As a team, we have been reading Bethany Ferguson’s The Mission Centered Life: following Jesus into the broken places. Since we lived with Bethany in Uganda and Kenya, and visited her in South Sudan, the stories resonate and we are no strangers to her wisdom and insight. Last week though there was a line that so encapsulates our experience that it has really stuck with me. “He will disrupt our expectations, and that is a gift.” (P 62). I invited team to share times their expectations had been shattered and then out of the resultant pain and chaos a picture of redemption, of good, had emerged. I shared a brief version of the story in the post before this one, a young man who thoroughly disrupted two days and how we therefore been treated to a glimpse of redemption, God working through the counter-cultural response of our Christ School alumni, to bring beauty.
Life last week included not only the challenge of a violent and psychotic young man, but: two children dying from cerebral malaria, one right in my hands as I tried pushing meds through an emergency needle into his bone marrow while also doing CPR, countless patients with complex stories of vulnerability, an all-day CSB board meeting spent debating the triumphs and trials of the 2019 school year and listening to the cultural lessons I could draw in the undercurrents, a day in court witnessing the absurdity of trying to pin down facts from people who do not think in those patterns, leading team meeting, bailing out a flooded house, meeting the District Health Officer with Dr. Marc and Dr. Amon, teaching, cooking, hosting more than half the nights, multiple distance meetings by internet-based calls. It wasn’t until yesterday that we even had a few hours to take a deep breath and sort out the final piles of boxes and bags from moving, make the final beds, hang a few curtains. And as I looked around thankful for electricity (even if it’s intermittent) and our delightful clothes washing machine, for fresh paint, for comfortable chairs, for the pottery collected over years, for light and peace and air, a space to live . . . The phrase came back.
Last year at this time we were approaching our final weeks at Naivasha Hospital, and preparing to clean and pack up our rented house to put everything in a storage container for a few months. We did not know our Christmas Eve was going to include an engagement! Nor did we think that we’d be in Uganda more than a few months. We anticipated sorting out a few issues at Christ School and supporting the team in transition, then deciding the best place (good internet, access to airports, manageable but meaningful medical work) to continue as Serge Area Directors. We thought we’d take a month Home Assignment when Jack graduated then move into a new place in probably Kenya by June.
Well, God disrupted those expectations, in the form of a complicated implosion of leadership of mostly Christ School but also this team. And in the form of listening to what people we were serving asked of us, and deciding to take a deep plunge back into a messy life that we thought we had finished. Selling our car, living in temporary quarters most of the year, engaging in spiritual battle left and right, and marching out to the edge of the fray, further from comfort. I won’t say it was always clear or ever simple, but by God’s mercy, the courage to follow this slope was supplied, and here we are.
And yesterday, as we hung those curtains, I thought, this is good. Not just the best one can do in a hard situation, but objectively good. We love Bundibugyo. We are back in the house where we raised our family for 17 years. We have a sweet new puppy. We are engaged up to our last shred of energy in work that impacts a generation of people in a smallish place. We have teams across the Area soaring on, getting grants and giving hope, and we have a team of dedicated friends here in Uganda too. We have regular interaction with young men and women we’ve known since they were children, and get to witness them raising their own families and making their own counter-cultural choices because the Gospel has taken root in their hearts.
Yes, I wish everyone I love was at my fingertips, and that malaria and Ebola and measles were eradicated, and that my own heart was more gracious. It’s not all lovely. But it is good.
Praying you can see some redemption in your own displaced hopes in 2020.
1 comment:
Dear Jennifer and Scott,
My heart is glad that you are able to accept so gracefully the 'disruption' of being thrust back into your new/old setting.
I can't help thinking about the difficulty I would find returning to the home I left--even though it is a beloved home where I raised my children, worked and lived for more than twenty years, when I had been hoping and planning for the beginning of work based on using what I had learned in a new more mature way. How hard I would find it to be pitched back into the difficulties of that world.
And yet you and Scott have done it--folllowed the path God called you to, begun again those grueling days and nights, all the while under the stress of so much to lose, and all this with your dear children and family far away.
Your courage and faithfulness lifts me up.
I am praying for your success in modeling God's love in a place where the interpretation of your acts may not be easy for others to grasp, where hatred, resentment, hostility, jealousy, greed--spiritual evils--surround you--and heat, dust, never-ending
work--physical evils--impede your way, and where the seeming impenetrability of different cultures--not an evil but a difficult
reality, all block the mission that God calls you to do.
Please know that I am praying with all my might for you, for Christ School, for dear Nanyuki and Bundibugyo and the souls who make it their home. May God bless you two warriors, the rest of your team at the mission and at the school, and guide you as you demonstrate that the joys of the counter-culture--God's good news--are real and true at every stage of life. I am praying with all my might for you all. With love, Judy in HMB
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