Don't go to Jerusalem, they said.
And with good reason, there was political unrest afoot, there was a rising cloud of tension and uncertainty, of threat or death. It was Passover time, a festival, a time of expectation, of crowds, of remembrance. Jesus who had remained relatively rural, mobile, difficult to trap, both gentle of touch and sharp of tongue, now spoke of impending death and walked directly towards it.
But first, a meal. A room, a limited gathering, a ritual connecting his small group of closest friends back to their history. Like their enslaved ancestors, they were living in a time of oppression and longing for deliverance. And like their enslaved ancestors, they did not quite grasp how it would come. What they did know was to go into their homes at dusk, to break unleavened bread and dip in wine and put the blood of their roasted lamb meal over their doorpost. To withdraw as the Angel of Death moved through, the tenth plague in a series of increasingly disruptive and dangerous difficulties.
In ancient Egypt, the curfew and isolation ended with an entire nation being born. In first-century Israel, the evening ended with arrest and tragedy and execution of the hope, and then unimaginable redemption.
In 2020, we are too close to see clearly.
Get out of Africa, seems to be the message we get daily from our embassies in various countries. Borders and airports are closed, yet every day or two there is yet one more email implying that perhaps a window will open. For some that needs to happen, for their own physical or mental survival. There is no one-size-fits-all path through this time, and anyone who thinks they can lay out a clear plan isn't reading Judges recently (where I happen to be). We all want to control God as being on our personal side. But if the stories tell us anything, it is that God's rescues don't always look comfortable or predictable in real time. Sometimes the army flees on its own, and sometimes the presumed victory does not materialise on time, and no one can say for sure which story we are in right now.
For the majority of our workers, we are here for the duration.
Partly that is like Jesus' path to Jerusalem, we are just doing our job, following our commitments and protocols, trying to be sensible and faithful. There is no safe place on the globe, and now we're more aware of that. If your path was towards Jerusalem, maybe it is best to keep following it. Pandemic or not, babies are still being born and some need a surgical escape route or a deliberate jump start to breathing. Malarial mosquitoes are still biting and someone needs to put in IV's and administer artesunate. TB still spreads insidiously until a canary-in-the-coal-mine toddler shows up with listless coughing and dwindling life, and needs a test and some medicine. Typhoid still punches holes in guts that need an emergency surgery. Hunger still stalks, and infants still need to be warmed and weighed and fed. Schools are closed but yesterday our staff at CSB still managed to finally get the home-work packets out to students, so they can work at home, no small task in a world without internet connectivity, without educational programs that can be decentralised. Some teams have been able to work with churches and groceries to provide food relief to the day-labourer majority of Africans who cannot stock up at Walmart and live off of a horde at home. Our Bible translators are working still, at home. Some are listening to neighbours share their anxiety, creating extra small jobs to help, or just giving help. Some are part of higher level planning in their area, purchasing equipment or doing training. Some are have taken in young singles stranded by the closed down public transport far from their homes. Some are praying.
In the USA and Europe, the pandemic has strained places with 1 doctor per every several hundred people. We have one per several thousands, even ten thousands. In the USA and Europe, hundreds and thousand of ventilators per city seems sparse. On this continent, we're talking zero to 20's per country.
We feel the cross, and on good days know it is just the light burden of a cross Jesus has already carried. On other days, it feels weighty. Our entire organisation was on a rare rhythm of simultaneity because our quadrennial all-continent meeting naturally meant that every single family planned travel, perhaps a vacation before or after, perhaps a Home assignment or a connection with friends or family. We were all headed for a break in a little over a month. Instead we are all pretty tightly restricted to a small, needy, unstable place watching not only our hoped-for rest disappear but our normally stressful lives might double, or triple, or more in sorrows. The kids on one of our teams listed their losses, an appropriate way for believers to be honest with God. Not being able to play football with a hundred kids is real. Not being able to see grandparents soon is real.
Will that cross mean any literal loss of life? We pray not. But even though none of us can ever be sure what the next day will require, in this particular moment of history the truth is more stark. We believe we will be the ones in the house when the death passes over, unscathed. The odds are good for any one person that we will be. But small odds repeated hundreds, thousands, millions of times still add up to a pile of bodies.
We have been here before. When the ADF kept up their cross-border terror, we sometimes ran and sometimes stayed, we lived in that tension of not-knowing. When Ebola came to our district, it found us here and grounded us here, exposed, still working. Did we always make the right call? No. But when our partners speak of us, those are the two times that they perceived the love of God. Solidarity in a shared danger.
So day 20 of COVID-19 comes to us in Uganda, on the Thursday when we remember the passover meal. 53 cases have been tested positive here, and all are alive still. Over 3 thousand travellers have been tested, and there are still 18 thousand that the Ministry of Health intends to track down. If 18 thousand people from high risk countries in March (mostly returning Ugandans) fanned out over the country, if 13 of our 53 cases were already community-transmitted, how can we escape? Yet all over the world we're seeing that the social-distance protocols are slowing the disaster, averting deaths, so we continue. Every few days our president holds night-time broadcasts to reminisce about his fighting days and enjoin the country to endure temporary inconvenience for long-term survival.
Tonight at the 7pm curfew we will celebrate Passover by Zoom around our area, remembering the truth on which our lives depend. Jesus came among us as a human, lived through times as tumultuous as this one, faced the worst, and in his actual body absorbed all the hate and brokenness of the universe. His work constricted right down to a cave in the earth, a tomb. And then he reversed all the trajectory of sin and sorrow and injustice and loss, and walked out to lead us home.
Congolese cross art from my brief stop in Belgium last August
In ancient Egypt, the curfew and isolation ended with an entire nation being born. In first-century Israel, the evening ended with arrest and tragedy and execution of the hope, and then unimaginable redemption.
In 2020, we are too close to see clearly.
Get out of Africa, seems to be the message we get daily from our embassies in various countries. Borders and airports are closed, yet every day or two there is yet one more email implying that perhaps a window will open. For some that needs to happen, for their own physical or mental survival. There is no one-size-fits-all path through this time, and anyone who thinks they can lay out a clear plan isn't reading Judges recently (where I happen to be). We all want to control God as being on our personal side. But if the stories tell us anything, it is that God's rescues don't always look comfortable or predictable in real time. Sometimes the army flees on its own, and sometimes the presumed victory does not materialise on time, and no one can say for sure which story we are in right now.
For the majority of our workers, we are here for the duration.
Partly that is like Jesus' path to Jerusalem, we are just doing our job, following our commitments and protocols, trying to be sensible and faithful. There is no safe place on the globe, and now we're more aware of that. If your path was towards Jerusalem, maybe it is best to keep following it. Pandemic or not, babies are still being born and some need a surgical escape route or a deliberate jump start to breathing. Malarial mosquitoes are still biting and someone needs to put in IV's and administer artesunate. TB still spreads insidiously until a canary-in-the-coal-mine toddler shows up with listless coughing and dwindling life, and needs a test and some medicine. Typhoid still punches holes in guts that need an emergency surgery. Hunger still stalks, and infants still need to be warmed and weighed and fed. Schools are closed but yesterday our staff at CSB still managed to finally get the home-work packets out to students, so they can work at home, no small task in a world without internet connectivity, without educational programs that can be decentralised. Some teams have been able to work with churches and groceries to provide food relief to the day-labourer majority of Africans who cannot stock up at Walmart and live off of a horde at home. Our Bible translators are working still, at home. Some are listening to neighbours share their anxiety, creating extra small jobs to help, or just giving help. Some are part of higher level planning in their area, purchasing equipment or doing training. Some are have taken in young singles stranded by the closed down public transport far from their homes. Some are praying.
One day we were resuscitating this infant with severe malaria and ICU-level vital signs, the next he was looking pretty normal
This is why we stay.
Just in time for the little girl in previous picture, Jessie got therapeutic milk delivered on her birthday.
Staff are still doing their job, babies still need their care
In the USA and Europe, the pandemic has strained places with 1 doctor per every several hundred people. We have one per several thousands, even ten thousands. In the USA and Europe, hundreds and thousand of ventilators per city seems sparse. On this continent, we're talking zero to 20's per country.
photos courtesy of acting head teacher, as staff prepare hundreds of packets, thousands of pages, to go out into a district where people don't have books and TVs and computers. Thankfully cargo is still legal.
We feel the cross, and on good days know it is just the light burden of a cross Jesus has already carried. On other days, it feels weighty. Our entire organisation was on a rare rhythm of simultaneity because our quadrennial all-continent meeting naturally meant that every single family planned travel, perhaps a vacation before or after, perhaps a Home assignment or a connection with friends or family. We were all headed for a break in a little over a month. Instead we are all pretty tightly restricted to a small, needy, unstable place watching not only our hoped-for rest disappear but our normally stressful lives might double, or triple, or more in sorrows. The kids on one of our teams listed their losses, an appropriate way for believers to be honest with God. Not being able to play football with a hundred kids is real. Not being able to see grandparents soon is real.
Will that cross mean any literal loss of life? We pray not. But even though none of us can ever be sure what the next day will require, in this particular moment of history the truth is more stark. We believe we will be the ones in the house when the death passes over, unscathed. The odds are good for any one person that we will be. But small odds repeated hundreds, thousands, millions of times still add up to a pile of bodies.
We have been here before. When the ADF kept up their cross-border terror, we sometimes ran and sometimes stayed, we lived in that tension of not-knowing. When Ebola came to our district, it found us here and grounded us here, exposed, still working. Did we always make the right call? No. But when our partners speak of us, those are the two times that they perceived the love of God. Solidarity in a shared danger.
So day 20 of COVID-19 comes to us in Uganda, on the Thursday when we remember the passover meal. 53 cases have been tested positive here, and all are alive still. Over 3 thousand travellers have been tested, and there are still 18 thousand that the Ministry of Health intends to track down. If 18 thousand people from high risk countries in March (mostly returning Ugandans) fanned out over the country, if 13 of our 53 cases were already community-transmitted, how can we escape? Yet all over the world we're seeing that the social-distance protocols are slowing the disaster, averting deaths, so we continue. Every few days our president holds night-time broadcasts to reminisce about his fighting days and enjoin the country to endure temporary inconvenience for long-term survival.
Tonight at the 7pm curfew we will celebrate Passover by Zoom around our area, remembering the truth on which our lives depend. Jesus came among us as a human, lived through times as tumultuous as this one, faced the worst, and in his actual body absorbed all the hate and brokenness of the universe. His work constricted right down to a cave in the earth, a tomb. And then he reversed all the trajectory of sin and sorrow and injustice and loss, and walked out to lead us home.
No comments:
Post a Comment