Life as Performance Art: #COVID-19UGANDA day 167, September 3, and Ezekiel

As missionaries we have a complex relationship with social media. As does everyone. Yesterday, for instance, we had some zooms with people potentially interested in working with us, and each referenced a blog post or story (from us and our team) that they had found meaningful. That is encouraging; it can also be paralysing. I never even heard of the word "blog" until some colleagues who had one joined us. I just looked up our first post: Sep 3, 2006, oddly EXACTLY THIS DAY 14 years ago. According to the stats on the sidebar, we have posted 2,016 times since then, an average of every 2.5 days (!!), and 2009 was the most prolific year.  These days my favourite medium is probably the instagram story (jamyhre) because the images are transient, immediate, allow for short text, and feel both poetically specific and grittily real. Facebook, Instagram, and Blogger are all platforms that project our life into a public sphere, and we keep throwing it out there. Which teeters on narcism or exploitation for sure. And yet . . . it also can be prophetic.

I mean that literally. Because in the march through the Bible, now it is Ezekiel's turn. As the world is falling apart, God does not just send Ezekiel messages to verbally warn or denounce or lament. In chapter 3, he eats the scroll of words from God that he will take to the people. By chapter 4, he's involved in his own art installation, lying on his side outside his house for over a year, cooking limited rations in the dust, to represent hard times ahead. He makes a model city and builds siege ramps. Later he takes a sharp sword to his beard and hair and publicly weighs and burns portions according to the coming judgement. When his wife dies, he breaks cultural rules to avoid mourning traditions, foreshadowing death to come that will be so all-encompassing the nation will be unable to hold onto their ceremonies. 

Ezekiel doesn't just talk about what he hears from God. He lives it. In front of everyone. He's an influencer for repentance, against a culture of injustice and consumption.

Bear with me, but I think that there may be a modern equivalent in some corners of the web. When people share a story about their differently-abled child and his job. About their cancer diagnosis and the struggle. About loneliness living in a country far from home. About impossible decisions to ration care in an epidemic. About the wearying parade of need and the relentless demands of love. These stories challenge our assumptions. They only make sense if the entire fabric of the universe is based on a different metric than winning, strength, power, or fame. 

Today in our team meeting we looked at the fact that 41% of the Bible is narrative. Not just the painfully bizarre stories of Ezekiel, but most of what we call the Gospel itself. Stories of real people in real-life situations, and stories that are parables, both have a way of getting behind our defences.  We might react argumentatively to propositions about the police, guns, protests, or politics. But a story of a person shot in the back seven times humanises the situation.  Truth is objective and absolute, yes. But our ability to perceive it is always subjective and bound by culture and language and history and perspective. Which is another way of saying, God is real. But we can only encounter and describe God from our puny limited selves.

So here we are, September 3rd again, 14 years later. Telling our story a few days at a time. Today we had four different meetings, 3 of which were mostly cross-cultural and one with our American team. I had spent many hours in the last week prepping a Uganda-specific teaching morning about malnutrition for our BundiNutrition team, gathering the latest local data and protocols. I'm pretty passionate about the value of treating hungry kids and the way this is a window into everything that is broken and in need of redemption. In other meetings we listened to people going walking hard paths. Those are their stories to tell, not mine, but the sheer weight of bearing loss and confronting evil and struggling to survive sometimes feels shocking. There were laughs too, like when some fairly new team mates made the pizza dough which was wet, limp, difficult to roll, impossible to stretch, a bit of a funny grey color, falling apart (Mike described the pizza table as a crime scene . . . we were NOT laughing at that point). We worked hard to eke something out that was edible. About an hour ago, after everyone went home, Scott said, I wonder if that was actually wheat flour or cassava flour? Sure enough, there is only one Lubwisi word for both, kahunga. So our colleagues thought they were getting a great deal on locally milled baking flour . . . only wheat is not grown here, so they were being sold a massive sack of kahunga (dried milled cassava). Which does not have gluten, and does not easily make a dough or a pizza.

Well, we're not Ezekiel, but we do struggle with cooking and live out our inadequacies publicly. We do TRY to point to God, to choose life paths that would not otherwise make sense. We do ask our faith questions out loud, and (thanks to Scott) share real-time photos of what we see. Thanks for reading along for all these years, watching with us for the redemption we KNOW is coming.