Sorry for the book. This is what happens when you take months in between each post and then try to catch up at 2am. Thanks for reading.
August 3rd marked our one year anniversary of living and serving at Musana Camps of New Hope Uganda. I blinked, and a year went by. The 31st of this month marks my _ _th birthday, which serves as a reminder that I am soon going to be labeled “middle-aged.” Joy and elation.
But life transcends time and birthdays and anniversaries and milestones and lows and setbacks and periods of growth and all the ongoing cycles of our time on this floating sphere. Indeed much of what I experienced this past year living in the bush of rural Uganda on the shores of Lake Victoria reminds me that I am just a speck in a really really big universe, and there’s something much bigger going on than the story of my small life. It’s like there’s this big God that is the one it all revolves around, and I am just a miniscule part of HIS story orbiting around Him…whether I want to believe it…or accept it or not.
Much of this year involved new experiences that I often found myself in the middle of, scratching my head, thinking, “This is crazy. Am I living someone else’s life? How did I get here? There must be some mistake. I should be home in America falling asleep on the couch on a Sunday afternoon while watching the New England Patriots have another story book season and then lose to a team they’re better than so Tom Brady can cry about how rough he’s had it!” VBS and Boy Scouts and summer camp and being class president in college didn’t prepare me for dealing with an angry mob that is cutting down trees and threatening to shed blood if they are confiscated. My Sunday School teacher never said, “Let’s look at the book of Deuteronomy where Jehovah will explain how to talk yourself out of getting a traffic ticket from a Ugandan police officer who wants to exploit a Muzungu (white person) because all whites are incredibly rich, even though you didn’t really do anything wrong.”
On a more serious note, I never really imagined someone coming to my door saying, “Muzungu, can you help me? This 13 year old girl living with me is not my daughter, but I’m caring for her because her parents both died of HIV and she was raped by her father before he died, and I can’t afford to feed her or pay her school fees. You have money…will you help her?” I wasn’t quite prepared to hear hear the guy sitting in the passenger seat of my car tell me as I drove him back into the city that he can’t take the job of being a Security Guard for me at the camp because the property is too big and hilly, and he has HIV and it would wear him out too much to have to do the boundary patrols of our 900+ acres. I also didn’t expect to hear him talk about how he had been abducted…twice…by Joseph Kony’s rebel army in northern Uganda…only to escape…twice…and live to tell about it and how he has sat face to face and talked with Kony himself. I wasn’t surprised to watch his eyes tear up as he talked about being forced to kill his best friend and others from his own village or face torture and death himself. I knew I would eventually hear children talk about growing up as an orphan and being mistreated and abused and left to fend for themselves and exploited in the midst of their suffering and starving to death, withdrawing into a life of survival and self-protection. What I didn’t know was that I would hear a similar story from close to 7 out of 10 Ugandans I have met whom I now call my friends and family.
But perhaps what has taken my breath away and left me amazed the most, is how many of the people who have shared life stories filled with unimaginable pain and suffering have a smile on their face and and gratitude in their heart and praise on their lips for God…because they have experienced his goodness and grace and have a hope and an expectation of a life of restoration and inexpressible joy that awaits them on the other side of the grave.
I have eaten a lot of humble pie in Uganda.
Yet in the midst of all of that and much more I won’t go into now, I still struggle to get outside of myself each day, pick up my cross, and follow Jesus with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. In light of the lives of countless people I’ve met and sat and talked with here in Uganda, my life has been a cake-walk and I have been blessed beyond measure due to no merit of my own. Still I continue to struggle with many weaknesses that are all basically rooted in the same thing: Self-Obsession.
Father has shown me over and over again that HE LOVES ME simply because He is God, and I am His son, and His glory is displayed in me because of His plans and purposes for my life as part of His story and His Kingdom. But I still choose to believe that I am a worthless failure, one step away from the hammer dropping and being exposed to all the world for what I really am…a selfish fraud who just can’t get it right, isn’t “good enough” and doesn’t have what it takes to be a real man, a loving husband, a good father, and an inspiring leader, and an authentic follower of Christ. Procrastinator, Lazy, Selfish, Joke, and Verbose, Pitiful, and Fat are all fitting labels that I willingly bestow upon myself over and over again.
God continually reveals His truth to me in a multitude of ways that often times brings me to tears and a heart of worship and joy at tasting a glimpse of His goodness. Yet I find myself walking back into the prison of believing half-truths and lies that bind me and blind me and rob me of freedom and joy and replace it with fear and anxiety and self pity.
I can look back over the year and see a lot of bad choices and the consequences they had. But the story doesn’t end there.
In the midst of it all, light has pierced darkness. Truth has conquered lies. Forgiveness has replaced condemnation. Fear has turned to freedom. Despair has turned to hope. It has happened in me, and I’ve seen it happen in others. All of it has shown me that in the midst of a fallen world, God can still say, “I AM.” He has not changed. He has proven Himself to be true to all the good I have known Him to be and been told He is. He has also proven that He is mystery and I have not scratched the surface of discovering all that He is and at times feel that I don’t even know Him and that He can’t be known. Yet He continues to reveal Himself to me in His perfect timing in His perfect ways just to the degree He knows I need it. And usually, it happens in very unexpected ways.
I have seen God in the face of poverty and suffering and conflict. He has shown His Himself to me in the deepest darkest places of my heart. Those are the 2 ways that best summarize this past year. God is LOVE even in the face of extreme poverty and suffering and conflict in rural Uganda. And God is LOVE in the face of my own failures and choices to live in the flesh and self-pity.
The Gospel is more than a threatening message that if you don’t repent of your sins you’ll spend eternity in hell. In fact, that is no gospel at all This year, I can look back and say that I am experiencing the Gospel in new ways, even in the face of my own failures and sin. Being a missionary has little to do with it. Living in a foreign country is in many ways, irrelevant. The Good News is, God is bigger than all my sin and the sins of the entire world. He’s bigger than I will ever understand, but he’s also as close as a brother. A best friend. A mother. A father. He’s all that and more. Jesus is all I ever wanted, and all I ever needed, and He’s holding his nail pierced hand out to me, whispering the truth that he has washed away all my junk and it’s gone. He’s not holding anything against me, so I can let go of it myself. He just wants me to trust Him. To walk with Him each step of the way. To listen to His Spirit. To believe His truth. He has jobs for me to do, but they’re not a burden because He’s going to be the one giving me the strength and wisdom to do them…if I let Him. All this can happen now…not someday. Eternity is hard to understand. Experiencing Jesus’ love for me right now isn’t.
That’s good news, and I don’t need the threat of a hell that He never held over anyone’s head to believe and accept it. He’s calling me AWAY from hell, UNTO himself. He’s RESTORING me to be what He designed me to be.
He’s doing it in me, and He’s doing it to others. In Uganda. In America. Everywhere.
So may this one year anniversary be a reminder that Jesus is right here with me. Removing labels, healing pain, and leading me to the freedom that comes from Father. And it’s available to orphans in Africa…and almost middle-aged men from America.