I haven’t yet left the hotel today. It is now 3:30pm and today I slept in late and I went to the pool for 30 minutes and just allowed myself to eat a cheeseburger even though I am in Kampala.
The day is sunny and in the distance Lake Victoria’s waters are being rippled to and fro by the shifting breezes.
Part of the horror of Uganda is the beauty of Uganda. This is not a a brown, dusty desert. It is home to rich, dark soil and tree covered hills and wildlife galore. A visitor air dropped into my seat now might think she has landed in Hawaii or the Caribbean.
But a mile from here… closer than that actually… slums. And around those slums? Slums. And the on and on they go divided by a few nice buildings and a few luxury neighborhoods. A visitor dropped into the city could no more guess this was a land of beauty than they could fathom the depths of the poverty around them.
It isn’t the contrast between rich and poor that is most staggering – perhaps because so few are rich – it is the contrast in beauty.
My mind goes back to Paul’s words in Romans:
The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that[a] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
I don’t know that I’ve ever heard that groaning as audibly as I do here. This land aches to be made whole; it yearns to live in its glory.
So do the people who live here.
Like the land they are beautiful and kind and generous and they too yearn to be ultimately redeemed. And they know they will. People here do not suffer from the delusion that this world will meet their needs, that this world will be the source of their joy. In that there is both resignation and freedom. The resignation is the resignation of seemingly endless suffering. The freedom is the lack of captivity to the seduction of thinking that enough stuff, enough progress, enough science will answer all the problems. The freedom is in the recognition that God is the source of all good things and that life is a march towards God.
posted February 16, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Thank you so much for sharing your journey, both literally and figuratively.
You have to read this (if you haven’t already). A Christianity Today interview with Ugandan-born theologian Emmanuel Katongole on missions called “From Tower-Dwellers to Travelers.”
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/july/9.34.html
I trust it will help you on your pilgrimage.
posted February 16, 2008 at 8:13 pm
It is great to take the gospel and love to Uganda. Continue the great work. If some of the diamonds,ivory,oil and other rich resources could be use to help build this country.=it would be great.
posted February 17, 2008 at 10:07 am
When my father died I couldn’t understand the pain. I rejected God and lived my life hating any concept of eternity or heaven or whatever. I had the mind of a child.
Whether I wanted to or not, I grew up. Well, got older and older.
I obtained children the physical way. The same way as my father did.
Somewhere along the way from child to adult, I believed that Jesus was the Way, the Truth, and the Life and accepted the label of “Christian” be applied to my thought process.
And life went on. The good, the beautiful and the bad and the ugly.
I got a call during one of the days of my life that my oldest son had died. With the lifestyle that he had chosen to live and the poor example of a father that I was to him, this call was anything but unexpected.
But I learned that predictive experience is the worse pain of all. So crushing, that no amount of excuse can make it better.
But something I had never expected has happened through this process of unimaginable horror and pain.
I no longer desire things and stuff, or envy other people having things I do not. I no longer pray about things. I no longer live just for the now of it.
I live prayer. I think about others every second of every day.
It is, now, not about setting aside time to petition God for this or that. I have no more words worthy enough for God. It is now about feeling the pain and suffering of other people, and wanting it to never exist.
Feeling them has become real because I am now one of them.
“The Son of God.”
I never understood what that meant until my own child, the offspring of my own creation act, suffered and died. But didn’t God desire above all things that I not have to suffer as God did? Isn’t the goal of a worthwhile life to want for others what you want for yourself?
Looking at pictures of suffering and dying children and heart-shattered parents, is no longer an advertisement for me. I am them. But I didn’t have to live through suffering to know it. I just needed to meet and expereince those that suffered, and live and eat with them. I needed to become part of their family. The family of God is all of us.
Though one of my greatest hopes is that people do not have to experience the loss of a child to feel compassion and caring for someone else’s family situation.
Maybe that is the greater things that we will do, then even Jesus did. He said we would move mountains. There is no greater height to scale than to care for others as we care about ourselves. For in that, is the history of mankind from the worse things ever done, to the most beautiful things ever accomplished.
Now, life means more to me for other people. My loss is complete, but from time to time, as I lift my head from the weight of grief that burdens my soul, caring about others gives it relief and hope. There is a future. There is a promise.
God was not spared the suffering from death and experienced grief that defies a numerical value.
The word of God is becoming more and more in focus, not from the evil that men do, but from the good that we choose to do.
I rambled and stumbled through this.
It’s just that the people in the pictures and stories that David is bringing to us are not other people in other places. They are us here and now.
posted February 17, 2008 at 8:58 pm
I am sad for how this will be once you return to the United States. From a Spiritual High back to Everyday Life. Its the hardest drop, and unless you stay in close contact with others who have been there with you, it is very lonely.