Turning Tables for Justice

Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society. 
—John Lewis, Across That Bridge 

On the day that our American lawmakers passed a bill that cuts out food and health care payments for millions of the lowest-earning people in our own country, and defunds programs and institutions globally that non-partisan (if there is any such thing) estimations expect will cost millions of lives . . .  in order to lessen the tax burdens for the upper-earners, who can think about funding food for malnourished kids in Bundibugyo? 

Holy disrupters can, that's who. God's people who think and speak prophetically about justice, who take action with their hearts and wallets. Our American tradition is rich with people who disagree with the might-makes-right ways of the world, and our Christian tradition follows a saviour that walked into the temple courtyard and overturned the tables of money-changers who were taking advantage of loopholes and laws to make a profit from the marginalized, and make it harder for them to approach God. Justice turns tables. Now more than ever, that is what God's people must be about. Even when it's more costly than ever, and the world feels unstable, we will have to fill the widening gaps.

So, let's turn some tables on the narratives of hunger and hope, and look at Bundibugyo. This being July 1, it is the mid-point of the year, and our faithful BundiNutrition team sent me their mid-year report, and texted some what's app photos of their work.

Nyahuka Health center yesterday

Teaching about nutrition on the Paediatric ward

Enrolling patients at the hospital clinic room above, and following up patients at home below.

597 malnourished kids have been enrolled and cared for so far in 2025.

At our Bundibugyo District hospital, we screen every child admitted for any reason, and 30% qualify for nutritional aid by being below critical cutoffs for weight, height, arm circumference (reflecting tissue wasting). About 3/4 are moderately and 1/4 severely malnourished, which is life-threatening and a top underlying cause of child mortality. At Nyahuka Health Center in the other major population pole of the district, ratios and numbers are similar, and kids come widely from 15 sub-counties and over the DRC border. We work hand in hand with the government health system. When they have UNICEF or World Food Program supplies, we enable kids to access those. When they run out, we reabsorb them into our program.

Amongst those 597 kids, 359 have "graduated" or left the program by July 1: 89% cured, 6% defaulted, 5% referred on for further care, and none died. That's remarkable, because even in decent treatment centers severe malnutrition has mortality rates of 10-12%. The remaining 236 will be joined by this week's admissions, and the next and the next. 

Besides giving children our locally sourced BBB (Byokulia Bisemeya ya Bantu, Good Food for People) peanut-butter, soy bean, moringa leaf paste (the production of which employs and empowers several women's groups), we also feed mothers of premature and sick babies who are admitted to the NICU so that they can produce more breast milk to express and feed their critically ill infants. This half-year we helped 47 so far. And we helped 2 women re-lactate and feed newborns whose mothers died in childbirth, so that the babies didn't die as well, which used to happen in a place where formula is rare, expensive, and frequently introduces infection. 71 inpatients received otherwise out-of-stock doses of antimalarials and antibiotics and the cannulas and tape and gloves needed to administer them. This is a way our donors bridge gaps in an under-resourced health care system. 

So we turn tables to feed the malnourished, to support moms of sick babies, and to enable infants to survive when their mom does not. Four clinics a week, assessing, distributing, and teaching on a long list of health topics. That brings us into contact with about 1500 families, who all are reminded that God has not left them alone, who are all seen and prayed for. Twice a month, the team randomly selects discharged patients to follow up IN their village, tracing them to their homes for assessment. This year they have visited 52 former enrollees, and found 50 still thriving ( the other two were a set of twins who were re-enrolled).

Our BundiNutrition team is not sitting in an enchanted garden, they are struggling up and down the road, over rivers and hills to distant villages. They are showing up in the places of sickness and struggle, because that's what love looks like in action.

If the new bill the congress passed leaves you wanting to be part of the Church's solution to government gaps, please feel free to donate to BundiNutrition. And if the current state of the world leaves you struggling financially too much to donate, please do pray, which is equally powerful and important. Bwampu, Ivan, and Clovice pour their lives into saving many others.

One final quote to end: When prayer is authentic, it will always lead to actions of mercy; when actions of mercy are attempted at any depth, they will always lead us to prayer.  (Center for Action and Contemplation email). Amen.

Cheerfully searching for the path to resist evil, cancer, bombs . . .

Are we all reeling from the whiplashing events and press releases of the week, and wondering how to respond when God's name is invoked? Trying to sort out how to live with wars and graduations, cancer and connections, faith and politics.( Skip to end for photos if you prefer).

Bombs tempt us to think we can get things done more effectively by force than by negotiation. In a world that is full of greed and hate and obfuscation, I am not one who believes that it is never necessary for a policeman to forcefully stop a school shooter, or for an army to protect a village from cross-border rebels. Limits to self-promotion enable us to live together, to share resources, to trust community. A disciplined, regulated security force answerable to the voters and upholding the rule of law is still needed in our world,  And yet. We are fallible humans. I don't know if the net effect of our country's actions this week were good (more security for more marginalized people) or bad (failed attempt to disrupt nuclear war and successful stoking of fear and hate). I don't know if our actions were driven by concern for others or by self-aggrandizement. Time may tell, or more likely the net effect remains hazy, murky, arguable indefinitely. We do our best and we don't always get things right.

California protector from dangerous edges

But as a person who has lived on another continent for half my life now, I can see that power is rarely the best or most lasting way to forge peaceful relationships. And as a professional Christian in some sense, we in mission must NOT cloak our-country-first agendas with religious justification. So, just a reality check:

• God does not love America more than Iran, God does not choose sides in our sibling squabbles. For God so loved the WORLD (not just one part) that God paid the entire cost of peace by personal sacrifice not crushing dissent. 
• God chose the small whispering voice, not a rock-splitting wind or earth-moving quake or landscape scorching fire (all three sound like bombs) to reveal his presence to Elijah (1 Kings 19). God seems to work a long, slow, subtle change from hearts outward, not a fast blaze of punishing destruction.
• Jesus refused to make Israel a Middle East powerhouse, refused to fill the Messiah role of calling down heavenly armies to set things right. It's unfathomable that "Christian" faith could be now a reason to justify any one country in the region wiping out all others. The most largest injustice, loss of life, starvation, suffering being perpetuated in Jesus' homeland right now is in Gaza. Can we show love there?
• We all have to live lives of mercy and truth in a world full of danger and sorrow, but also full of beauty and grace.  Absolutely we should do our best to bring our values into every aspect of our life, working and voting too. But God doesn't want forced relationship. Our job is to live authentically in ways that reflect "do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God" that makes God's loving community real,  and attracts others to join. Not to think we can expand it by military might.
• Resist evil, do good. That's in the Bible, that's how we love our neighbor as ourselves.

The upheaval of the world finds us in our upheaval of life. We don't say personally that cancer is its own form of life, and quietly watch as we let it choke out all the rest of life in the body. We resist. Good news today that the 4 moths of medicine and initial 6 weeks of radiation therapy have successfully plummeted the cancer marker (PSA) in the blood down to undetectable. The cancer is still there, but being restrained, going dormant. Scott still pays the cost as we are now 2 days in to another 6 week course of daily sessions with the external beam radiation machine that targets the metastases in nodes further up his spine.  We were invaded, we are responding forcefully, careful though to limit the collateral damage, and paying the cost of discomfort and weariness and loss of much that we held as meaningful and dear.

That seems to me to be a picture of life in a broken world. Not ignoring evil or letting it choke out all that is good. But paying the price to resist, to limit, to distinguish life from death, good from bad. Knowing that we will most likely never completely be rid of all the cancer but, with the support of our community both medical and spiritual and biological . . . "cheerfully we refuse". 

Dr. Ssesanga served with us in Bundibugyo many years ago. When a brand new strain of ebola mysteriously broke out in our district in 2007, there were 4 doctors who examined patients and tried to keep running the system until help arrived (us and 2 Ugandans). Dr. Jonah died. Dr. Ssesanga was infected, locked himself in his house, and only opened for Scott to check on him. Scott and I were spared. Dr. Ssesanga went on to serve nearly 20 years in Uganda and died yesterday. He was a man who resisted evil and helped many.

Yesterday Scott started round 2 of radiation, and this friend Ian from round 1 took it upon himself to drive nearly an hour and show up to surprise and encourage us. The bonds of suffering are real.

In the weeks between round 1 and 2, we reconnected with some family and friends

Kacie and Winnie Forrest in Ventura, CA, with Scott's mom

Mike's parents and Scott's mom, mission is a whole-family center of gravity.

My mom and Chuck Meyer, her best friend's surviving husband who drove from Maine to visit us all, and has been a life-long prayerful support. My mom is finally recovering from a months-long ulcer and scaring misery and able to be in West Virginia for the summer!

On our CA trip we saw close-to-kids, two of the three Tabb girls that grew up in Bundibugyo with us. Laura is now a nurse . . .

As are Sarah and her husband Kevin. All three fit the theme of refusing evil and choosing life.

The main draw of the westward trip was to take Ruth, Scott's mom, to her grandson (our nephew) Karsten's graduation from UC Santa Barbara. 

Family photos by the lagoon and the tower, palms and sunshine, proud faces and full hearts.

Channel island light house built in 1932 like Ruth . . a symbol like the raptor at the top, using truth and sometimes some force to protect us all from danger

Scott taking care of all of us before heading back to radiation this week. We are thankful that the terrible timing of cancer has allowed us to be present with our moms to a greater extent, and we thank all who pray for them.

Ordinary Cancer Time

 Monday I opened my lectionary app as I do every morning, to “ordinary time.” Two thousand years of tradition have knit patterns of reading through Scripture, and remembering history, to the calendar. Actually thousands of years before that, ancient cultures did the same. The exodus of the entire people group descended from Abraham’s sons from Egypt, an enduring story of release from slavery and return to home, is tied to the cycle of moons and harvests. We are people of body and spirit, so the joining of timeless truth to tangible times helps us stay both grounded and growing. The post-Jesus lectionary revolves around anticipation of his birth, and annual remembrance of his death and resurrection. The overlay of his life and the ancient Hebrew festivals imbues both with deeper, broader meaning. 

In the agrarian cycle, the feast of Pentecost came 50 days after Passover. Pentecost celebrated fruits, harvest, produce. The beginning of provision from the gardens of the land, the seed gone into the ground and dying now giving life to a multiplicative abundance. Fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection, ten days after his ascension, as his people gathered for that feast, the Spirit was visibly and audibly revealed to be active in, not just a limited priesthood, but all who believed. The miracle was communication, understanding, connection. 

The budding grape vine I planted a few years ago in Sago

After such a dramatic Sunday, an undeniable wave of inexplicable capacity poured onto countless humans, one hardly expects Monday to dawn as “ordinary time”. 

I can only imagine that the brand new community of Jesus-following disciples felt that their time would never be ordinary again.

Our 2025 has lurched through the far-from-ordinary so far. As Christmas turned to Epiphany to Lent to Easter to Pentecost, we turned from our family-holiday (first time together for that in a few years) to annual Serge meetings to launching the new year in Bundibugyo with school and work . . . only to be shockingly disrupted by the sky-high-abnormal routine test and subsequent discovery of extensive aggressive prostate cancer that catapulted us back to America. We urgently began months of biopsy, scans, waiting, consults, injections, pills, radiation, staying with kind friends for weeks and months. . . . and between all that both of our mothers had the roughest stretch of their 9-decade lives, and Serge changed executive directors (planned and peaceful but still a major shift with celebratory events) for the first time in 2 decades. Suddenly, unlike the rest of our adult lives, we are basing our future from the North American not the African continent, and we have a diagnosis that clouds the view of how long that will last.

So the liturgical announcement of “ordinary time” jarred my eye this week. I think we sense the extraordinary more readily.. . . But ordinary is how we actually live. Crisis lasts for a season, but the cycle of the year, the decade, the century keeps turning. The seismic shift of the presence of God with us as a community, with each of us as individuals, is now ordinary. The post-diagnosis, post-pentecost road leads from this week’s doorstep, and it is our calling now to find ordinary ways to live by faith.

The new normal: post-pentecost, we are not alone, the Spirit is inexhaustibly available. And the perennial plan: what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God? Perks of mentoring amazing people is that we learn so much from them, and one of my colleagues six months ago shared her “3 words” for the new year. . . . which challenged me to ponder mine. Over several days, what came to mind was this: Mend, Send, Attend. Ok I have a weakness for rhyming, I admit it. But by mercy we mend the frayed edges of an unraveling world by practicing justice, by righting wrongs. And we love mercy as we serve others, sending them forward to thrive and lead and live. And humbly we attend to the truth and beauty of God’s presence all around us, in his word, his people, his world. Every ordinary day draws out from us some opportunity to mend creatively so that hurts are healed. To send selflessly so that others are blessed. To attend to the unseen realities that guard and gird us all. Those three words formed for me before the January bombshell of prostate cancer, but cancer is part of the ordinary path through life for many, many people.

As we walk into the ordinary of a much altered life, we pray that Scott is mended, that every cell is choked by the medicine and zapped by the radiation. And we pray that our 11 teams and countless partners in 6 countries across East and Central Africa keep mending the sorrows that seem to engulf them and their neighbors, that wars cease and hunger is fed. The year 2025 finds us solidly into the third third of life where we labor to send new leaders forward, and our diagnosis makes that even more necessary. So we pray for wisdom and grace to support our kids and our colleagues. In ordinary time, we have to build conscious habits of attending to the important and not just be lulled by what is easily seen. That can be bird watching or Bible reading or poetic prayers. Paying attention. 

Grateful for the great cloud of witnesses that read and pray, that walk into “ordinary time” with us, mending, sending, attending. On both sides of the Atlantic we need a fresh infusion of the Spirit to do justice (even for immigrants), to love mercy (even for the marginalized minorities), and to walk humbly with our God.

 
ORDINARY TIME LOOKS LIKE:

Ordinary tasks: splitting wood for next winter's heat

And hosting my mom and brother-in-law

Great visit from some of our longest-standing friends

Holding zoom meetings with Africa from the wifi in the parking lot of truck stops as we travel back and forth to medical care

Rhododendron buds, signs of new life

And to remember MEND, SEND, ATTEND . . 3 pictures

Happy or Alarmed: Mother's Day 2025

 Everyone had a mother, so it's really the only universally experienced relationship. And both mothers themselves and the holiday today can conjure either gratitude or grief, or most likely some of both. In our church this morning the woman who led the prayer time did a solid job of celebrating the act of mothering, the women in our lives who bring life to the world both biologically and metaphorically. But she also recognized the pain many (most) carry from being hurt to some degree by the crucial mothers in our life, or the grief of motherhood denied or motherhood wounded by loss. It's messy. 

Because real world love IS messy. 

Two moms now (above) and then (below)

With Nola, my paternal grandma

My maternal grandmother Winnie died when my mom was 21

My grandmothers  and mother and mother-in-law worked hard to create home out of the materials they were given, to raise children who were nourished with support and love. They all outlived husbands and they all worked to provide and they all delighted mostly in reunions with family, in cheering on the next generation or two or three. If I had to distill the nectar of what they passed on to me, it might be loyalty. A determination to put their kids' well being into the priority place, to truly believe that mattered more than any other accolade.

Because mothers are primarily an ally in the mess of the real world.

And fighting for the well-being of children has become more difficult in 2025. In my 37 years since graduating from medical school, childhood deaths have decreased by more than half (60% decline from 13 million to 4.8 million a year, even though there are more kids), and "mortality ratios" of deaths/births have decreased similarly from a global 10% dying to about 3.5% (and a measure of Bundibugyo's suffering and reason to locate there as a pediatrician, their ratio was over 30%, some estimates close to 50% all that time ago). We mothers have celebrated better access to safe deliveries, to family planning, to adequate food, to immunizations, to education, to treamtents for malaria and diarrhea and TB and HIV. It matters. None of us anticipated that Mother's Day 2025 would find us reading this week's medical journals with concern that that progress would stall, and mortality would reverse it's fall and begin to climb.

The medical journal Lancet using massive amounts of data estimated that because of America's withdrawal this year from our commitment to fund "PEPFAR", a long-standing public health initiative, a million more kids would be infected with HIV, a half a million more would die, and almost three million more would be orphaned in the next five years. Most of that impact will be felt in Africa, our other home. Most of the people affected will be people we know and love, people who are sending me "Happy Mother's Day" texts.

The New England Journal of Medicine wrote "The Trump administration’s gutting of USAID and other foreign-assistance programs marks a break from decades of evidence-based practices that have improved lives throughout the world. In addition to pushing millions of people into poverty and leading to an estimated 160,000 or more avoidable child deaths each year, these reforms will undermine health and the economy in the United States."  The Journal Nature estimated USAID cuts would cost the world 25 million lives.

Mother's Day 2025 is a day to resolve to align our hearts with mothers. My mother aligned hers to ensure my survival and my capacity to care about the world. Because of the women on both sides of our family, I have children of the body and heart both, those that I birthed and many more that have been part of our life. I am so delighted by talking on a family face-time with a handful of them today, and receiving greeting texts from across the world wishing my happy Mother's Day. 

Let us continue to work and pray for mothers everywhere, and their children.

Above and below, goodbye for now to some of our Ugandan kids

My early Mother's Day gift was a week visit from Julia, who brought cheer and capacity to see us through this strenuous course of treatment.

This is what most visits with kids look like now from our call today. . . 

And I enjoyed the peonies in our host home in Baltimore as my Mother's Day flowers!

Presence is the only promise

 Upheaval pictures our life and many others in 2025: it carries the image of quaking earth, of erupting lava, of crashing wave and upturned boat. Forces far beyond our control, on scales of impact beyond our neat boxes of explanation. Cancer, an internal rebellion of unruly cells risking fatal endings. But also the shock waves of cancer in loss of home and community, change in vocational approach, days so completely different, every week accumulating weary struggles. Our microcosm perhaps pictures on a single human scale the cosmic view that stuns us all this year. The most deadly wars in Africa's DRC and Sudan; the most geopolitically volatile conflicts in Palestine/Israel and Ukraine/Russia; the natural disasters in Myanmar and frankly widespread floods and even resurgent measles. And an underlying sense of the ascendency of might makes right, of self-justifying greed, of pride in flouting the boundaries of law and care for the future generations that had restrained our worst instincts.

2025 has shaken us all.

Upheaval can also clear new paths, and that is the story for our mission, Serge. Even before we received an unexpected 100x normal bad news test result in late January, we had planned to come back to America this past weekend for the Board Meeting that honored our outgoing Executive Director Bob Osborne, and commissioned our incoming Executive Director Matt Allison. Bob spent 20 years leading Serge by embodying service, a weight-bearing connection point between the resources of North America and the gritty messy global work. We more than doubled in number of teams and places, and probably tripled in impact and finance. Bob wisely intended this timing to hand over to the generation 20+ years behind us ... but even planned change after so many years of crafting a responsible Board and a resilient base, in the cultural milieu of 2025 feels like upheaval. 

Bob praying for Matt (Scott as his first team leader was one of those asked to commission him in prayer)

So it was truly holy ground to see this heaving up land so well. Highlights for us were:

• Matt's dad Brad, a former Board member and key pastor in the American Serge church base, preached from Psalm 46. God does not stop the mountains from moving, the sea from roaring, the nations from raging, but IN all that He does promise His presence. Be still, and know the present help. That is what we have been praying to hold onto, that the cloud of obscurity and risk is also the cloud of God's presence with us.

• We were the "field report", I guess a missionary comes to every board meeting but this was our first time ever (since we were interviewed by the board in a church basement to join Serge (then World Harvest Mission) as the process in 1991 that is now an entire coordinated week of assessment and orientation!). Talking about our Area, gratitude for the people and projects, and honest pleas for prayer, is always a privilege.

• Worship, conversations, prayers, meals, fact to face human interactions with the leaders of our Home Office as well as the Board who supervises the entire operation is just plain heartening. The work done all over the globe has dedicated and prayerful support evidenced here.

Brad and Matt, father and son

Board gathering around us to pray, and then a group photo below

Home Office leadership, current and former board, spouses and friends gathering Sunday morning for worship and commissioning

Bob's trademark Hawaiian shirt style spoofed by current and former board members. They testified to Bob's personal individual care in them as humans, which enhances their ability to work together to change the world.

In a year of upheaval, these friends are a rock we can lean on. We started together in college committed to serving an isolated  place with an unwritten language and significant medical and development needs. Bundibugyo for the first stretch together, then they handed off to us and filled gaps all over the world. So glad to still be in the fray together!

Praying for Bob as he takes an emeritus role (and a grandfather one with his 4 grandkids), and Matt as he steps into the target of suffering to love all of us, and his wife Rachel and kids too. In a world that has been heaved up by politics and injustice and pathogens and discouragement, let us pray for the only promise we need, the only promise we know to be true: God is with us.