Decades of memories make it rather easy to imagine Christmas in Denver.  While the fine red dust blown in by the Harmattan wind swirls about our feet, our thoughts turn to the windblown eddies of fine snow that spin along the ground as winter evenings settle in Colorado.  The growing glow flowing from neighborhood homes chases the nipping chill as padded footsteps hurry home.  Aromatic evergreens laden with cheerful memories greet guests gusting in with the chill wind and fleeing flakes.  Warm aromas rise to melt the frost from frozen noses.

Here in Burkina Faso friends and neighbors bundle against the early morning chill as temperatures fall into the 60s.  One can even see the occasional young child in a full snow suit.  The afternoon winds whip the desiccated dust into a fine fog that makes the sun resemble a suspended glass ornament.  Baobab trees stand like leafless guardians of the 9-month dry season as everything inside and out fades under a growing layer of muted red dust.  The memories of Christmases past fade as the incongruity of humming carols while wearing a ruddy, sweat-stained shirt under the scorching sun relights reality. 

The past year has seen even more changes than we ever could have expected.  We have taken on more hungry, underweight babies in dire need of supplemental nutrition.  We have begun experimenting with the incredible Moringa tree that we hope will provide a sustainable alternative to packaged baby formula by increasing babies’ birth weights and improving nursing mothers’ lactation.  We also began distributing bars of soap along with hand washing instructions and reminders to neighborhood children to wash their hands before eating, after visiting the toilet, and throughout the day.

We are also unashamedly changing the local culture.  We hired a neighbor’s ten-year-old daughter (for the equivalent of $2.00 a month) to be the keeper of soccer balls, Frisbees, and jump ropes.  It’s a culture changer because women, especially young women have a low status in traditional cultures.  Now in our part of town the older teenage boys must politely ask a much younger girl to use some of the sports equipment.  We are also changing the local culture by teaching cooperation, sharing, and how to earn small treats by doing things like filling small sacs with trash from the streets which we then dispose of. 

Close enough to Christmas to truly be a gift was the opportunity to share in the celebration at the SIL center of the completion of the typesetting phase of the Kaansa New Testament.  Stuart and Cathie Showalter have worked for almost 28-years on this translation project.  It was a stunning moment when we got to hear one of their team read the Scriptures in his heart language.  Because of Stuart and Cathie’s dedication to the spreading of God’s word, the Kaansa language group will have the word of God in their heart language.  This is why Janet and I are honored and humbled to be working here for Wycliffe Associates—to help and to see Bible translation accelerated so that all may hear.

We have also come to view Christmas with greater wonder and thankfulness.  Most people in Burkina Faso are Muslim.  Most of the minority Christians are Catholic.  The remaining “evangelical” Christians are tainted with varying degrees of animism and superstition.  Christ is known of, but not truly known.  A small minority in this country have the assuredness of an eternal relationship with a loving God through His Son Jesus.  We wage a constant, loving guerilla action to inject Christ into all of our interactions with our Burkinabé friends and neighbors while we work at the SIL bible translation center for Wycliffe Associates.

As Christmas draws near memories of loved ones in the US and in many countries around the world fill the nooks and crannies of our hearts and minds.  We drift in and out of thoughts of you all as we hear (or hum) a carol, decorate our diminutive tree, plan for the staff Christmas party, or soak in the Scriptures as we savor the day when God became man to deliver his own Christmas presence.  We are also very aware of the countless number of people who do not know our Gracious Lord and who have not eternal life in His presence.  Among all the wrappings and trappings of this Christmas season, how wonderful it would be to share the presence of Him to which we owe all that we are and hope to be. 

This holiday season, why not give Christ for Christmas? 

Share the Gospel and share the joy.

Back in Burkina and What a Week It Was

It was a blessing that my plane landed at Ouagadougou International Airport at midnight on Tuesday, 28 October and not much later in the week.  News on the American media was sparse.  Emails from the U.S. embassy on Ouaga were much more helpful in filling the many gaps.  I could expect anything from major demonstrations to a near dead calm on the streets.  Thank God it was the latter.

I picked out Jonathan’s face in the crowd as I passed through the vaccination check and infrared early Ebola warning temperature scan.  Jonathan’s familiarity with almost everyone in the capitol city made passage through customs almost a breeze.  Getting through would have been simpler if I had not shown the officials the manifest for the crate containing the cell phone amplifier system I was to install for Wycliffe Associates at the translation center in Ivory Coast.  The manifest included the costs associated with all of the equipment and could have resulted in duty charges if not for some very fast talk from Jonathan.

Jonathan and I parted company in the airport parking lot after filling the bed of my small pickup truck with all the baggage.  Jonathan took off for home on his moto and I warily headed down the dark streets of a nation which was about to chase a very unpopular president out of the country. 

The week following my arrival saw numerous demonstrations, some peaceful and others violent enough for the US embassy to warn expats to “shelter in place.”  The Parliament building, the mayor’s offices, the national television offices, other public buildings, private business, and some homes of targeted family and friends of the soon-to-be-former president were gutted and burned.  Cars we set afire, windows smashed, and some stores were sadly looted.

Barely a week later the president, after considering the better part of valor, took off to visit the Ivory Coast with a small entourage of thirty or so SUVs and a French military escort.   The citizenry celebrated by taking to the streets once more, but in a rush of civility they cleared and cleaned the streets of the reminders of the fits and fires of a few days before.  This is after all “the land of upright men.”

The government has a new interim head, Colonel Isaak Zida who has declined to observe an African Union demand to yield his position to a civilian leader within two weeks of a somewhat indeterminate date.  Talks among an unusually inclusive group of players have so far garnered sufficient patience if not confidence to allow life in Ouaga to return to some degree of normalcy.  People have returned to their jobs, bars and schools are open, the curfew is limited to midnight to 5:00am, and conversations in the street are more frequently are about topics other than what some view as a people’s revolution.

Even from my limited view, there is something encouragingly different going on here in Burkina.  There is optimism that the nation is at an historic and pivotal juncture, especially for a poor, developing country whose fortunes rise and fall with the price of cotton and the quantity of rainfall.  This is a popular and inclusive change in leadership.  Burkina enjoys some unique opportunities to start anew without the burden of a presidential power structure older than half the population.

Inertia is on Burkina’s side as long as the road to a consensus, civilian government is not too long and as long as the culture of nepotism dies with the Compaoré power structure.  The opportunity to forge a new popular democratic government is hers to lose in this what may very well prove to be the land of upright government. 

Faceplant

It came on slowly.  We sat in in the boarding area in the Ouaga International Airport.  The big (for Africa) flat screen TV was playing French news that is always more wide-ranging and in-depth than we usually find in the US.  The news ranged from Syria, to Gaza; from the Ukraine to Libya.  It all looked so much bigger and richer than we had become accustomed to in Ouaga.

Six or so hours later we arrived at the Brussels airport.  It was like peeking behind the winning curtain on “Let’s Make a Deal.” There were more material goods crammed into the airport shops that we had seen during the past year in Burkina Faso.  It was almost unreal in the vastness and value of the offerings.  We caught ourselves staring in every direction, feeling like country bumpkins gawking in Times Square.  It was like a palace of dreams come true.  Even before I could think of a particular meal or gift, it was there in front of us pasted on a dozen shop windows.  I thought of our neighborhood kids in Ouaga—barefoot, unwashed, and begging for peanuts or water.  I couldn’t shake my head hard enough to empty the incongruity from my mind.

Thank God (literally and often) we arrived at Denver International Airport at night.  The airport was pretty much down for the night.  No crowds streaming down escalators; shops were electronically shuttered.  The trip home was muffled in darkness as our attention was on talking with Andy who was so kind and patient to greet us as we entered the arrival area.  It was unspeakably good to see the face of a warm Christian brother that gave us some root in the surging maelstrom of change between America and the fourth poorest country in the world.  Thanks Andy, you will never know how much of a blessing you were that night.

Now, four days on the clean ground of Denver, I still struggle with jet lag and something like culture lag.  I want to celebrate being in a country where the air smells good, I can drink from the tap, and we don’t have to soak our vegetables in laundry bleach.  Paradoxically, I am also very angry with America.  All around I see people who have so much, yet desire so much more.  I see people leave half-uneaten meals on plates in the restaurant.  I am bombarded by advertisements that tell me I can’t be happy, feel contented, or live rightly without cars, clothes, food, furniture, toys and other treasures that must always be the newest, most trendy, or fashionable.  Everywhere I see lots of stuff, but little substance.  I see people craving actualization and hardly if ever thinking of Jesus.

Here I sit, pontificating and sounding so self-righteous, but I am honestly not.  I blame myself as much as anyone.  I spent the first half century of my life thinking mostly of me and running over other’s toes.  I craved professional accomplishment, disposable income, and material comforts.  God helped me because I almost wasted my life. 

Now I carry water for Jesus and fight an ongoing battle against my egocentrism as well as against the ravages of other people's poverty.  I am tempted to pride because I do what I think I should be doing, but all I am doing is what God put before me as a lesson.  God gets the glory and I am blessed because he lets me carry His tools. Now like a chastened Scrooge, I want to throw open the window and greet Christmas with a shout.  I want to let the unsaved know that the boat is slowly sinking and they have choices to make.

It’s a lot different living in a hot, dusty, and dirt poor part of the world.  I live among people who treasure their faith, their friends, and their family.  I want to stand on a street corner and wake my neighbors to the fact that they are dying and will eternally fall never to see God again.  I want to tell the USA that there are so many people living here that are so poor that all they have is money.  They have a ton of 401k’s, health care, good accountants, a lot of stuff—more than they can even see because they are occupied with wanting more things, more vacations, more money and hardly have a thought for God.

My face hit the wall of divergent realities—realities as different as night and day.  People who have so much that they don’t treasure what has real value—Jesus Christ and eternal life through Him and Him only and people who have so little that they value what is really real—God, family, and friends.  When the end comes those who have had so much will be the truly poor and those who had so little will have known best what actually had the greatest value and will enjoy eternity truly free of all want.

I need to find a street corner.

(Don gets the blame for this rant.)

Unavoidable Consequences

They positively identified my friends remains a few days ago.  She had mysteriously disappeared as if she had been plucked off of the face of the earth with few, if any clues as to how or why.  She was a good, but not especially close friend.  We shared a church and a small circle of mutual friends.  We would chat and maybe work together to clean leaves from the church gutters or wash dishes after a church dinner.  Before she bought her condo, she asked me to inspect it.  That was the last time I saw her.

 She was a regular at every church function and seemed to especially enjoy doing things for other people.  I remember her sitting with one church member who was nearly 100 years old during a potluck.  Most of the others had managed to not see or visit with the centenarian.  My friend chatted, smiled, and as I recall, patted the old woman’s hand as they spoke.  My friend always seemed to be helping someone.  And then she was gone.

My friend and I never had “the conversation.”  Mostly, I assumed that being a church-going Christian she was saved—that she had an eternal relationship with God through the grace of His Son Jesus.  I also had yet to master “the conversation.” It was easier just to clutch my assumptions and hope for the best.  In the years since she disappeared, I have thought many times about never having asked her about her relationship with Jesus.

 Asking a person about their faith can be awkward; it’s easier not to ask and it gets easier over time.  In our society we often hear that we should avoid discussing religion or politics.  Religion is often claimed to be a personal matter and one best left alone.  In some circles, it’s not a fitting subject for “polite company”. Hogwash.

A lot of people, maybe most people are unaware or refuse to acknowledge that there are things we can do or not do in our earthly lives that have eternal consequences.  As a species, a society, and as individuals, we are so bound to the here-and-now and are so infrequently confronted by eternity that it can easily be concealed behind homework, shopping lists, and the big meeting next week at work.  Most people prefer to put eternity off to the last possible moment much like those who wait to file their income taxes hoping for a pre-midnight postmark.

Truth is that which is—things as they actually are.  Truth exists independent of our wills and cannot be changed.  Truth is often not what we would like or not what we would wish it to be.  As a practical matter, we cannot walk into just any bank and start helping ourselves to as much cash as we want, we can’t simply pick up all the items we want and walk out of a store without paying, and we can’t decide to drive as fast as we want down the highway or at least we can’t do these things without having to face consequences, often very serious consequences.

It is much like this with eternity.  As unfair as it may seem, we cannot believe whatever we want or behave as ever we’d like without having to face consequences—the most serious of consequences and consequences that will prove to be irreversible.  Physics, chemistry, and mathematics are replete with unalterable “laws” that are entirely inconvenient—you must obey gravity, you can’t turn jellybeans into gold, and any given mathematical equation will produce the same result no matter how often you perform it.

I never went out of my way to talk with my friend about eternal matters.  I never cared enough to ask her if she had ever chosen to confront eternal truths.  I never asked her about her relationship with Jesus.

I truly wish that I had.

Have you considered eternity? Are you sure of the consequences of what you have done or not done in this life?  Do you have an eternal relationship with God—the true God, the only God and His Son Jesus by whose grace we can enjoy eternity in His presence.

Please consider that what you do or don’t do during your earthly life can and will have eternal consequences and that truth—the real Truth determines what those consequences will be.    

 

Seeing Red (or Not)

After enduring countless cuts in water we finally got our proprietaire (landlord) to agree to install a chateau d’eau (water tank).  He agreed to provide the tower and to pay for the installation, if we bought the tank.  That was how the events of this morning came to be.

I decided to head downtown (au centre ville) to buy a 1000-litre tank at a place recommended by a coworker at SIL.  It was to be a straightforward affair.  Armed with Google Map printouts and my vastly more direction-enabled wife’s instructions I headed out alone to the moto-packed streets of lunch-hour traffic to buy our polytank.

I imagine that there resides in some dusty cabinet in some government official’s office a compendium of all of the laws, rules, and regulations governing traffic in Ouaga.  That is the only place they reside.  Once in traffic one quickly finds that custom, convention, and convenience trump any written code.  Motos drive in lanes reserved for motos and they drive on the streets swirling and flowing among cars like small fry around big fish.  Suddenly opening a car door at a red light can put you in immediate contact with a handful of bruised moto riders.  Left turns by cars and motos can occur on either side of one’s car.  Red lights are a suggestion and turns in one direction can easily begin in the opposite lane.  You get the idea.

A mere block away from the store where I was to buy the polytank I encountered a bevy of policemen who were excitedly gesturing for me to pull over to the right side of the road and the left side as well.  I chose the right side because the policeman on that side appeared to be having a better day judging by his expression.  Bad choice.  He was immediately joined by a second officer who demanded to see my papers.  I’ve seen enough black-and-white movies to know it’s never good when an official asks to see you papers…”pleeease.”

The two officers proceeded to offer me a litany of all the rules residing in the file cabinet that I had transgressed beginning with the red light I had passed (J’ai brulé une feu!).  I responded that the signal had no light lit.  No score.  One officer began to explain that my visite technique was expired.  I showed him that I had a copy of the results of the inspection and had had the necessary repairs made.  No score.  He told me that it would cost me dix mille CFA (10,000cfa or just over $20.00.)  The other officer continued to examine my papers.  The amount began to climb.

Discretion being the better part of valor I sunk to obvious squirming.  I offered to the offices an increasingly sad tale beginning with the fact that my wife will be very unhappy with me and may hit me when I tell her what happened.  I tossed in a couple of “Ooh la las” and talked more of how angry she would be.  I allowed my French comprehension to degrade and repeated “Qu’est-ce que je dois faire?” (What am I to do?) a few times.

In a sudden bolt of perception and while looking around to see that no one was watching, the policeman offered me a discounted fine.  I tried to hand him the money and he, while looking way down the street  instructed me to put the money on the seat.  He picked it up with some of the papers sitting on the seat, took the cash and handed me the papers.  He then encouraged me to move along.  I offered my hand with a relieved, “Bon jour” both of which he waved off and urged me to leave--now.

I spent the next 20-minutes or so looking for the store to buy our poly tank.  Using the Google Map printouts, I managed to make my way back to a familiar landmark to recommence my hunt for the polytank vendor.  The route on the map brought me back to the precise spot where I had just done my part to support Burkina’s economy.  The police officer with whom I delighted part of my morning was nowhere in sight, perhaps because he saw me coming or maybe he subsequently discovered that he did in fact have enough money to buy lunch. 

Maybe I should have asked him for a receipt.

Then again, maybe not.

We have our water tank.   

Yay!

Rocking Bears

Saturday Janet and I piled into our truck with three friends and seven “rocking bears” and headed out for an orphanage, “Les Ailes de Refuge,” (The Wings of Refuge) in the town of Yako, 70-miles from Ouaga.  There was a story behind the freshly-painted wooden bears riding in the back of our truck. They were completing a journey that began on the dusty, sunbaked streets of Ouaga well before we left for Yako.  The bears were actually coming full circle.

A wiry and well-tanned Kate Royal operates a small mission on a dusty, rough road in Ouaga.  Her mission is a refuge for boys from a hard life of begging on the street.  Besides refuge, Kate’s mission offers food (usually rice with some sauce, a bit of meat or fish and whatever else is available) steeped in the Gospel and the love of Jesus; a chance once more to play; to learn to speak French (more universally useful than Mooré, Jula, or Fulfulde); and to begin to learn a trade—carpentry—and maybe a way off of the streets.  The boys make small stools upon which many Burkinabé sit and more recently they crafted the very solid “rocking bears” that could easily grace the shelves of Toys R Us.

Shortly after arriving at the orphanage we carried the rocking bears to a rare shady spot next to one of the classrooms.  We set them on the ground, stood back and watched as a handful of toddlers slowly made their way cautiously to the unfamiliar objects.  Likely beckoned by the bear’s smiling painted faces, one-by-one each child reached out to touch a bear.  The most adventurous encouraged by volunteers climbed into a seat and almost immediately began to rock back-and-forth as smiles sprouted and giggles belied delight with the strange, new playthings. 

 

I watched one young, blind girl warily sweep her tiny fingertips across the bear’s freshly varnished and painted surface.  As if an image were slowly building in her mind’s eye a smile blossomed on her lips.  She felt her way to the seat and climbed onto her bear and headed off to where ever she imagined.  Next to her a stout young man with a joyously round face already upon his mount, twisted his small hand as if to rev the engine on a “moto” and “brrrrrrmmed” his way down an unseen road.

The bears made a round trip, but to a place they had never been before. The bears began their voyage at the hands of young men—many of them orphans themselves—back to the hands of other orphans.  With them, the bears carried the hopes of young craftsmen for a better life and the desire to help make a slightly better life for other orphans while demonstrating and sharing the love of Christ for some of “the least of these.”  We all learned a lesson that day; sometimes the biggest thing you can do is what you can do for the smallest.