own lineage.

While preaching to pagans in Athens, the apostle Paul describes the reciprocal searching between God and humanity. The Athenians, like my grandparents, worshiped a god whose name they didn’t know. When he notices their altar dedicated to an unknown god, Paul sees it as an icon of the mysterious and timeless interplay between God and humanity. He tells them,

And [God] made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us… (Acts 17:26-27, ESV)

It all makes me wonder: How would our conception of Christian missions change if we thought of every person on this planet as a pilgrim questing after a God who calls them by name, feeling their way toward a God who is not far off?

From the outset, a conception like this places us in solidarity with the people around us, rather than at a higher remove. We too are pilgrims. We too have longed to know God’s name. Every day we chance upon people whose stories with God are already in progress. For years God has already been seeking them out, walking with them, inviting them home. God has put eternity in their hearts. We enter on sacred ground.

The backroads of Montana are a dangerous place to find yourself during a snowstorm, but Thomas Johnston had never been risk-averse. He scraped ice off his windshield and drove off before the heat kicked on, two of his kids bundled up in the backseat. His headlights swirled with snow; his breath swirled with mist. These country roads weren’t in great condition on a summer day, but in a snowstorm they were almost impassable.

Thus Thomas drove into a blinding wilderness. Sometimes it seemed as if his entire life was a story of leaving the safety of home.

He’d grown up on 15,000 acres of ranching property, his father’s hard work and good fortune stretching out as far as the eye could see. It was a rich inheritance, waiting for him to claim when he came of age. When the time came to declare a vocation, however, he chose a path that no one expected. Like Abram thousands of years before him, Thomas had heard an invitation into the unknown. Instead of a life on the ranch, he wanted to be a minister of the gospel.

This was not the path his parents had prepared for him, and his announcement elicited swift backlash. His father gave him a stark ultimatum: either he could stay, carry on the family name, and claim his inheritance, or he could follow Jesus and lose it