the hardest question I have ever been asked

"How come America is more blessed than Africa?" a young Rwandan school girl asked me as we sat together on a grassy hill sharing conversation last summer. I think this is probably the hardest question I have ever been asked.

I just watched this short video clip (http://www.altervideomagazine.com/2011/07/13/the-worst-place-on-earth/) of Lynne Hybels describing the disgusting tragedies happening in the Congo. She goes on to say: "in so many places where you see the church really being a Church, it is the poor caring for the desperately poor and it is the sick caring for the dying..."

Sometimes I can't help but think Africa is more "blessed" than America. Sometimes I can't help but wonder how much more generous I would be if I had less to live on or how much more compassion I would have for the dying if terminal cancer was destroying my own body.

Sometimes I get so frustrated because I simply don't know.... I don't know how much culture has influenced my theological view....or how to even begin to try to un-tie these two...and this scares me. How much do I really let culture decide what is "God's will" for my life? I don't understand why I was born into much materially wealth that has provided me with countless resources -both necessary resources to sustain life and completely unnecessary, selfishly excessive resources that I would probably be better off without. I don't know what to do with this constant, heavy frustration.....I often feel all I really have to offer God is this humble state of utter confusion.

I don't know how to just simply trust that where I am in life is exactly where God wants me without somehow feeling like I am forgetting a little bit about all the little African children I met last summer walking the streets with dirty, torn clothes and swollen bellies. My heart longs to be with these children or the people I met living in a garbage dump in Guatemala. Sure I am probably guilty of romanticizing poverty to some degree or another...but isn't it also so true that it often takes living among the sick and the dying to get us to remember that we are the sick and the dying? Sure the more academic degrees I earn might help me to make an even "greater impact." I love the work I am learning to do and am eager to continue to develop as a professional. I can always bring my line of work to Africa but this frustration, uneasiness, discontentment, distrust, or whatever you want to call it goes beyond Africa. Admittedly, I am probably still dealing with some reverse culture shock but when did we start classifying reverse culture shock as some sort of pathology? It is culture itself that is pathological.

I have become quite weary of Christian culture over the years...you watch this following clip and want to throw up because of this uneasiness we have created in ourselves in terms of how we integrate theology and culture: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2011/12/30/art-conscience-and-theological-mccarthyism/ -the media, theologians, authors, speakers, and bloggers (myself included) who think they know the exact interpretation and application of Micah 6:8, who think they know exactly what it means to be a follower of Christ in suburbia America or maybe they are a bit more humble and admit their limited understanding but you still desperately want to believe everything they say because they are John Piper or John Calvin or Bethany Webb :) Well, maybe you can feel safe believing everything they say if they are one of my favorite Taylor University people, Ken Taylor, whose personal translation of Galatians 6:4-5 is this: "Let everyone be sure that he is doing his very best, for then he will have the personal satisfaction of work well done, and won't need to compare himself with someone else. Each of us must bear some faults and burdens of his own. For none of us is perfect!"

How often I am told if I just do my best wherever I am, doing whatever I am doing then that is all the Lord asks of me....maybe this strong desire to go back to Africa is more than just an emotional pull at my heart strings, maybe it is one of the signs of what it means to "be called"...but what I can't understand is how any person of faith can go to Africa and not want to go back there for a more permanent stay...sure there is a lot one can do to make that seemingly "bigger difference" without actually living there but how can one not want to have consistent, personal contact to be able to frequently hug the sick and dying? Yes, Jesus refers to the sick and dying as meaning those who are poor in spirit as well (who are everywhere) but I just can't shake -and don't want to -this desperate longing to live among the real sick and dying in order to just maybe become a little more sick and dying myself.

"How come America is more blessed than Africa?" I don't know.

a few African moments

I became more of a person on my flight to Africa:

On the long trans-Atlantic flight over to Addis Ababa I started reading Carl Roger’s On Becoming a Person. As I was reading I totally resonated with this line: “The more I am open to the realities in me and in the other person, the less do I find myself wishing to rush in to “fix things.” It’s funny and kind of ironic how, as counselors especially, we want to know and explore all the complexities of both ourselves and others and, yet, this further makes things complicated. Life is so full of complex processes and understanding this should make one less inclined to hurry up and try to “fix things” and to try to “manipulate” people to go in the way we want them to go. I think similar things can be said about missions. As humanist Carl Rogers says, we need to accept and warmly regard every human being with a high degree of unconditional self-worth “of value no matter what his condition, his behavior, or his feelings.” Before we fling the gospel at anyone, we need to first understand what it means to have “respect and liking for them as separate people, a willingness for them to possess their own feelings in their way.”

Deciphering and understanding cultural differences is a very tricky and risky business yet a very crucial one and perhaps a little dangerous –dangerous in the sense that further understanding often naturally weakens the initial drive to achieve that understanding. The older I get the more I realize how much I don’t know….and maybe don’t want to know? People are complicated, cultures are complicated and the more we know about either one, the more complicated they actually become. However, we are called to dive deeper and deeper into these bottomless mysteries and what a tremendous spirit of humility is required in order for us to do so.  

Learning to literally see Jesus everywhere in everyone:

One weekend we left the capital of Kigali for the smaller town of Gisenyi. We spent the night at a church/theology school compound. During the night, almost half our team experienced what we thought was the rapture taking place. I typically sleep soundly through most thunderstorms but in the middle of the night I was startled awake as my whole bed with mosquito net covering shook. Above my bed my window lit up a very bright shade of orange for what seemed like a half of a minute and I simultaneously heard the loudest booming sound I think I have ever heard before. My first thought upon waking up was that the world was ending. I felt a sense of panic as I wondered how I was going to escape the apparent fire that was quickly closing in all around the compound as the bright shade of orange still lingered across my entire window. I quickly ran down the hall to where a few of my other teammates were but they were of little comfort for they were soundly asleep. 

The next morning I was planning on keeping my little rapture experience to myself in fear of being laughed at until another team member said they thought they saw Jesus last night. They too woke up to the explosion in the sky and within seconds their bedroom door flew opened and there was Jesus standing in the doorway.  This “Jesus” figure was actually another team member coming in the room, but only the outline of this figure was seen and so this girl thought: “Jesus is coming to get me to take me home!” Who knows for sure if it was just the thunderstorm that woke us up...or even a bomb for we were only a few miles from the Congo (although much of the political unrest more often occurs in the country’s interior).

Some powerful quotes placarded on the wall in the genocide memorial center in Kigali:

“When they said “never again” after the Holocaust, was it meant for some people and not for others?”

“There will be no humanity without forgiveness, there will be no forgiveness without justice. But justice will be impossible without humanity.”

“If you knew me and you really knew your self, you would not have killed me.”

“But the genocidaires did not kill a million people. They killed one, then another….day after day, hour after hour, minute by minute. Every minute of the day, someone, somewhere, was being murdered, screaming for mercy. And receiving none.” 

 “God must love America more”                       

While spending a few days teaching at a girls’ school in Rwanda, some of my team members and I were asked some pretty tough questions. Initially, we were always asked: “Do you have a mother and a father?” (many lost their parents in the genocide or due to AIDS) and “How old are you?” and “Why aren’t you married yet?” but later as conversation continued I was posed a question that I was not expecting, a question I did not know the answer to, a question that made every part of me twinge in guilt, disgust, anger, confusion, and embarrassment. One of the girls asked me: “How come America is so much more blessed than Africa?” As I stumbled for words, I said something to the effect that just because people are rich in America doesn’t mean everyone has a relationship with God and often riches get in the way of people loving God. As I dialogued with an American Peace Corps volunteer later that day, she explained how she constantly needs to remind her students how we are all the same people with the same desires –how we are never satisfied with what we have, we always want more. However, I felt if I simply told them that God loves them as much as He loves Americans it would probably just make me feel better.

"All that has perplexed us in the providences of God will in the world to come be made plain. The things hard to understand will then find explanation. The mysteries of grace will unfold before us. Where our finite minds discovered only confusion and broken promises, we shall see the most perfect and beautiful harmony. We shall know that infinite love ordered the experiences that seemed most trying. As we realize the tender care of Him who makes all things work together for our good, we shall rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”

africa has indeed kept part of my heart

After 38 hours of traveling and 4 flights later I finally made it home last night from spending most of this past month in Rwanda and Uganda. Now I fully understand why everyone who goes to Africa on a missions trip comes home and changes their Facebook profile picture to that of a picture of them holding a little orphan. In search of a mild sense of relief for this pain I now feel for leaving half my heart in Africa, I succumbed to any feeling of abashment for conforming to the standard Facebook protocol one follows upon returning home from an African missions trip.

Last night I was talking with a friend who mentioned how funny it is that sometimes it takes us going all the way around the world to hear God's voice more clearly or to learn simple spiritual lessons that were too difficult to learn at home. Of course God is speaking to us all the time wherever we are but sometimes I think we are more apt to hear Him speaking to us when we are in different or difficult circumstances or maybe even dangerous circumstances rather than the often dull, daily circumstances of everyday life.

God definitely spoke to me during my time there. I wasn't expecting Him to speak to me through a mighty wind, or a powerful earthquake, or a brazen fire for I feel He sometimes speaks to us best through that still small voice He spoke to the prophet Elijah in. Not that God only speaks in a still small voice but what I mean to say is that I wasn't expecting to experience a mountain-top spiritual high. Going into the trip I was cautious not to let my doubt of having a spiritual mountain-top experience negate any spiritual renewal or revelation I could have had but didn't as the result of closed-mindedness or of having low expectations. Yet God chose to speak to me through a little infant boy badly infected with HIV whose name, quite ironically, is Elijah. He also spoke to me through the relationships our Taylor team built with the students at Kampala International University and the ALARM (African Leadership and Reconciliation Ministries) staff in Rwanda.

Before the trip began and in the initial stages of it, I felt a lot of guilt as I weighed the costs and benefits of short-term missions trips and my own reason for wanting to go to Africa. I used to have this philosophy that if you have already experienced one or two short-term missions trips, the external costs of going on an additional trip(s) outweigh any internal benefits because most of these benefits hopefully have already been experienced during one's first missions trip. God challenged this belief.

During our first week in Rwanda I struggled with trying to understand why I was still feeling incredibly selfish and guilty....I thought if God really wanted me here then why was He allowing me to feel this way? God then spoke to me....not in a big way but through every little interaction I had with the people there, in every smile exchanged, in every laugh shared, in every tear cried, in every hug and handshake, through every dance and song. During our time in Uganda God did something incredible -He forged some deep, meaningful relationships between people of vastly different geographical locations, personalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Our lives are spiritual journeys and for me this 3 week trip to Africa was one significant spiritual journey itself within a larger span of a spiritual journey [my life]. During this 3 week spiritual journey God really taught me the importance of relationships. I used to be more of a task-oriented person growing up, but the older I get the more I realize that it's people who matter most. Over the last few years I really struggled from time to time with the idea of how I should be spending my time. I would become quite distraught over whether I should be doing this activity or that one -both may be equally good things but I would constantly fret over whether or not what I was doing was in God's will for my life and whether or not there was another activity I could have been doing that would bring God even more glory or make an even greater Kingdom-impact. Every day -and especially on this trip -I am realizing more and more that it is people who matter and not so much things or tasks. During my college years I would often feel frustrated with how tied down I was to my schoolwork -I felt I wasn't doing enough for God....not that I felt I needed to do a certain amount of good works but I just felt I wasn't doing as much as I could to further God's Kingdom. While on this trip God supplied me with a sense of comfort and peace regarding the next five years of my life which will be spent in graduate school. If there is one major lesson I learned while in Africa it is this.....it doesn't really matter where you are or what you are doing (as long as they are God-honoring places and things) but what matters is the condition of your heart.....we are most God-honoring and God-glorifying when we give Him our all wherever He takes us and in whatever task He provides for us.

There were times on this trip, as there were times on other missions trips and at other points in my life, where I felt kind of useless and I questioned the impact we were having at times. What good is there in holding a two month old baby slowly dying of HIV? When we leave the orphanage for the day even the oldest toddler probably doesn't remember us for more than a few hours or maybe a couple of days so what's the point other than to experience sadness as time draws near when we must say goodbye? Did we really come all the way to Africa to help paint part of a building? But then I came to realize through these activities that this is the work God has provided for us and we should thank Him for it first of all and then fully engage ourselves in it....we most glorify and honor Him by being fully present both in mind and spirit while doing whatever it is that we are doing, in whatever work God has provided. For me I am still not entirely sure if earning my doctorate in clinical psychology is completely in God's will for my life but I do know and take peace in knowing that it probably isn't outside of His will if He has already allowed me to get into the program, has blessed me with the financial resources, intelligence, and determination to go through the program. I know this time spent in school will allow me to hopefully impact a greater number of people on a greater level some day. Five years of graduate school is just another long, integral segment of my even longer life-long spiritual journey.

Last week while in Uganda we were encouraged to write a poem summarizing what we were feeling as the trip progressed so I tried to compose to the best of my ability, in a short-time frame, the following poem:

Another trip around the world, another white flag unfurled.


Any initial guilt has been slowly starting to wilt.


When did fetching a pail of water suddenly become more important than His own precious daughter?


Every cow, every hill, every banana tree, reveals a new glimpse of the incredible beauty of Thee.


In the middle of the floor lies a broken toy, around the corner comes streaming tears of joy.


Columbus, Kampala, Canton, Kigali, Calcutta, or wherever, you will always find a neglected orphan, a slighted widow, and a needy mother.


Books and bread, clothes and cars, polished glass and scrap metal, it doesn't really matter what it is in the kettle.


A crack in the wall, a tear in a shirt, a tear-stained, dirty cheek, a half crooked smile, a doubly-bent knee, when will we learn to really see and just be?