Living on the Edge

If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room.

Our friend Pat found that on a shirt for us once and bought it off someone's back, because it so encapsulated a life principle (I've seen it attributed to dozens of sources, including Jim Whittaker first American to summit Everest, or Morgan Freeman the actor). "Hard-to-reach hard-to-stay" is the phrasing the NGO world uses. Every part of our world contains unexplored depths of beauty and brokenness, every village and city and farm welcomes justice and mercy. But some spots are more edgy than others, be it access to goods or power, to water or electricity, to child survival or media attention. Living on the edge, then, reflects a willingness to do without guarantees. And trying to insulate oneself from all risk means less space for the majority of the world that can't make those choices. The edge symbolises proximity to hardship.

And the edge seems to be a place where God's presence becomes particularly palpable, be it a burning bush in the desert, a thunderous trembling mountain, a shelter shared with farm animals, or a cross in a cursed hill of skulls. 

When we're trying to be at the center, it's hard to be open to loss, to change, to being wrong, to being weak. 

What does that look like this week?  Watching kids gather to the ever-cheerful Clovis at Nyahuka Health center where he prepared to weigh and enrol those who were suffering from not-enough-nutrition. A mentoring meeting with team mates designing a new water system that will save lives, and give women back the hours of carrying marginally clean water from distant unprotected sources. . . and another preparing to re-open the mission preschool. An ultrasound for the pregnant wife of a faithful young man who works for our mission (all is well); another for a friend's daughter. Brainstorming with another NGO interested in advancing care for sickle cell disease, since we live in one of the world epicenters of that gene prevalence, and researching potential testing and treatment options. Reports and emails, immigration issues and plumbing issues, laundry and cooking. Suppling  all the 76 seniors at our secondary school (S4 and S6) with malaria prophylaxis (they also sleep under nets, but malaria is so pervasively endemic here) to take that one factor out of the equation as they begin their month of national exams next week. Praying together with team. Wrestling with our cultural assumptions, with discerning truth. 

Oh, in the fine print of team leading, managing construction of new latrines for the church. . . 

And in the background of all of that, the looming terror of Ebola. 74 cases (54 confirmed) and 39 deaths (19 confirmed) per today's numbers. We are proud of our local hospital and health center IV for preparing, drilling, educating. . . but we also know that human behaviour can be dangerously illogical when fear over-rides the hearts and thoughts. 

with my two girls, Abby left and Julia center, on a hike in August . . 

And as much as we love the edge, and tomorrow will mark 29 years since we landed in Uganda and shifted our main sense of home here . . . another reality of the edge is that it separates us from people we cherish. So today our hearts are actually with our daughter-in-law, who is having surgery for a chronically torn ligament in her ankle. She's a nursing professor and a triathlete so being unable to walk puts quite a stress in her life. If you read this pray for Abby to have a good result. 

And pray for us, to not grow weary of embracing edginess, to stay expectant of God's mercy in places where it's hard to see. Can God prepare a table in the wilderness? Ps. 78:19 says that's the crucial question of faith. Pray we can keep saying, yes.

Please pray for CSB students beginning national exams next week . . . photo above is all the S4 and S6 kids coming forward for prayer by staff during chapel last Sunday.