South Africa

Yesterday, Shannon and I met with Gloria & Rodney of the Umgeni Community Empowerment Center, who are involved in ministry to the "ladies of the night" and other people living on the streets. They counsel, love, pray, and empower (through food, through jobs, through being a safe haven) to move people off the streets. Their story is so inspiring too, they were comfortable in their church in what we'd call the suburbs and God kept speaking to them that they weren't where He wanted them. Eventually "after much time, kicking, and screaming", they sold what they had and moved into the city and God started leading them on this adventure, turning even trials into a journey. Their car was stolen, and before it was recovered, they had to walk down streets they never would've and started making relationships. And God continues to bless them and is expanding their ministry, mostly by faith and sacrifice.

We had the chance to meet some of the girls (and they sadly are girls) and I felt overwhelmingly honored to be with them. We were invited to a baby shower for one of the them next week. It is heartbreaking to look at where they've been and at the same time beautiful to see how God has and is raising them up out of those situations. Standing with them in a worship service, I felt like I had so much to learn from them. This young teenager was glorifying God from the moment I met her, telling me her testimony of being on the streets, and how she can now go to sleep with a smile on her face for the first time in thirteen years. She kept saying, "if you knew where I was, and where I am..." Their passion for the God that sought them, even "in the gutters" is inspiring, and now, they are ministering to girls (and guys) in the same place they were.

We're also working with Jo Carlson (a friend of Shan's) and Cave' (a young Congelese woman) who saw a need among the many refugees from other African countries and just started teaching them English and life skills-- and from that have grown into Woman Across Borders.

Every meeting we've gone into in the past two weeks have blown our minds with the Spirit bringing unity of vision, even, or especially the ones we didn't have much hope for. It's exciting, genuinely... I feel this sense of momentum and anticipation. God is stirring here (and in so many places). I'm also reading A Generous Orthodoxy which is challenging and the kind of book that starts questions instead of ending them. In some ways I feel like I'm finding Jesus again, or maybe just learning something new about Him, like vision correction or integration. It's not that I ever wanted out of the Christianity boat, not at all, but before Uganda I was kind of in this headlock of not knowing how to show people Jesus was relevant to them, and I feel like I'm (re)discovering the Spirit of Jesus in normalcy. How life is relationships and worship and work and ministry, and ministry, relationships,worship, and work are just living.

I stand braced between so many things... an accumulation of experiences cherished or discarded, a house of memory with an open door and unpacked boxes. Exhausted by a language about God that has become reduced, exhausted by -isms and finding my thoughts unconsciously shaped by them, finding words and borders that define and label and reduce life, and me, and you, and God to finite... when everything inside of me sings of a truth of infinites, of eternity. So many contrary pulls, the shifting and shedding of the world as it moves into post-modernism... but into what, we are all being defined by what we are no longer, by our growth, by our changing, and yet the rationalism clings on for a new set of definitions and division. My nature is bent on having definitions, an analysis to every moment, a wondering at what I would be thinking if I had already learned what I do not now know. But, that's not the point. Really it isn't. I say that more to myself than anyone else. The point is that God didn't step in with a magic wand, but wrapped himself into our humanity eternally- Jesus Christ the Son of God, Son of man, and began reconcilling the world through sacrifical love and we're on that journey with Him. ... life.