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The most important person in my life is turning 65 on Wednesday. First of all I am thankful he’s reaching that milestone. As we grew up, “65” was considered the legitimate end of a working life, the transition point to retirement, much like 18 was the line between child and adult. Starting this 2025 year with a new diagnosis of Stage IV cancer made the birthday an aspirational milestone. And he hadn’t exactly taken the “safe” route for the 64 years prior either, working front-line in two different Ebola epidemics, riding a tank into a war zone to bring aid, gritting out diseases and injuries far from the centers of care, or just the most dangerous reality of decades on high-mortality roads. So today we celebrate not just survival, but the person formed by it. And whether or not you read my thoughts, please feel free to open the comments and leave your name with a word or sentence of witness to who Scott has been so far to you.
65 finds us uprooted from the house where we raised our family and spent 23 of our 38 years of marriage (Bundibugyo, the other 15 were Chicago/Baltimore for training, and a long stretch in Kenya), and falling back on the farm inherited from my family. So the transition from the primary learning/working years to the final stretch of life is a threshold not just of time, but of place. God often moves in those liminal zones to get our attention. This year He’s certainly grabbed ours. Not a day goes by that I don’t affirm that I’d rather be in the whirlwind of uncertainty (Stage IV sounds final, but so is life) with Scott than anywhere else without him.
Birthdays and diagnoses leave us pondering: love is stronger than death, AND death’s limiting inevitability is God’s chosen context to refine our souls. So a birthday tribute to Scott is called for. I once wrote a whole retreat on the image of the tree, and this week our Burundi team is basing their retreat on a Tim Keller sermon on Psalm 1 we listened to, plus it’s peak Fall and we’re surrounded by acres of forest. So some thoughts about Scott, my tree, from my heart today.
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Stable roots: Scott is dependably present and not easily blown down. He anchors our family and our Area in his trustworthiness. None of us wonder if he’ll abandon his people or his reality. Those roots have spent a lifetime burrowing into the Rock of Ages, holding and being held. We all count on him to do what he says, and to operate out of truth and service. We know he’s choosing what is good for us, not what is easiest for him. We can lean on him, and we do. I wanted to be supporting him this year, but he’s had to carry me through two broken arms. Which he does, for many, without fanfare and without complaining, a stable presence.
Curious branches: Scott’s roots and branches fork and extend continuously: by research, data, reading, talking, listening, engaging. One way he loves his kids is by going to great lengths to understand what they are interested in, to keep up with it, to try. He has always been an athlete, but an American football/baseball/swimming/track star who then embraced soccer, rugby, racing, climbing, and marksmanship as his kids’ and community’s passions led him there. He has always been a stellar student, but he doesn’t rest on laurels for any new problem. He finds the tools and expertise to address new issues in new ways. He loves to work with his hands, to mend, to create, often with a YouTube video teaching him how.
StrOng trunk: One of the hardest challenges of cancer is the severe impact of treatment on core body capacity. Scott has always been someone who can do hard physical labor, and who enjoys strenuous exercise. Some men abandon treatment for these impacts, which is a legitimate metric of accepting a shorter life but opting for a quality important to them. It is difficult to choose the uncertain forward arc of physically diminished but longer days. He has done that for us, and we are deeply grateful for the soul strength that grows paradoxically by limits and suffering.
Tranquil shade: Scott is a person other people like to be around. He has solid friends from every phase of his life. We rest in his leafy shade, because he’s inviting and communal, he does not horde, he welcomes. He hasn’t based his life on pruning back inefficiency to produce wealth. He’s a family medicine doctor, the path of lower prestige but broader capacity. He’s willing to stretch out his arms further to protect more.
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Tactical fruit/seed: The Tim Keller sermon on Psalm 1 points out that fruit is seasonal. Our biologic and our Ugandan “fostered” kids are fruit that will have their own seasons, as will the mothers and babies with HIV, the women saved by timely C-sections, the many hundreds of students nurtured by a school whose mentorship and finances he has long carried, team leaders and members in Serge which have grown from a handful to a crowd in his years. Working remotely now feels a little more pine-coney to us, not spectacular fleshy mangoes as fruit but tiny dry potential seeds. 65 years is not long enough to know all the hidden good that Scott has brought to this world, and that’s as it should be. His part is to be rooted, branching, strong, inviting, productive … but earthbound and time bound views are partial. Faith rests on an outside perspective that will make sense of even prostate cancer.
Celebrate 65 years of Scott by leaving a comment, or saying a prayer. I'm selfishly asking for many more.
Death, the universal experience least discussed. A metric of development might be how adeptly the average person in the area can avoid this reality. In our 30+ years in Africa we went to more burials in a year than Americans attend in a lifetime. The first one or two thousand years of the church for most of the world could not ignore death, and so this weekend in the church's calendar is a time to "memento mori", remember death, in All Hallow's Eve (Halloween), All Hallow's (Saint's) Day, and All Soul's Day. I suspect the timing was set in the Northern Hemisphere by Fall, the season of fading light and dropping leaves. In 2025, we are once again in Fall, and once more face-to-face with death.
A stage IV metastatic cancer dispels the illusion of living indefinitely. And yet the treatment gives a potentially substantial stretch of road ahead, suffering from the hard medicines and costly commitment but walking on through beauty and joy too. Which is true of life always, just more obvious for us. In my Wendell Berry novel last night I read the main character (Jayber Crow) describe his life as "hoping for good, reconciled to the bad, welcoming the little unexpected happiness that came." Amen.
The depth of this holiday stretch is the communal nature of the recognition. We are part of a cloud of witnesses (Heb 12), a long parade of saints through time, whose lives upon this earth we recognize and celebrate. We are not alone, even in, maybe especially in, our hardest times. We recognize our belonging, and we garner the wisdom of people who have followed this path through the ages. No trick-or-treaters came to our door last night (so we had to eat a snickers ourself) but three different neighbors / church friends stopped us as we walked down our road yesterday to greet and chat. We miss living intimately with family, team, and village life. But we are not alone even now. (A Bundi favorite song we played and sang: For All the Saints. Exactly this).
Suffering and death, per 1 Corinthians 15, are also "thin spaces" between the seen and unseen world. As such, they are opportunities to recognise the "supernatural", the forces that we relegate to fantasy or horror movies but actually experience in our lives. Suffering is the path, and death is the doorway, and both get our attention when we are distracted by sex, money, power, and all the palpable principalities of this world. They realign our grasp of what matters.
And lastly, both suffering and death have been redeemed. Death was our final enemy, but Jesus' resurrection turned it into a calling home. I love the old hymns in our country church that compare dying to being called in for supper. Perhaps the best seasonal Halloween passage is Ezekiel 37, where dry bones scattered across the wilderness are breathed to rattle to life. Love is stronger than death. (Andrew Peterson's Lay Me Down poetically expresses this, one of Scott's favorites).
The Fall foliage carries all these themes of death: communal, liminal, transformational. Each leaf is an individual work of art, and a splash of color in the branch, the tree, the forest of seasonal unity. The crisp forest of color takes us into the edge of another world. And the dying leaves blaze glory, redeeming finitude into victory.
True confessions, Bone stories like Ezekiel and Halloween resonate for another reason: I (Jennifer) broke my left arm in October (after breaking my right arm in July). It would almost be a joke if it wasn't so hard to be without hands. This time the crushed pieces and joint impaction meant surgery, which our hero ortho surgeon son arranged, so we diverted to Colorado between visits with moms. Cancer, loss of home/normal/work/community, injuries in the family, violence in Tanzania and Uganda this weekend and Congo most days, conflicts between people we care for, loneliness and disability in aging moms, a lot of bad to plod through this year.
So this holiday weekend we lean into the grace that pulls bones back together, that gives camaraderie along the strenuous road, that connects us to saints living and dead in the human family that will one day reune at home.
Because of cancer, our life in 2025 took an abrupt turn. A turn that cost us deeply: our home, community, much of our day to day job and purpose, our view of the future, our normal life. One of the hidden truths of mission is usually it's strength: the weaving and braiding of spiritual, social, labour, recreational, family roles. But this year, it extracts a deeper toll. The overlaps mean that a medical issue is not easily boxed into a limited sector. Everything is impacted.
Returning to America this year has been its own paradox. Months of draining but effective treatments. Learning to work remotely. So thankful for that. But entering into a country whose leaders pit followers into 'us vs. them' divisions, a country marred by political violence, a church floundering to find a foothold of faith that engages with integrity in the communal debates, that is tempted to shortcut the slow work of persuasion by the power of force.
In August we finished 56 rounds of radiation treatment, continuing on 3 intense medications for the foreseeable future but sensing the progress. In September we were able to travel for Serge leadership meetings, and even take a hiking week in the Dolomites of south Tyrol. But while we were gone, Charlie Kirk was assassinated and we returned to a new level of fracture in our home country. Every day we continue to pray, bank, supervise, support our East and Central Africa teams, all of whom are inching good forward in locally relevant ways, living and preaching the good news. But every day we are also bombarded by the news here where we live. And America's angst has an outsize impact on the world. So forgive us for diverting to a few hopefully globally true thoughts.
1. 2025 confirms that being human requires us to distinguish good from evil. There are few things we can agree on, but if you listen, most people seem to agree that there is a difference. Murdering a politician in their home (MN) or at a rally (UT) to silence opposition is always evil, no matter how much we disagree with their rhetoric. Likewise others of the once-foundational ten commandments still hold some sway. Stealing, cheating, lying, greed, unfaithfulness remain undesirable acts that make common life impossible, and so need to be restrained. The Bible talks a LOT about how we treat the poor and stranger, how we love or hate each other. Distinguishing good from evil matters. We need to live and speak in ways that promote good and call out evil, and democracy allows us to keep striving for common good and keep dismantling systemic evils.
2. The line between good and evil runs through every single human heart. (Solzhenitsyn, and the Bible). NO ONE is fully evil, or fully good. We have heard the language of spiritual warfare brought into politics without the key phase of Ephesians 6: our struggle is not against flesh and blood. People are not, individually or as a group, unredeemable enemies. Evil is not a human person.
3. Winning is not the point. We are manipulable when we fear losing. Hate is a powerful force, but love will outlast it. And love has an arc of losing. Losing self, losing will, losing plans, losing fame. Love's symbol is the cross. When we choose risk, choose personal cost for the good of another, God can bring resurrection. Our call is to love, not to push ourselves forward by imagining that winning is the path to a better world. We can lose, God can redeem. We are small, God is not. Holding the paradox of the way of death (literal and figurative) that brings real life (literal and eternal) requires faith.
So if the Africa half of our life can now speak back into the America half . . . I believe Africa would say, endure. Care for your family, your village, your locality. Face the big problems "one small life at a time"( Wendell Berry). And that connects our two continental foci. This year we are living back in a country where wealth and power too often trump justice and truth. The last 32 years we've lived in a place where survival of children and respect for ancestors drive sacrifice and hope. To all cultures, the love of God and of neighbor inspires us to fight cancer not people, to support schools not militias, to pray for strength to love not strength to succeed.
The good is breaking through, and mostly on the margins. So we live in hope.
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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.
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.
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.
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:
