Thoughts on Children and the US Embassy

Yesterday morning, Jessie, Isabella and I paid our first visit to the US Embassy here in Bogotá, Colombia to apply for Bella’s US Passport, Social Security Number, and her Report of American Citizen Born Abroad. The Embassy is built like a fort, sprawling over several acres with multiple fences and walls. After passing through two security checkpoints and receiving big “restricted access” nametags, coughing up our cell phones and our US drivers licenses, we finally found our selves walking across a deserted courtyard with a huge Seal of the United States and the Words “American Embassy” engraved on a massive stone wall as we approached equally massive metal doors whose attractive weathered copper appearance couldn’t belie their immense weight and obvious utility. Passing through the darkened doorway, we cleared yet another security check point, this time under the watchful and serious eyes of a young Marine behind several inches of thick bomb-proof glass.

The whole process of entering the building is clearly designed to impress you with the size, expense, and impenetrability of this small patch of US soil. After waiting in line and filing out even more pages of forms (I had come bearing about 7 pages previously filled out) and paying $142, Isabella was successfully registered, and just like that, gained access to one of the richest and most exclusive groups in the world – America. All that now remains is for us to come back in a week to pick up her documents. The whole experience was a far cry from the free, hour-long process that was required to register Isabella as a Colombian citizen.

While at one level the process was an interesting study in geopolitics and the display of physical power, it also clearly revealed something in my own heart as well. Throughout the whole process, I got more and more irritated as I was forced to comply with all the regulations and security checks. The whole time I kept thinking, “This is ridiculous, I’m an American! I deserve better! What do they think I am, some sort of criminal? Even more than that, I was in the Marines! I was in charge of security of a base bigger than this! I’ve got more experience than that young kid behind the glass! …” and so on, you get the idea.

That sad truth is that I like to feel important, I want to feel like I'm on the “inside” not stuck on the far side of power, or influence or control. I want to be recognized and accepted based on my merits and actions and experience and knowledge. I want it to be about me!

What a bunch of crock.

It was embarrassing to see this attitude of my heart come welling up polluted with self, and pride and insecurities (Jessie is great at calling me out when I need it - that's part of why God gave her to me). I’ve been reading through Abba’s Child by Brenning Manning and the central thesis of his book is how important it is to rest firmly in our identity as God’s Children and to rest not on our merits but on what Christ has done for us. My prayer is, and I hope that you’ll join me in it, is that I will continue the slow, often painful process of dying to self and living for, in and by our daddy, Jesus.

I want to close with a great quote from Frederick Buechner on what it means to live as Children of God:

“We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us – not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”