Advent 2: the labor of planting a fragile branch in this earth

We have a mulberry bush just by the door, thanks to Lesley Stevens who lived in this house for a few years. I am grateful to her quite often, as we search the branches for a dark, ripe berry to snack or to freeze for adding to smoothies . . . the tropics are amazing for fruit and we have bananas, papaya, mangos, even avocados in our yard, but berries are harder to grow in the heat, so those handfuls bring us a lot of joy. On Thursdays when the kids come for pizza, they often scour the branches for berries to add to their own "desert pizza" creations. More joy. So, this being Uganda, a month or two ago when Scott had trimmed the bush back, I took a half dozen branches and stuck them in the ground down by the clothesline. Literally a branch shoved into the grassy dirt, but equatorial rain and sun and abundance means several of them seem to be alive, sending down roots and growing their own leaves. Recently we picked our first two berries from the transplanted branches. 

The mulberry bush by the door

A day with a good harvest!

one of the branches, bearing fruit

That's the image of the branch in Isaiah. The promised one does not appear with a flash of alien super-hero power, he comes as an embryo, made of the same substance as us. An idea, a concept, an unseen truth that became flesh. A small fragile piece of humanity connected to long lineages, literally stuck into our earth to grow. Mystery of God, for the first time, visible and palpable to humans. Fullness of grace, transplanted. 

A flashing miracle of sudden presence might have sounded like a more sure bet than the painful labor of giving birth two millennia ago, or even now. Isaiah 11 speaks poetically and confidently of the branch, but for the word to become flesh and dwell amongst us the picture in Isaiah 26 is more realistic: trouble visits, a woman in labor cries out, the time draws near and the sharp pains are upon her. Giving birth, literally, but also a metaphor for the deeply personal costly effort that Jesus' presence required of Mary and requires of us. In chapter 26, the gruelling process is entered with hope but no guarantee that the outcome will be more than wind. That's faith's exhausting toll.

Because this has been a week of labor, searing sorrows that we hope bring forth more than we can see. We're struggling to balance the budgets, to conclude the calendar year, to plan for 2023, writing and signing contracts with a dozen mission and several dozen Christ School employees. Negotiating, listening, trying. Having hard conversations with a few that wrench the heart. Personal and virtual meetings, hard stories to pray for and carry across the six countries in our Area of supervision. Determined to trust God's story even when we can't see around the corner of how God will provide, determined to push everything an inch closer to goodness even though a thousand forces seem to push in the opposite direction, determined to not give up but to let some things go with open hands. Juggling paperwork and rules and taxes and details. And weeping over our little dog Nyota that followed us home one traumatic morning six-plus years ago, and now seems to be dwindling towards death in spite of treating for everything locally treatable. It's been a lot.

But the message of Advent is that in the pain of these labours, the Word enters our reality. In the struggle of faith, God is enfleshed. 

A 23 year labor of love that God let us see beautiful results from this week: the staff of Christ School  on the last day of school (still have some exams, but last full day for staff) after a prayer walk to THANK God for the miracles and mercies of 2022, 

    

Advent 2022: the paradox of walking in darkness to see light

 We all want to see the glorious sparkling lights, not exactly something we have to be talked into. As we turn the corner from Thanksgiving to Christmas, today marks the Sunday where Advent begins. Even yesterday we put up a couple little strands of partially functional much-used Christmas lights, which we rush to unplug every time the power goes our so our batteries don't bottom out. Still, 'tis the season of anticipation of what is coming, of waiting and hoping for good. Like a traveler scanning a web site brochure, or a shopper reading on-line reviews, those originally waiting in Advent had ancient prophecies to pin their expectations to. The entire nation of Israel after the defeat of exile held their collective breath for a change in the plot. And Isaiah the prophet wrote repeatedly to give them glimpses of the coming reality. Including, in chapter 9, a great light.

Bring it on.

But, Isaiah says, the light shines on people living in darkness, in gloom, in the land of the shadow of death. 

Chapter 9 speaks of yokes, burdens, rods, battles, blood, oppression. Not sure that sounds so Christmas-y. Unless, of course, you happen to be living in a land battling Ebola, or in one of our border countries with drought, famine, rebel warfare, displacement, intractable poverty, injustice. In the real world, in other words. Where the shadow of death is undeniable. And where Christmas comes as shockingly good news. 

Advent wreath waiting to be lit

It's raining here, mud and gloom feel palpable, particularly as electricity flickers on and off, and the water line remains interrupted. But this is the exact place and time for a strand of Christmas lights, for unreasonable faith to shine into the narrative. 

 We have the privilege of living in 2022 so that we can look back on both the anticipatory darkness of centuries of longing, and the light that shone in Palestine. We can read pictures of what-would-come painted for the ancients in Isaiah 9:1-7 and 49:5-6 . . . and the picture of what did come in the testimony of John 1:1-9. And yet, at the same time we must acknowledge that shadows remain in our own era and hold onto a hope for the light to come (Rev 21:22-25). Because the darkness is not a sign that the light has been defeated. It's a sign we're in the right place to wait for it.

Waiting for light, example 1 of 4 in last day  .. Miss Michaela, beloved teacher, has to go for a couple months to raise more support and see her USA family. Dark times for first grade. But the light on the horizon is that she agreed to come back for another 2 years!!!

Example 2: baby with a life-changing disability, but hope on the horizon as we refer for surgery and care.

Example 3: Melen (far right) has known more than the shadow of death, she felt the weight of it most achingly during Ebola (a week from today we will reach the 15th anniversary of Dr. Jonah's death). But she smiles with hope that the son she was pregnant with at the time will pass his exams finishing primary school well enough to keep on the path to be a doctor like his dad.

Christ School, perhaps the place we smack into the darkness most often and yet the place where the hope of change and hope rests. Today the Senior Six class had their last regular Sunday preaching service, and Scott spoke from John 13. As we say goodbye to them like Jesus did to his disciples, we not only preach leading with a servant-disposition . . . we demonstrate it as Jesus did by washing their feet (Madame Topista, deputy head teacher; Scott, Chairman of the Board; Peter Bwambale, head teacher, and Patrick, Director of development; in front of the 33 graduates)

Thank you for Surviving: Thanksgiving in the context of risk, celebrating with community

Thanksgiving, an American holiday but a universal foundation for life. Reaching the 4th Thursday in November outside of American culture means that we have zero advertising promotion of turkeys or parades or time off or football or pumpkin or pilgrims. Instead we have another day in a country that is reeling from Ebola and struggling to address poverty and hunger and unemployment, that is rapidly attempting to organise and modernise and educate and cultivate. Except for the Ebola (in those days it was small pox and a dozen other plagues)  . . . not so different from the 1621 harvest-time feast. Thanksgiving comes into the context of risk, and thanksgiving calls out a communal celebration.

In Uganda, webhale kwejuna, thank you for managing to survive, is the traditional greeting to a new mother. Because childbirth is risky. And that captures the spirit of this holiday. In agrarian societies at the mercy of rain and weather, making it through to the next harvest is never guaranteed, the hungriest times being just before the food is replenished. And for the early Europeans attempting to colonise North America, the terrain, the defensive inhabitants with their suspicion and resistance (well founded, as it turns out), the impending cold of winter, the dangers of the voyage . . . all added up to a sharp awareness of the fragility of life. Just as childbearing brings dangerous hours into a woman's life, so that on the other side we note even survival with thankfulness. And while Thanksgiving in the USA was intermittently emphasised for the first century of the country, it became a more universal national holiday when? In the Civil War, 1863, in the context of the worst days of our history. That's when we needed to give thanks.

In Uganda, many greetings start with webhale, with calling out thanks, because we need to see life communally, to draw each other into truth. Being thankful takes discipline, intention, awareness. I suspect that's why the leaders of the pilgrim and indigenous American communities saw the importance of marking the day, and that's why the Psalms and the whole Bible have to keep enjoining us to taste and see. Hardship slams into us and grabs centre stage; it is a choice to instead lay out a table, sing and eat and celebrate. Reaching that point alone is nearly impossible, but in community we get a new and nuanced view of our situation, a reality check that we are part of a family.

So the context and celebration of thanksgiving, Biblically as well as historically, is that in the proximate inevitability of suffering we open our eyes to the undercurrent of good by gathering together to name the blessings.

I'm thankful for my family and my team, and for surviving 2022. And thankful to be reminded, today and this week, of the truth that love is stronger than death, that good overcomes evil in the end. So let us leave you with two Thanksgivings, two older community members who had been blinded by cataracts. It's a good story because it began in the context of risk and sorrow, probably fifteen or more years ago when a young man who had been friends with our kids graduated CSB and earned a University admission and Scott was filling out what he thought was a cursory health exam form . . and discovered that this kid had rare severe glaucoma-based vision loss. Thanks to a missionary short term ophthalmologist, connections to the eye hospital in the capital, generous donors and many trips, he's had multiple surgeries and some preservation of the limited vision he still had. He struggles. But he knows how to travel to the eye hospital. So when the CSB gate guard was about to lose his job this month because he was losing his vision (being blind makes security a bit of a difficult career), Scott had the idea to send him to Kampala with this young man at his next regular follow up, to see if he could also be helped. And that seemed like a golden opportunity to send the grandmother of our next-door neighbour too, with her granddaughter to help her. The four of them arranged seats on the early morning bus, for everyone but the glaucoma-guide their first time out to the big city 8 hours away. There were complications and setbacks, uncertainties and mercies. God opened the door to both the old man and the old woman getting immediate surgery. They returned able to see. Both came to visit in the last two days to say "thank you". Her comment: that much money could have bought land, I can't believe it was spent on me, God is good. His comment: I can walk alone, I can read the Bible, I can do everything. Scott recognised they were each like the 10th leper in Jesus' story--healed, and not taking it for granted, but giving thanks. A tragedy of glaucoma nearly destroying one young man's vision, still wrong and sad. But a redemption in his suffering bringing life-changing sight to two others.

So, praying we can be like that. Having our eyes opened to the goodness of God (the song and artist from the UVA memorial for the murdered student athletes this week, a powerful statement of intentional awareness of truth on the darkest day). And celebrating with our community. And in spite of all the valley of the shadow of death, finding a table laid. Not an escape (in the presence of enemies after all) but a declaration of faith that even on the hardest bleakest paths, God brings good.

Malawi, stories, and rain at the frayed edge of grace

A week ago we pulled out of our gate in the early morning, to drive across Uganda through rainy season profligate green to the international airport. . . and this morning we drove out of Lilongwe, capital of Malawi, to their international airport to head back, past dusty plowed thirsty fields. Out of rainy season into dry season and back again. The rains on our continent make the same north to south sweep this time of year. 

Rainy Uganda above, to dry Malawi below

Over 100 years ago, Scottish presbyterians and South Africa Dutch Reformed missionaries followed the call and example of David Livingstone into the interior, and an innovative risk-taking Malawian leader in Nkhoma saw that these Europeans had guns, and decided to invite them to his area. His tribe could handle wild animals and vagaries of climate, but he thought the firepower would be very useful in protecting his people from hostile neighbouring tribes who also took captives to sell to coastal slavers from abroad. The missionaries noted that Nkhoma, at over 4000 feet, provided a healthier less malarious climate for survival than the lower lakeshore. So they accepted the invitation. Still, at the end of the first year, the tensions of cross-cultural collaboration and suspicion were high. On Nov 27, 1889 a crowd surrounded Rev. Murray. The rains were desperately needed and late. If he really had a connection to God, he should pray for the rain. They gave the missionaries 24 hours, until sunset on the 28th . . . and if no rains had come, they would take that as a sign that these foreigners displeased the spirits and should be sacrificed. Those men prayed, and prayed some more, through the night of the 27th and day of the 28th.

A half hour before sunset, the skies opened and rain poured down.

And so lives were spared and land was granted to the church to begin a collaboration that translated the Bible, built numerous schools and churches, and established a hospital and nursing school and teachers’ college and eventually a University. The synod leaders over the decades transitioned from foreigners to Malawians, as did most of the church, school, and hospital staff. Family after family came and went from various corners of the country and the globe, moving into the solid brick houses with their tropical verandas and tenuous water systems. Thousands and thousands of treatments and surgeries and lessons and projects later, here we are in 2022. So much good. And yet, Malawi remains, like most of this continent, near the basement of any development index. The Kingdom comes, but in the slow way that a mustard seed grows, good but not enough for twenty million people the thrive. Yet.

A bit like the old missionaries, were were responding to invitation and going to establish collaboration, though this time we pray with less colonial hubris and certainly no firearms, but the ongoing heart to bless our neighbours. 

Arrival photos, Daniel and Bethany in front of their house

A year ago the Robbins family moved to Malawi. They had served a short term in the area as school teachers shortly after their marriage over a decade ago, and after finishing graduate training and working in the USA and having three kids then joining Serge and completing needed PhD coursework to qualify for seminary professorship and counsellor training to engage with safe-house programs for abused kids (a lot happens in a decade). . . they were ready to move to Nkhoma. We had intended to make a respectful visit as Serge leaders pre-move to Nkhoma in 2020 but . . Covid . . then when travel eased a little in 2021 but . . . injury . . . so this trip was long overdue. Though many others have served and lived in Nkhoma over the years, we don’t assume our welcome or right to insert ourselves. We need the clarity of the synod leadership inviting us organisationally, and so we primarily went to sign an “MOU” (memorandum of understanding) together (THANKS to advance work by the Brotherton-Streets). 

With Rev. Vasco in his office for the signing

This is the Area Director side of our job, and quite delightful. The primary meeting was fun for sure, Malawians have a warm humour, and Rev. Vasco graciously signed with Scott while saying : yes, now we have the papers, but more importantly we already have the trust with Daniel and Bethany.  They have worked hard, and God’s abundant grace at the fray, has enabled them to already establish relational connection that is more important than any document. And that’s the real joy of such a visit, not accomplishing paperwork but witnessing redemption. Getting a front row view of the Robbins and others as they grapple with poverty and broken systems and find the places where their particular resins can seal the cracks. 

Because in our era, even a century on, there is still work to be done. Daniel teaches in the seminary faculty of the University, which invests in deep theological training over 4-5 years so that church leaders fan out over the country with not only a degree but a spiritual resilience, and also invests in broader diploma-level 2-3 year enrolments so that secondary schools receive teachers with competence. Bethany not only homeschools her kids (and she’s one of those dream homeschoolers who uses the flexibility to stimulate creative, problem solving, real thought about the way the world works) but also mentors counsellors locally and at distance, particularly those working in the hardest heartbreaking areas of abusive trauma in childhood. Non-Serge missionaries are also on station, establishing family medicine and surgical residency training, providing medical care to the marginalised. We toured the hospital and met with some of the doctors and professors and pastors and friends. 

We loved being students again for a morning's dive into a Scripture passage as Professor Robbins drew out observations and analysis, then challenged us to examine trinitarian relationships in the context of voluntary submission. . . significant for understanding God but also human relationships. Wow.

Our role as outsiders now is to come alongside people who are the primary sealers of the broken pieces, people who were born and raised here. Like Rev. M who is preparing a thesis examining the Hebrew concept of “anavim”, a word in the Psalms that comfortable people assume to mean internal moral poverty . . . but perhaps the people who wrote it in ancient Palestine and the people who read it in 2022 Malawi see a richer (and more accurate) both-and meaning of spiritual and physical, internal and external need. Or Professor H who is juggling the finances and administration of the entire University while raising his family, or his wife E who brings quality improvement projects into the nursing care at the hospital. These people and their children are the future of Malawi, and yet God continually sprinkles in people from afar too. People who have benefited from a life that allowed for development of their skills and passions and who are now willing to be the seed of similar blessing and training in a new location, people who have access to tell the stories and channel the resources which are not fairly distributed in our world.

H, his son, M, and Robbins fam having stimulating discussions over fruit and eggs from M's chickens

That’s why we are in Malawi, new to Serge though not new to the centuries of Africans who have laboured and lived and loved here. To listen to statistics and witness the reality that Malawians endure. To willingly encounter the sorrows that harm so that we can be a tiny drop of the grace God rains down. 

On our final evening last night, I walked out on the porch to sit and read as the light faded, a moment of rest before our early morning return flight. It was about half an hour before sunset again, in mid-November, and the parched heat of dry season radiated back up from the dusty floor as it does after months of sun and wind. Gradually I noticed an unfamiliar sound and sensation. 

Raindrops. 

The tentative beginning of the annual deluge had arrived.

PS The team would love to have more help. Priorities are seminary professors and family medicine doctors, or nursing professors or teachers or counsellors. . . . mostly people with the humility to listen to and learn from our partners, and the faith to try new things in hard places.

We can testify it's a fun crowd to spend a birthday with!

Nkhoma mountain, Malawi. May God's Kingdom come here in all it's healing, refreshing beauty. 

All Hallow's Eve: on community and facing the unseen realities

Theology, in most of the world, is a communal concept. 

In Africa, we remain hourly aware of the impossibility of survival individually. We lean into the vast, frayed, knotted, repaired, beautiful net that upholds each person in a family, a clan, a tribe, a region, a country. And not just the living, but the awareness of ancestral lines stretching back into time, the sense of a parallel reality that breaks into ours. Perhaps because of that assumption, it makes sense from this continent to read the Bible seeing that God spoke to communities of people, called families and tribes, and is so vastly beyond us that we need an entire world of humans to refract and reflect His light. 

So “All Saint’s Day”, the commemoration on the church calendar tomorrow, reminds us of this communal nature of our faith. We are part of a vast multitude of humans through time and across continents who have worshiped God. It’s an opportunity to be thankful for those who have lived and those who have died. For Martin Luther who re-set the idea of church as infallible power to an institution in need of constant humility and reform. For Bishop Hannington who died bringing the Gospel to Uganda, and for Dr. Jonah Kule who died living that out here in Bundibugyo. For the untold stories, the invisible-to-us saints who are nevertheless precious to God. The neighbours who rose with the light this morning to feed their children and get them to school, the pastor up the road leading an early morning prayer gathering, the nutrition team heading to the hospital with peanut paste. These are the saints, and their faithfulness and tenacity lend courage to our ongoing walks of faith. We need each other.

Some saints you may not have ever heard of: Bwampu and Bahati above, Nusula and Swalleh below.

And the unnamed people who feed us, plus the very dear saints on this team.

The communal nature of “All Saints” seems obvious from our continent of vulnerability, in spite of the peculiar individuality of American traditions. 

And on the Eve of this day, I’d observe that the spiritual nature of Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve) seems more obvious on this side of the world too. 

From the 600’s onward, the holiday of All Saint’s Day and Eve has been influenced not only by pious proclamations but also by local traditions, which crossed cultures and evolved and came back, in a complexity beyond this short post. But suffice it to say that medieval people were much more in touch with the constant lurking presence of death . . . so practices of wearing disguises, baking cakes, singing, moving about in groups as the holiday began at sundown on the 31rst made sense in a cosmology thick with angels and demons, spirits of the dead, forces beyond explanation. 

It is only in the last century or less that the form was divorced from the meaning. In much of the wealthy world, the idea of dressing up and having parties has become popular for all ages. And almost no-one who participates assumes ANY connection with an actual spiritual world, good or evil. 

This year, however, the tragedy in South Korea screams that evil is not an imaginary concept, it is dangerously real. It’s hard to read about a surging crowd and suffocation and not be overwhelmed by the sadness of it. Of course, we personally don’t doubt that reality encompasses more than what we see, that the “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” that Paul mentions in Ephesians are the real enemy, NOT flesh and blood. So from wars just over our border to the west that lead to death and displacement, and connect to greed and precious resources, to an Ebola epidemic in districts to our east that has smouldered and flared because fear drives people to hide and spread the risk, to the apathy and cynicism of our own hearts . . . we don’t pretend immunity from evil this Oct 31rst. Or any day.

But that gives the All Saints Day context too. We need each other precisely because it is TOGETHER that we are called to overcome that evil. The Eve might be dark and full of dangers. But dawn comes. The last week, as we’ve been out for our daybreak early morning walks, we’ve passed dead snakes on the paved road twice. Forest Cobras both. And quite large. In a place where antivenin and ICU care do not reach, and where children sleep in homes where reptiles can slither in for warmth, I can’t blame anyone for defending themselves or their family. Traditionally a killed snake is thrown onto the path to be crushed over and over, to be out of the family compound. So frankly, the sight of those dead snakes gives a little picture of the defeat of all that is harmful. 

A bit past dawn, but my hopeful morning view of the Rwenzori mountains, royal palms dangling weaver bird nests, and home. 

May your All Hallow’s Eve strengthen your hope in the end of all evil, and your All Saint’s Day bring joy in the community traveling that way together. 

Love, mystery, beauty: thoughts on why we keep on going on

I got a text this week, asking why we keep going. Perhaps inertia, perhaps hope, perhaps the sovereign plans that are bigger than us, perhaps many motivations we aren't even able to see. 

In Ephesians 3, Paul writes that "through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places." Not a phrase that ever stopped me in my reading tracks before. But this week, it did. It sounded like a pretty good summary of what's happening here. 

First that word "manifold" is actually in the Greek, “multicoloured”.  Varied, diverse, multifaceted. A good reminder that God’s thoughts and ways are complex, even perplexing, and also beautiful. Mysterious, but in a way that invites rather than excludes.  In a novel I was reading this week, this line about the ritual of a funeral: “the opacity of God unites them briefly before His clarities again divide.”  Yes. Manifold wisdom has lots of space for variety. And as hard as it is to take in and comprehend, when you do, it is rich and resonant. A painting perhaps, or a musical, being watched by the unseen cloud of witnesses. Or a rainbow, stretched over a perplexing landscape. 

As complex and beautiful as the shining wisdom is from our human viewpoint, because it comes from God it is consistently true. And the deepest truth of the universe is love. Which is what the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places can witness, watching life on earth play out.  To quote Tish Harrison Warren one last time (sadly we’ve reached the last chapter in our team study) . . . God’s love is the primary constant of our reality,  like the speed of light, an unchanging reliable center.  Sounds clear . . . Yet we encounter the love of God paradoxically in our actual life, slogging through the gritty fray… refracted through suffering. When the speed of light is refracted by rain/cloud/tears . . we get a rainbow. Light plus cloud, love plus suffering, viewed from a place apart, show the way.

Rainbows courtesy of Rwenzori Mission School 1rst and 2nd grade

Ebola map from yesterday

So we keep at it. This week, this month, this year, this life. Bumping up against corruption when we get called to pay dubious fees, for instance. Bumping up against poverty when only 3 of our 76 students taking final exams have actually paid their final tuition, making it challenging to feed everyone or keep up with electricity and water and staff salaries. Bumping up against our own weary frailties, and the pesky illnesses of team kids and friends, or the dangerous reality of Ebola climbing to over 100 cases and 48 deaths in Uganda now. Bumping up against hard decisions, separations, longings as we work with 76 Sergers in our Area who all have to weigh the needs of their families of origin , their families on the field, their kids who might be in boarding school, their teams and communities close by, and want to love them all in spite of it being impossible. 

Praying with our Area

Monday afternoon, a good portion of those 76 joined in an Area prayer time by zoom, because our vulnerable humanity trying to shoulder those crosses NEEDS the powerful presence of Jesus, and we find that as we pull together with Jesus’ family in prayer. From people in a dusty arid town in Kenya learning Bible Stories to share with others, to teen girls in Malawi receiving counseling as they heal from trauma, to a doctor in Burundi pulled out to rush to an emergency C-section, to food supplements for people in DRC displaced by yet another flare of rebel warfare, to a Bible study with ophthalmology residents in Rwanda, to an engineer triple checking a zillion calculations to bring clean water to thousands of people in Uganda, this is the refraction of that light of love through the cross of Jesus in our Area as we prayed.

CSB chapel today, the good news of God's love into our vulnerability going out

If all this reflection on why we keep on going, what is really happening in Serge East and Central Africa, in the lives of countless real people in the church universal, is too "manifold" to make sense, well, that's part of being human. But let me end with one of my favourite songs ever, because Dave Wilcox expresses everything I've stumbled clumsily through above in poetry and music, which are a much better language for love.

SHOW THE WAY (click here or here or here to listen as you read the words)

You say you see no hope

You say you see no reason we should dream

That the world would ever change

You say the love is foolish to believe

'Cause they’ll always be some crazy

With an army or a knife

To wake you from your daydream

Put the fear back in your life

Look

If someone wrote a play

To just to glorify what's stronger than hate

Would they not arrange the stage

To look as if the hero came too late?

He's almost in defeat

It's looking like the evil side will win

So on the edge of every seat

From the moment that the whole thing begins

It is love who mixed the mortar

And it's love who stacked these stones

And it's love who made the stage here

Although it looks like we're alone

In this scene, set in shadows,

Like the night is here to stay

There is evil cast around us

But it's love that wrote the play

For in this darkness love can show the way

Now the stage is set

You can feel your own heart beating in your chest

This life's not over yet

So we get up on our feet and do our best

We play against the fear

We play against the reasons not to try

We're playing for the tears

Burning in the happy angel's eyes

For it's love who mixed the mortar

And it's love who stacked these stones

And it's love who made the stage here

Though it looks like we're alone

In this scene, set in shadows,

Like the night is here to stay

There is evil cast around us

But it's love that wrote the play

For in this darkness love will show the way

How to risk Joy?

 Paradox was a concept I first encountered in GK Chesterton's writings (before we were even a pair of docs) and have held onto like a life-raft ever since. Gratitude and grief, for instance, the words that described the last year of severe injury and mostly-recovered relief, apply to most of our review of the past. We aren't forced to wear rose coloured glasses, to pretend everything was wonderful. We can lament honestly.  But we are enjoined to pay attention to the mystery of good, even as we acknowledge and mourn the losses.  Holding two opposite, disparate truths at the same time, it turns out, is also the path to hope. Looking ahead as well as looking back, we know that everything won't go our way . . . and yet we dare to believe that love is stronger than death, that good overcomes evil. That ultimately, everything we actually need will be true, because God is with us.

But living with paradox takes a toll. As we slog through reality, choosing joy risks experiencing disappointment. 

Right now power is out, again. We have a long slew of tasks to accomplish that are made more difficult by the zero-electricity state, not to mention the thunderstorms pouring forth. People we love have some significant injury and illness issues, heart-breaks and challenges abound. In the last week, our team's been slammed with some confusing tax/facilitation/government/legal fees here in our country that could potentially mount up to way more than our annual salary (not that we have to pay it all). That plus Ebola simmering on the edges, and constant reminders of disability, make choosing joy a challenge. 

To quote the book I always quote because we're reading it as a team,

And we pray that far under the surface of our lives, however easy or arduous, there would be a deep source of joy, a constant current of love that will never run dry.

This rain has me thinking of that underground river of joy that is available, but needs some excavation to tap into. So how do we risk it?  How do we dig down to the source of joy?  Paying attention to the presence of God in daily life, and reminding our soul that that is what we actually need. Looking back on the week, for me that happened one morning in a little wooden shack of a pharmacy shop, across the road from the health center. I had gone down to see the daughter of one friend who was recovering from a C-section and as usual the needed medicines were missing from the hospital stock, so we had gone across the road to buy them. It was a place I hadn't been to in ages, and so when the proprietor turned out to be a nurse we'd worked with long ago still cheerfully plugging along and delighted to connect, it was encouraging. She had about 3/4 of the vials needed for the full dose, and the energetic commitment to procure the rest.  But even better: her daughter was on the porch of the shop and came in, and she had not only graduated from CSB but was a trained nurse-midwife herself and worked at the local government health center too. (In fact, we hadn't even been aware of the first friend's daughter's C section because the health care system we and others invested in for so many years, including these people, worked to save the mom and baby alive.) And the daughter's daughter was the cutest little preschooler, all smiles. To encounter a family who embody the all-things-new of what God is doing in Bundibugyo, lives spent serving the sick and endangered, faithful to their jobs and enjoying each other's presence, investing now in the smallest 3rd-generation member like we had invested in the 1rst and 2nd . . . it was a moment to glimpse that committed work with the hospital, school, church, discipleship, scholarships, encouragement and example, does keep rippling out. For the world's good and God's glory, our vision statement says. Many days we don't see much of the world turning good, and we don't feel that we're reflecting much glory. But risking joy means celebrating the "sacramental reality", the presence of God in the muddy, complex, tangible stories around us.

the little newborn who we went to see . . .named Lindsey after one of our teachers!

Glimpses of glory, Margaret and Asita with decades of faithful work for this place

And Yoneki and Damali, saints that remind us God is present

2nd and 3rd generation blessings, which give us the audacity to risk joy

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.