Better late than never...

This is an attempt from last week to describe the craziness that is my life...but my computer just recovered it after I thought I lost it...so, enjoy.

(Wed. 3 Dec.)

The last week has been busy. I didn’t expect life in rural Africa to be busy. Alas, it is.
One of the paybacks of a busy week is build up of blogging material…so, that’s what this post is, life’s payback to me for not taking time out to process what’s going on. Sorry that you have to pay the price for it…

(that reminds me of something…Musical: Fiddler on the Roof…Song: “Tradition” Nochem the beggar of Anatevka calling for alms, “Alms for the poor, Alms for the poor” and one of the townsmen gives him only one Kopek, a smaller than usual contribution, and the beggar is disgusted…
“One Kopek? Last week you gave me two Kopeks!”
“I had a bad week.”
“So!?! If you had a bad week, why should I suffer?!” )

Anyways. Sorry. Tangent. The week…

Betty: Last Wednesday, we gathered as a team with the staff of Christ School to celebrate the end of the school year and to say goodbye to Betty, one of the Deputy Headmasters (do you call a Deputy Headmaster who is a woman a “headmistress”?). OK, true confession. I am hardly ever at Christ School. I know hardly any of the staff by name, let alone students. I use the excuse that the only times I’m ever there are in the dark and so I can never really see what people look like well enough to remember their names…which is true, but also a lame excuse. But Betty, I knew her name. Even from the infrequency with which I visited Christ School, I still knew there was something admirable about this woman. She exudes grace, she exudes confidence…graceful confidence…I think that’s what it is. A wonderful example for the girls of Bundibugyo who attend Christ School…a wonderful example of a woman in leadership. I thank God for the time he gave Betty at CSB and she will be dearly missed.

Thanksgiving: Obviously was Thursday. It was fine. The highlight was by far the bougainvillea after dark. Jennifer had arranged the furniture from the front room (which had been taken over by seating the crowd of 26 or so for the dinner feast) in the space under the bougainvillea, and Karen brought out candles after dark and set them on the ground in various places around…as Annelise said, it was very “Pottery Barn” looking… “with furniture in places it shouldn’t usually be”…the kids were inside watching Charlie Brown’s Christmas I think…it was so nice to sit outside in the cool and quiet of the sunless night, it was chaos free (for a while at least during the kids’ video), Annelise and I chatted for a bit about important things which we don’t usually get the chance to do ever really…it was a blip in time I’d like to put in a bottle and open whenever I please…then a bit later, I was still in my same seat on the couch in the candlelight even though people had come and gone around me, and a game of “Basket full of nouns” materialized between Myhre’s and singles to round out the night. It was a riot.

Repentance: It’s a big deal around here…because people never do it. No one ever admits guilt. But Sunday was different. A man stood up in church, and in the beginning I thought he was another guy enjoying the limelight and calling it a testimony (how optimistic am I, eh?!), but as he went on and on I realized that this was for real, and not just for real but this was in fact earth shaking! This man, a headmaster at a local primary school, was quoting scripture about repentance and forgiveness and loving your wife and not crushing the spirit of your children and telling us the story of God’s convicting his heart of his sin. He told the whole church about his unfaithfulness to his wife on two occasions, about their separation and quarreling and the pain inflicted on their children throughout it all, and then he called his wife to the front of the church and knelt and asked her forgiveness…I was in tears…This is a big deal. To kneel and confess sin and in a physical demonstration of respect for your wife to ask for her forgiveness, this is revolutionary! People, let alone men, don’t do this kind of thing here. Men were in tears, women were cheering, and an elder threw his arms around this man and jumped up and down while hugging him. As my parents always say, you never know what God is doing behind the scenes! This is such an encouragement to us here...so encouraging to see God at work in peoples lives.

Advent: Emmanuel = God with us. So, we gathered as a team on Sunday night to celebrate the first Sunday in Advent together…singing/reading/sermon. My dad emailed the booklet he put together for Grace & Peace’s Advent celebration and so we’re trying to follow that as a team (albeit pretty loosely since we’re only together 2 of 4 Sundays I think). So, the first Sunday’s text was from Revelations 1. And can I just say, Praise God for sermons!?! Scott found a Tim Keller sermon on the text online (not an advent sermon but it’s close enough) and so we listened together to that. It was really helpful. I read about the golden lampstands and the golden sash and hair as white as wool and snow and feet like bronze and seven stars and a sword coming from his mouth and geez louise, I can’t make heads or tails of it…it all seems so fanciful, but I feel like surely somewhere in it there’s some really significant meaning, I just have no idea what it is! But then there’s where the sermon comes in…and voila! The “one like the son of man” is standing among the lampstands which represent the churches…he is among them and his feet are like bronze, “refined in a furnace”…He was AMONG us, He walked through the fire that is this life leaving his feet bronzed, He has been through every trial and tribulation, every struggle and challenge, He knows every sorrow and sadness…and then “He laid his right hand on [John], saying ‘fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.” Holy smokes! Not only did He walk through it all, but He has the last word! This was so powerful for me. To think that He knows what I see/hear/feel, what everyone around me sees/hears/feels, and I’m not to be afraid, He will have the last word, He’s got the keys!

Death and Life: Mondays…they’re becoming the bain of the existence of both Jennifer and I…packed ward…I mean PACKED! 3 of the last 4 Mondays have been like this…44 patients in a ward with beds for 25…mattresses and cooking stoves and pots and packets of UNICEF milk and cockroaches and snotty nosed toddlers and crying babies and weary mothers EVERYWHERE! Jennifer stood up on a chair to do her usual announcements to start the morning off (to try to enforce some semblance of order…”try” being the key word) and I think the height of the chair gave her voice the projection it needed to be a bit more effective than usual. Anyways, when I arrived this last Monday I read the report book and found that one of the premie’s we’d been trying to get to the 2kg mark had died over the weekend. He wasn’t looking so hot on Friday despite IV antibiotics and such, so I wasn’t shocked (he weighed less than 1.5 kg and lives in rural Africa – a miracle he’d survived til that point) but I was sad. When you go in every other day to pick up this tiny little person and coo “Ohliyoh” (good morning) in your best high pitched baby cooing voice, after preparing a little warmish nest on the cold metal scale hoping that maybe they’d creeped up 100 grams or something…from 1.3 to 1.4 kg…you get kinda attached to these little people…Mourn death. But then there’s always Tuesdays. Thank God for Tuesdays (even if it’s just for the sake of not being Monday anymore!). I was sitting in my usual chair, perched at my green plastic table, on the first Tuesday of the month we usually have a crowd of motherless kids and outpatient follow-ups and such. And I looked up to see who was responding to a name I had just called out to receive food, and look who was there…my little friend Swizen…Swizen who God brought back from the brink of death…the 5 year old who instead looks and walks and acts like he’s 2 ½ years old…but he’s now an 11kg 5 year old, not the 4kg skeleton he presented as on admission to the ward some months ago (probably about 9 months ago)…”eh! Look who it is!” I exclaimed as he waddled his way over to my table…he never ceases to amaze me…the glory of God that I see in this child’s body is amazing! Celebrate life.



That’s enough for now, don’t you think? Signing off.

PS - the hair?! I know, it's bad. That's why I tried getting it cut the other day, but the guy in the bushes didn't quite pull it off like he did the last time...it's bad, really bad...like a mushroom cap or the little dutch boy or something...and how is it that a bad haircut can put one into the lowest of states so quickly?...a downward spiral of self judgement and
loneliness has ensued and it's no good...just like the haircut...no good. But my identity is not in my haircuts, right? Of course right.