Africa is not for whimps

"Africa is not for whimps", this is what Cami said to me as I was sitting on my malaria sickbed. That is right, I guess I had decided that Sierra Leone was too easy and I wanted a challenge before I left. I was headstrong and didn't listen to doctor's orders about taking it easy. I was diagnosed on Friday and made the brilliant decision Saturday to go to Kroo Bay. This will probably go down in history as one of the dumbest things I have ever done. I didn't want to miss the good news club but was so miserable throughout it that I was just praying it would be over. Before the club, I had walked down Shaka Stevens Street in the sun to buy supplies for the medicine that we do after the good news club. This in and of itself made me feel like I was going to pass out. I am not quite sure what I was thinking! Well, I finally made it home Saturday night and just crashed. I barely slept because with malaria your joints ache something terrible and so there is no way to get comfortable. My hips, knees and spine were killing me and I had a fever all night. Well, I got up Sunday morning and got SUPER sick. I have never been in such bad shape. Faye came over and her and Haley took care of me. They checked me into a hotel where I could get some rest in the air conditioning. That is just what I did and I feel better now. I am still not back to 100%...matter of fact I think I am about at a 40% right now :P but I am getting there. It is remarkable how weak I have become and I have no appetite whatsoever. I have to admit that I have a new understanding of what the people here have to life through. The Lighthouse kids said that now I am a real African woman. I am not going to tell you how guilty I felt and feel that I got to go to a hotel to rest. That is one thing I wish I could do differently. It was a lot of money and I feel like I am here to identify with the poor. The poor would have to suffer with their fever and aches without air conditioning. I should have to. I am grateful that I didn't have to, but felt too much like a hypocrite while enjoying the cold. So, what I didn't think about with malaria is that it depletes your immune system. So, now I have a terrible cold and 3 boils and an out of control heat rash. Ahhh, good times! :) All in all it isn't bad, but I have had the first thoughts of "Lord, I don't think I could live like this". Up until now, this trip has been easy for me. I had even decided that I could learn to live with boils. (I have had two others besides the ones I have now...they are not fun, but I could manage.) Lots to think about and pray about. I am asking the Lord to show me the call on my life and give me the strength to answer it with obedience, if it is to come back here. So, that is what is going on in my part of the world today. I will be home in just a couple weeks. We leave Africa two weeks from tomorrow! Yikes! I will post more between now and then.

Happy Thanksgiving!

So, today it is Turkey Day! Hope you all are staying warm and enjoying the day of eating and being with your loved ones. Today has been a very hot day here, one of the hottest yet, I think. We are going to go to dinner here pretty soon as a group and will hopefully end the evening on the beach. Not a bad way to spend the holiday, but definitely my first Thanksgiving with sand in my toes! :P I love you and miss you all! I hope you know that as I reflect on today being a day of giving thanks to God for all He has done, you all are on my list of things to be thankful for!! Thank you for allowing me to process and walk through all these issues and my experieneces with you all. Thank you for your prayers and encouragements. I hope and pray that you each have time today to pause and think of all you have to be thankful for and that there are many things on your lists. :)

Happy Thanksgiving!

don't get twitchy

Today has been a restful day but difficult for various reasons. I wanted this afternoon to be a time of sitting down and really processing through some of the deeper issues that we are faced with on a daily basis, some of what we have been talking about as a group and some of the issues we have been reading about. However, most of my day has been spent stewing and then praying and repenting and then stewing again. See, an indignation rises up in me when I feel like I have been wronged or when I feel like someone is trying to control me in some way. I like to be the one in control. The issue I am upset about is not a big issue and my response of being so irritated is a hideous side of myself that I hate to admit is even there! I set out to have this afternoon be a time of reflecting and talking with the Lord about issues concerning the poor and oppression and what my response should be. The Lord is faithful though to work on my own heart and my realationship with Him before I can dive into those deeper issues. So, this ugly issue of pride and arrogance is what I feel the majority of my day was spent thinking and praying about. It was a good day in the sense of growth but not a very fun thing to see such filth in my heart. I do think/hope that the Lord has helped me to understand that my own sense of entitlement is what I feel like was challenged. This revealation carries over into other issues concering the poor. When you are serving and living among the poor, I believe that you really need to know what our rights are and more importantly what they are not. When Jesus came and dwelt among us, He gave up ALL His heavenly rights and put Himself on our level. He had access to all power under heaven and yet He humbly submitted Himself to the Father and to what the Father wanted Him to do. We have been talking a lot about this becuase of a book that we are currently reading (Missions and Money). How do I think that I can truly rid myself of my belief in my American/wealthy entitlements (clean place to sleep, healthy food to eat, running water, access to meds, access to comfort, access to entertainment, etc) in order to put myself in the shoes of the poor, if I can't even get over my own sense of entitlements among people I am serving with?! It really is an issue that is difficult to come to terms with. When we look at the poor we all believe that they have the rights to the same things we do...to clean water, to food, to a place to live and to education. Do we think that they have the rights to more than just the basics? Do we believe that they have the right to a TV, to a cell phone, to a comfortable place to live and not just a 10x10 room? What are the things that we see as necessaties that they don't have access to and if they did have access would we think that they were being lavish? I have noticed this in my own thoughts and the thoughts of others here. We would like to say it isn't true but it is there and rears it's ugly head. The Lighthouse kids want a cell phone and so they are told that is an extravagance and that they cannot spend their money on one. Yet, everyone telling them that has one and wouldn't live without it here. Is it wrong to have a cell phone? No, but the double standard is not okay and our having one and them not having one does make it seem hard to say that we are identifying with the poor in all ways. I don't have the answer for this, it is just something I am thinking about and processing through right now. What is my response to following Jesus and living as He would have me live? What brings Him glory and what harms my testimony and witness? All questions that I need to be asking myself. So, anyway, this might be all over the place but I am not going to go back and reread and edit it. I am just being vulnerable with what the Lord is doing in my heart today. He has been sweet to me and despite the heavy questions and the terrible pride of mine that is dying a slow death, I have found rest in Him and it has been a sweet day. All questions are not answered but my rest is in the fact that He is with me and is faithful to bring to completion the good work He has started in me. I have peace in resting in His hands. We read Psalm 139 this morning during our community prayer morning. It is a sweet reminder that He has made us and knows us inside and out. He loves me despite the fact all the ugliness that I see in myself.

Well, I suppose this is long enough for now...wow, thanks for bearing with me. I don't know if I will post Thursday or not, so just in case I don't HAPPY THANKSGIVING to you all.

no rest

Sometimes I marvel at the Lord's patience. He reveals things to me and it takes forever for me to apply what He has revealed to me in my day to day life. This week I have yet to have any Sabbath time and my week is packed from here on out (I know anyone who knows me well is not surprised by this, I am just disappointed that the change hasn't happened yet). I was going to try Tuesday afternoon to have some rest and down time with the Lord and it did not happen. I ended up running from thing to thing to thing that afternoon. They were all good things, but not restful. Then today is our "day off" and it has been a fine day but a wearying one. I washed a ton of clothes by hand this morning because I have a heat rash all over my torso (very common here this time of year) and so I need fresh clothes to change into. Then I picked up Vina (the Zizer's 3 year old little girl) from school and took her to the National Stadium because Abubakkar had a field day today for his school and he invited me to (which he took first place in the javelin throw - woohoo!!!). The sun here is hot right now and being in it too long zaps your energy....not to mention it doesn't make the heat rash feel much better. Then at the stadium (I think) our team cell phone was stolen from my bag. Theft is a big problem here and even leaving the stadium I watched a man reach into my pocket and I just looked at him like he was nuts. I have learned not to carry stuff that is valuable where it can be readily available but I forgot to move the phone from an outside pocket in my bag to the bag itself. It was an old phone and I am not in trouble...just makes me feel TERRIBLE. I even felt like something told me this morning not to put it in that pocket. Other than that the field day event was fun. Vina is a little pistol sometimes but she was mostly good and we ate vendor food just like we would at a game at home. She took the sweet popcorn that Faye bought her and would suck off the sweet parts and spit the rest out. It was wonderful because it kept her occupied for quite awhile! :P
I hope that I am not giving the impression that I didn't enjoy my day, because that is not the case. I am just a bit weary right now. It was all worth it though to watch Abubakkar singing and dancing to the music and rallying his classmates to do the same before he knew we were there and watching him. He has such an infectious joy and a smile that feels like heaven itself is smiling at you. And when he was on the field, he looked up in the stands to make eye contact with us and gave me the thumbs up....that made it all worth it. He was looking in the stands to see someone there supporting him and believing in him and we were there! I would say today was a success, phone loss and all!!! Okay, so back to my original point of the Lord needing to beat things in my head. I posted earlier this week how much I learned about resting in the Lord and I have not prioritized that once since we got back a week ago. So, this is my accountability. I will not post again until I have had some good solid time resting before the Lord.

Alicia, I have to say that I thought of you guys a few times when we were on our retreat. We were being very outdoorsy and seeing all sorts of cool stuff that I know Nate would have loved. :P I miss you guys and I hope all is well!

I am back

We got back on Friday and have hit the ground running....I have had ve. ry little free time since we got back. This is my first chance to blog and I don't have much time even now. It is late and the cafe closes soon.

The trip was a precious time with the Lord and with our community! I have never experienced anything quite like it before. The Bible talks about taking a Sabbath and prioritizing times of rest....I have never been very good at this or understood it fully looking at it with my Western mindset about what really is restful. Last week, I had a small taste of what it is to rest in the Lord and I am addicted! The first full day at the park the rest of the team went on a hike and I stayed back by myself at camp. I prayed, read the Word and journalled. I sat before the Lord amidst the vast and varied creation and marveled at who He is and just soaked Him in and let go of so much worry and junk that I have been holding onto. The many different kinds of birds, the butterflies of every size and color, the monkeys, the lizards, the rushing river and the enormous trees all around me were pulsing with His glory and His power. All of it, held together in His hand and yet He is in my heart speaking to it and refreshing it...bringing new life to dry places. The Lord has been teaching me over the past months about what it means know Him not only as my Beloved and my Companion but as my King. I have been asking Him to teach me holy fear of who He is and the honor He deserves. I think I often loose sight of this because I focus so much on the relational aspect of His character. I feel like He started answering my prayer on this trip. I had a deep revelation that first night sitting under a full African moon watching dark and powerful clouds filling the bottom half of the sky with thunder and lightening of how 'other' He is. He is unlike anything I could imagine and anything I have thought before. I just sat out there under the light of the moon and the occasional lightening and marveled at how big He is....Africa is a good place to learn this lesson. Everything seems brighter and bigger here. The week was full of His sweet presence. I had a really challenging talk with Faye during our time there and it has given me a lot to think about in terms of what is to come next in my life. We had some quite contemplation time and a lot of time to be alone with our thoughts and the Lord and to process through a lot of the things we have seen and experienced so far. We were gone a long time and so I can't possibly dig into all that I learned in our time away. I have shared a little and I am sure more will come out in the future. :)

There are too many highlights and not enough time to do them all justice. I will share with you a little of what I hope never to forget about our time there: the sweet revealations and rest in the Lord that I discovered, the beautiful Blue Plantain Eaters (you should look them up online....they are AMAZING), the myriad of butterflies everywhere, the evening of running and screaming from the attacking ants (they are vicious little suckers and show NO mercy), the monkeys that hung out around our camp, our evening hike through the bush to find elephants (which we didn't find...we found elephant poop that was a day old but no elephants. It was still cool to see where they had been and trees that hey had knocked over. And it was pretty darn cool to walk into the bush with vines grabbing at your feet and a man in front of you hacking a path with a machete!), our trip to see the hippos (they are big animals to be sharing the water with!), the black scorpion that walked between my legs when I was sitting on the edge of the road and the drive into and out of the park through village after village. Kids running out and screaming 'abpoto, abpoto' and waving, the drying peppers on the ground and all the little baby goats romping and playing. I cannot tell you enough how much I love these people. They are just amazing and beautiful. The village kids that came to visit us in our camp were priceless! If my camera had not been ruined, I would be posting pics of them right now. Which I guess that is one not so good thing....my digital camera got wet, so no more BubbleShare. I am bummed but it is just a thing and I have my other camera with me. So, I have to go now but that is a little bit of how great our trip was and how thankful I am that I went.