Africa Journal #3

Africa Journal #3

Please extend grace to me as you read over what I will write over the next few weeks. I’ve read many short-term mission reports in my time (and written many myself!) and they rarely fail to be quite joyous and exuberant. This, of course, is a wonderful thing and I will be the last to tarnish the joy a believer has when boldly entering into “the mission field”. But I am not an unladen man. I wish I was, but what I am most facing as I process every night alone is the incredible pain I have carried with me to Africa. I would have loved to have just left it in the desert where it likely belongs, but as such things go, it has followed me here. This last year has been hell for many a personal reason. I would entertain the idea of explaining it to people, but it is something that defies simple explanation and I have found that explaining it doesn’t always help. It is, ultimately, an issue that God and I have to figure out. Why is this important? It’s probably not if I were to merely report the external reality around me. Yet I feel a strange compulsion to do what should probably be a common virtue amongst the believer: be honest. Honesty brings me to a place to say that my sheer realism/pessimism is caustic in a place like Uganda, where faith is no abstract notion, but the very fabric of the Christian church (ie. Christ’s followers). That may seem like an absurd statement, but I assure you it is not. Faith is part and parcel to the African church. They believe. There are few atheists in the church. They believe in a way that I can only dream of believing and some, incredibly, have told me that they dream of believing as I believe. What a poverty, then, that exists in my own heart. The contrast that my faith, with all its contradictions and doubts, brings to Africa is nigh palpable. It exists for me, in the self-conscious world of self, as this balloon that I have around my head, so inflated that it almost keeps me from entering a room. It says, “liar” on it and I feel moments away from being found out that when someone makes a statement about God I do not believe first, but first attempt to understand the theological and sociological framework behind a statement—because I have learned that Christians simply don’t believe the same things. That is not to say I think they are wrong, but I feel a strong desire to be precise and correct because let’s be honest, Christians have lied to one another, and to the World, quite a lot about what they believe. We say Jesus is Lord and yet we believe, for example, violence is restorative, redemptive and many of us will, quite literally, die on that hill—despite the radical nature of the person of Christ. It is a heresy to believe such a thing, I have found… and yet because we in the West are so liberal/rational/post-modern/whatever, we cannot tell someone that they are a heretic anymore—it costs too much or “we should have grace” . We don’t know how to move the Truth out of what we’ve been taught to believe. You see, I don’t see the world the way most people see it. It’s not simple. It’s not even manageable. It is infinitely complex and we, as believers, are completely out of control. Africa, for me, takes those things that I have silently been drawn to believe, and take them from the back of my mind to the front of my mind. Because in reality, the thing, pathetic theology we have come to believe is true is simply not strong enough to face the reality that exists outside of our safe world. Does our theology, does our practical belief have anything to say to those on the sharp end of a machete? I don’t think it does. I am the worst amongst the liars then because I find myself speechless, most often, when I am here. I have to talk just so I can fill the void between what I do not understand and what I so desperately desire to understand. I am a weak man. It is a desperate desire of mine to just be present because I don’t have anything to say. I bring nothing past a desire to be used for the Kingdom and to experience healing in my own life because I promise I need it as much as anyone. My heart is as corrupted as they come and of that I can assure you. Perhaps during my time here I will begin to truly grapple with Grace for as I sit here, completely loved by my African friends and so unworthy of their servant love I feel both Grace and a desire to reject it all the same. It feels much more correct, much more safe, much more just to hate myself in a place I have little to offer.

Today I was talking to a man who was kidnapped by the LRA and, I’m sure, experienced terrible things, but all he wanted to tell me about was his love of God. I want to weep in this life more than any other thing. I am so weak and detestable… and I rarely believe God loves me though I’ve heard it a million times. If I didn’t have the friends and community I have, I would probably cease to even entertain the notion no matter how evident the “proof”. All I have is a broken heart. That is the reality of my offering to people who, like me, have experienced great pain due to a broken world. Some may say, “that is enough”, but I do not believe them. I wish they were right but I am often paralyzed by this life. I struggle to find a coherent Christian narrative in the land where I live and it really, really messes me up because I don’t really know the truth and as wonderful as the Bible is, it rarely comforts me in the way that it ostensibly comforts others. You must understand that I desire God in a way that He would be very real to me and tell me the truth to cut through the fog of war in my mind because I struggle to believe almost anything some days and yet I grasp to this persistent hope that I have pinned my future on the Truth and that in God’s timing I would know it deeply, intimately, and take refuge there. But I do not think this is the season. I do not think we, as a people, are accustomed to realizing that in suffering we see another side of Jesus and this is the side I want to see. I want to steel myself in sackcloth and roll my heart in ash. I want to mourn. I want to then find hope and cling to it despite that I feel keenly aware that there is something wrong with everything and that my existence in this body politic known as “The Church” has not really prepared me for the reality that what I feel now, in this very place, may be the least common denominator in human experience. But what do I know? These are just the musings of a mad man who sometimes glances off of this monolithic reality known as “the truth” and I’m left spinning at the implications because I cannot see what I have seen and not be changed. Something must give.