When Darkness Is Required

"You do not have to sit outside in the dark.

If, however, you want to look at the stars,

you will find that darkness is required."

-Annie Dillard

I’m terribly homesick.  Homesick for a world that makes sense.  Homesick for a place where the ground is fertile, the water is clean, and our neighbors' lives aren't harsh struggles for survival.  

It's probably not good missionary etiquette to say life here isn't as glamorous as you might be thinking.  I am inviting you into the hard days so that you will be standing by our sides when He does lead us by ways we have not known, guides us along unfamiliar paths, turns the darkness into light before us, and makes the rough places smooth. (Isaiah 42:16)  You probably have your own moments of standing in the darkness, and we want to say to you what we hope you will say to us, "Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm.  Let nothing move you.  Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain." (1 Corinthians 15:58)

The honest truth is some weeks in Africa we are soaring on wings like eagles, and other weeks we are crying, "Oh God, do not remain silent."  (Psalm 83:1)  "Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?" (Job 2:10)

The good news is I can't say, "I feel terribly homesick for a world that makes sense," without the Lord saying, "I know exactly how you feel."  How much deeper He must have hurt than I do when he walked among poverty and sickness.  How much longer his thirty three years of homesickness were to my one.  How great was the cost, and yet how great was his reward!

"It is said that in some countries trees will grow, but will bear no fruit, 

because there is no winter there.”  

John Bunyan, Seasonable Counsel: Or Advice to Sufferers

So, here's to our darkness and our winter and the fruit that will someday come of it.

Water Wells, Evangelism, Medical Clinic......Oh My!

This is one of those, "I can't believe this is really our lives" posts.

 

We joined a short-term team from North Carolina and a handful of sold-out local Christians for a well-drilling, medical mission, evangelism effort in a remote village.  (By "we" I mean Philip, Emily, and Joy because the rest of us stayed home to keep from sharing the chicken pox.)  

Prayer before the drilling began

All this equipment sitting in the midst of mud huts.  What a contrast!

It was the village entertainment, as you can imagine.

This girl had a grand time staying in the women's guesthouse.  I use the word "guesthouse" lightly since there is no running water or electricity or other such luxuries.  It's all part of the experience.

Dinner the first night is pictured above.  Dinner one of the other nights was this gift of

a sheep from the village chief to the drilling team. (pictured below) 

The well-drilling team worked hard and dug three wells for this town while Jacoleas introduced the village children to Jesus (where you could find Emily and Joy, too) and an American doctor held a medical clinic (where Philip helped and Paul translated).  In the evenings believers from both countries testified to the crowds who gathered in the shadows from this 99% Muslim village.

 

You'll get a taste of all of that in this video Philip put together.  Don't you just love being Front Row?

 



On Language Learning

"N'ne bi se ka fo i ye n'ne me degui bi wa?"

Did you catch that?  I was asking if I can tell you what I learned today.  Can I tell you......

Learning a language means you have to fail.  Publicly.  Repeatedly.

It means you will be laughed at.  Every single day.

It means embracing someone else's reality.

It means bringing light into eyes honored that you care enough to try.

In learning language, Joy and I are learning more than vocabulary and pronunciation.  We are learning to interpret reality through the lense of the Jula speaking people because "heart language sets most of the parameters of our worldview."  (Misreading Scripture)

"Our culture (via our language) shapes our worldview which in turn filters what we notice and how we interpret reality." (Misreading Scripture) 

The day we learned the Jula language has no word for "dessert" or "chocolate," well, I just about quit.  How am I supposed to identify with a chocolate-less people group? (Just kidding, of course.)  Or, can you imagine a culture where the majority of people don't know the names of the days of the week?  The only day typically used in Jula around here is "Friday," the day Muslims go to the mosque.  What a different world!  Would America not cease to exist without days, and calendars, and appointments?  In learning the names of vegetables we learned green beans and garlic were introduced by the French while onions and sweet potatoes were already here.  Who would have thought we'd be learning the effects of colonialism alongside sentence structure and back-of-the-throat vowel sounds?

It is imperative for me to learn some Jula because many of the women and children in our area are not French speakers.  French, you see, is the language of the educated, the language of school and business - while Jula (and a handful of other local languages) are the languages of home and friendship. 

By the grace of God, Joy and I are able to learn Jula without first learning French only because our language teacher, Paul, is willing to come from another town three days a week to teach us in English.  To find a Jula speaker who also speaks English is rare.  To find one willing to travel half the week to be our teacher is a divine intervention!

What we are doing, skipping French to learn the local language first, is quite the oddity.  To be educated is to speak French.  It's virtually impossible for a locals to have one without the other.  In fact, in order to tell someone, "I don't speak French" in Jula, Joy and I actually have to say, "I don't speak white people language."  This cracks me up! 

Before Paul began to teach us Jula, my neighbor thought she would help by giving me Jula lessons (though she speaks no English).  She simply could not comprehend that I was not understanding her French explanations of the Jula language!  As I thought to myself, "This is impossible. This is never going to work.  What a waste of time." the Lord whispered clearly, "This is how you love me."

Ever since that first impossible lesson, language learning has been less about the hurdles, mustering up the motivation to keep trying, or even the people with whom we want to communicate, and more about following the voice of the One who knows the end while we are still at the beginning.



Our Kitchen Sink

"A sink full of cups. This is how you know you have had a great day full of many visitors. Here it is customary to get your guest water as soon as they enter your yard."

I love this description of our kitchen sink on Joy's Facebook page.

A great day indeed.

"Our mother" Jaymi's visit

To communicate respect and dispel polygamist assumptions, we introduced our most recent visitors as "our mother Jaymi" and "our sister Joy."  Our plans for the week Jaymi was to be in country were loosely to visit an orphanage, get Joy settled into our home, introduce them to our neighbors, and travel to a remote village near the border.  The Lord is the ultimate travel guide!  In His plans we would do all of the above as well as sing "Build Your Kingdom Here" in the courtyard of one of our Muslim friends, share chocolate chip cookies with men on camels from the desert, and splash in a waterfall.

In the midst of planning for this trip, Jaymi and Joy faced Ebola concerns and our country's Revolution.  On this side of it, I think they would side with Dietrich Bonhoeffer who said, “There are always reasons for not doing something; the question is whether one does them nevertheless.” 

From her first day the Lord gave Jaymi eyes to look into the faces of poverty and see Him.  It was such a blessing to have her here!  For a week the adult English speaking population in our house doubled, and I had not heard our kids come alive with so many stories in months.  This evening Jaymi will return to her family in the States (who we wish to thank profusely for letting her visit us), but she left behind quite a gift......her daughter Joy to be our sister for the next five months!  Hallelujah!

If You're Happy and You Know It.........

Let me bring you some big smiles for your Sunday afternoon.  Each week on the way walk home from church we are joined by this pack of children.  Once they saw me carry Daniel on my back, and now he gets a free ride on someone's back every week! The boys come to play with our soccer ball.

The girls work on those loom band bracelets, a perfect group activity that can be done non-verbally.

These cute twins are the daughters of our night guard.

Don't these smiles just make your Sunday?

Short but Fruitful Season

Thanks for your patience as we weathered our “unplugged” season! We are more than a little happy to be back online, but the weeks waiting for an internet connection couldn’t have been better if we’d planned it that way!  It really was a gift to have both feet planted firmly on Burkina soil while establishing ourselves in a new location…..

“…the newcomer goes through a critical time for establishing his sense of identity and belonging during his first few weeks in a new country.  If he becomes bonded with expatriates, he may always remain a foreigner and outsider.  But at this crucial time he has the unique opportunity to establish himself as a belonger with insiders, in order to live and learn and minister within their social context.”

“Bonding and the Missionary Task” by E. Thomas and Elizabeth Brewster

And what a great time the holidays are for entering well into the African culture!  Both Christmas and New Years are marked by excessive visiting of neighbors and church friends.  I don’t know if we could have been ushered into the community any more festively than it all happened those first few weeks.

With internet, we now get to reignite our mission to be a bridge between the church in Africa and the church in America.  What a sweet spot this is!