DON'T WASTE (THE REST OF) YOUR LIFE.

During my late tens, my twenties, and my early thirties, I thought myself to be a reasonably good person.  I knew that I wasn’t a saint, but I could rattle off the names of a dozen Hitleresque persons worse than I.  Then I became a man and (mostly) gave up childish ways.  Faced with a nagging desire to know the true Truth, I realized that I was not really all that good. Not nearly.


I got married, bought our first home, climbed the career ladder, and made good money.  I allowed the last two items of the preceding list to become my raisons d’etre—my reasons for being.  Big mistake.  As a then nominal Christian, I stumbled into a wiry, Reformed Baptist preacher who gob smacked me with the possibility of actually wasting one’s life.  The concept left me stunned to my shoes. He disillusioned me of the idea of buying a boat, retiring to Punta Gorda, Florida, playing softball and collecting seashells.


I listened to dozens of his sermons while pedaling my stationary bike.  I started to become annoyed with his insistence that “life” as I knew it was not life at all, that what we often mistake for life is rather a system of unimportant diversions.
  

Note that I wrote “unimportant,” not “inconsequential.”  A lot of unimportant things have consequences.  Passive decisions can have monumental and eternal consequences.  Without warning, life can become a system of passive decisions.  The American dream is such a system of passive decisions.  Almost without the slightest thought, we may embrace the idea that life consists of building a career, making a home, buying stuff, and chasing postcard vacations, like going to Punta Gorda. 


There is nothing wrong with the American Dream if it does not become the primary objective of one’s life.  Food is good, gluttony is not.  Money has a function, but it is a false objective.  Vacations are restorative, but they are an escape.  In fact, everything about the American Dream is an escape made up of unimportant (but consequential) diversions.  Realize it or not, the American Dream is the scenery that flies by as you ride the rails to your final destination.


The sermons I Youtubed while working out became the existential icing on the materializing realization that it is difficult to discover the meaning of “good” while living a life of unimportant diversions.  The American Dream can leave us confused about the main point of our lives and wholly unprepared for what comes after.


I am now in my seventh decade and I am again stunned to my shoes when I consider how close I came to wasting my life.  If not for the love of a relentless God and the people he purposely sprinkled into my life, I would have persisted in the haze that I was a reasonably good person pursuing my slice of the American Dream. I am now able to look back on decades of self-delusion and see clearly the sins for which I now fall weeping at the feet of Jesus. My eyes have been opened to how close I have come to riding the remainder of my life until it flew off the rails and tumbled into the pit of perfected irrelevance and unspeakable aguish.


What we call “life” is a prelude, a dress rehearsal if you will, for eternity.  We pass through a deluge of unimportant diversions.  Some of us are swept away by the current while others find solid footing in a loving God.  In the process, we discover that the American Dream has the potential to become a final, eternal nightmare.  We also discover that while we are capable of conceiving of “my truth” and “your truth,” that there is in the end only one Truth.  While we can also convince ourselves that we are reasonably good, there is really only one good—God.  When our goodness is measured against His goodness, there is no discernable difference between us and the meanest, most horrible person we can imagine.


In the end or nearing the end, I once again see how I have been rescued by a relentless God.  Rather than see my retirement as the opportunity to enjoy life and to find recreation with fewer concerns or responsibilities or to chase after postcards and collecting shells in Punta Gorda, my age is a vantage point from which I can squint eternity as the American Dream and my puny concepts of “truth” and “good” fade into vapors.  It is only in God through His son Jesus Christ where we finally find the real good, the real truth, and that which is consummately more real than any dream.


Don’t waste (the rest of) your life.

MY CRAZY MOTHER

My sister and I were sure our widowed mother wasn’t crazy, but I think that there were times she wanted us to think so.  She couldn’t resist keeping us wondering.


My mom was left with a nine-year-old daughter who had been pummeled by a one-two of spina bifida and polio and who required a ridiculous number of surgeries even before graduating from high school.  A two-year-old rambunctious and strong-willed son balanced the other end of her yoke.  Maybe that’s why she always a seemed a bit “different.’


Besides the usual “clean up your room” and “please don’t start fires in the house,” mom always did the excruciatingly unexpected.  When I was about four or five, mom dropped the hammer on me for dropping toys on the floor.  One day she sat me down with “that look” on her face that said I may not be sitting down again for a while.


“Look, I work all day to put food on the table and to keep a roof over our heads,” said Mom.  “Your Nana keeps an eye on you and your sister every day to make sure that you both eat and that you don’t burn the house down.”  (Oh, oh, she found the burned spot on the floor beneath the hassock.)  I don’t have the time or energy to always pick up after you.  If you don’t put your toys away, we’ll figure out a better solution.”


A few weeks later, with toys still on the floor, one of our neighbor’s husband carried in an old wood army footlocker and put it my room. I liked army stuff and thought this to be pretty cool.  Mom came in and sat me down on the footlocker.  She snapped a small padlock on the hasp.  She looked me in the eye and said,

 “Every toy that you leave on the floor goes into the footlocker and remains there ensconced for two weeks.  If it winds up on the floor again, it will stay in the footlocker until just before Christmas.  We will take the footlocker to the Ottilie Orphan Home and you will give one toy to each orphan until all of your toys have been given away.”

I knew that Mom could be stern, but not THAT crazy.  I remained a recidivist. The memory of an unlearned lesson quickly vaporized.
  

A couple of weeks before Christmas Mom and I drove up to the Ottilie Orphan Home in “Becky,” our pea green 1939 Dodge sedan with a footlocker sticking out of the trunk.  Even then, I held out hope that this was just some drama meant to teach me a lesson.  It was not.  In all-too-few minutes I was raining tears as I clutched each toy before hesitantly handing it to a child who clasped the toy to his or her chest and said a very appreciative “Thank you!”


The next day, Mom helped me to write a letter to Santa.  I asked for a small, rideable delivery truck, a panda bear, and a wind-up roller coaster.  Mom walked me to the post office to mail the letter.  A few days before Christmas, a big box with a North Pole return address was delivered to our house.  Inside were wrapped packages addressed to my sister and me. They remained unopened until Christmas Day.


Sixty-plus years later, inside a yellowing photo album in our basement is a picture of a very smiley five-year-old riding a small truck and clutching a very fat panda bear.  Mom always stuck to her story that she had nothing to do with the package that came by truck.  She said that she was struggling to make a Christmas for my sister and me.  Money was tight and she was working two jobs.  There was little left for presents.  On Christmas day, she was a lot more surprised than I was when we opened those gifts plus a letter from Santa wising us all a very, merry Christmas.

When I went to my room that night to go to sleep, the footlocker was gone and I was clutching my new bear.  I still wonder about Mom to this day.

Roping Toilets

I have shared before that it is customary that just before we leave the US for Burkina, after we arrive, or before we leave Burkina for the US, or just after we arrive things fall apart. In my case it has most often been something with a toilet.

I have become so adept at quickly repairing toilets that I am reminded of a calf roper launching after a calf released from its chute only to be wrestled to the ground with its hooves bound by a rope in what the wrangler hopes is record time. I even raise both hands in victory as I flush the repaired toilet for the first time. I brought a wrangler’s hat with us to Burkina this time so I can more closely resemble my missional avatar.

This time it was an electrical connection in the main circuit breaker adjacent to the meter—it smoked and cut off the current last evening. I was not inclined to work on the problem in the dark, so we ran the generator until midnight. I “pre-cooled” the bedroom as much as possible before we hopped into bed and tried to fall asleep before the room heated to ambient. It worked, almost. When the room temperature rose above 85-degrees I awoke as if a large metal platter had fallen onto a concrete floor. I spent the remainder of the night repeating my prayers until the sun laser-beamed through a slit in the curtains screaming that the night was over.

The circuit breaker reset this morning, although I measured its temperature to be over 160-degrees with my IR thermometer. I have a call into Daouda, our very friendly and capable Burkinabé electrician. We are using as little electricity in hopes of keeping our electrical load as low as possible. While I wait for Daouda, I can see if the voltage regulator for the refrigerator can be repaired and then find the source of the short circuit in the living room lights. Later I can replace the burned-out spotlight and exterior light fixtures. Once I get the two dead batteries in the trucks recharged.

The toilets, so far, are okay.

Daouda has arrived. It will be a good day.

The Oasis of Hope Women’s Sewing Project Update

Their smiles say it all.  The joy of new-found hope and the love of Jesus in the faces of our most recent women’s sewing project graduates.

It seems like a small thing--learning to sew clothes, shoulder bags, small, stuffed animals, and more.  Bringing hope and the love of Jesus to women marginalized by widowhood, divorce, or abandonment are the products of small steps.  The first step is when a woman so painfully shy that she can only look at the ground arrives and tentatively knocks on the Oasis door.

Greeted by smiling faces and encouraging voices she soon feels the affection of women who just weeks or months before were in the very same place as she.  People listen to her heart and her story.  She shares her hurt and hopelessness and someone listens.  The soft touch of another who has shared similar pain assures her that she has found a place of hope.  The love of Jesus begins to bathe her in the light of expectation where the shadows of despair begin to fade.

Soon her smile and sparkle begin to show as helpful hands show her how to sew a straight line or to make a hem.  Hope takes root.  Fellowship, prayer, Scripture, and song fill the air and her heart as she begins to raise her eyes and take hold of hope that will last.

It is now her turn to open the door for a woman who can only look at the ground. 

Small steps.

Into Africa

I am sitting at a makeshift desk in 100-degree heat in a town whose name I could not pronounce a few years ago.  I have a tablet pc, a smartphone, and a power pack to keep them both charged. 



It is a scene that reminds me of one in a lot of films about Africa.  Usually such a scene occurs on a safari with someone in a pith helmet pecking away at an old Underwood.  In this case, I am sitting in an oasis, the Oasis of Hope in Lorem Ipsum. Instead of being surrounded by lions, and tigers, and hyenas, I am surrounded by babies and small children and their mothers.  A couple of men are finishing the new chicken coop.  It’s all so stereotypically African with a twist.  And it’s hot and getting hotter but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.



The chicken coop has been long in coming.  It was supposed to be full of hens laying eggs by Christmas.  It’s now almost Easter and the chickens may be here before May.  Their eggs will feed the mothers who come to the Oasis for baby formula because they cannot nurse or to family members when the mother or both parents are missing.  A malnourished woman can’t nurse properly.  The added nutrition from a few eggs per month can make the difference.  Leaves from the nutritious Moringa trees raised here add even more nutrients to mom’s diet.  Babies feed better, gain weight, and grow better, and may even make it past their fifth birthday.



I’m drinking a Coke, it’s warm.  So is everything else.  Besides money, food, health care and honest government, one thing in short supply here in Africa is shade.  The sun has moved to my workspace and I can feel the heat rising from the desk.  Soon my tablet with give me a red box warning that it is shutting down because it is too hot.  I need to find more shade.

Feeding wizened babies and their nearly as skinny mothers is good and it makes many good feelings.  So does distributing small bags of rice and beans or small plastic sacs of drinking water to the many in need.  Taking desperately ill babies and adults to local clinics, pediatric hospitals, or radiology specialists is also good for a serotonin uptake. Holding a cooing baby once the size of a rolled pair of socks is an even bigger rush.  But, as the song goes, it’s all just “dust in the wind.”



If sending well-fed babies to Hell was the best I could hope for, I’d go live someplace a good deal cooler and find something much more amusing to do.  But there is more I can hope for and do.



Unlike postmodern Europe and North America, Africa hasn’t tired of faith in God.  In fact, I have found much hunger for who God is.  Here where peoples’ continued existence can depend on the next rain, God has a more welcome and visible hand.  Here, most people are not “too smart” to still believe in the Eternal God of the universe.  Here is a growing population who know that they need Jesus and seek him with all of their hearts.  They know God is the one who brings the next rain. 



I’m getting older and already past retirement age.  Dragging around 25-kilo sacks of rice or beans, hauling 20-kilo containers of water, and experiencing sun so intense that you really can cook on a car hood is not the object of my life.  What gets me out of bed in the morning is the hope and experience of sharing, sometimes just a little of the love of Jesus Christ with someone who is living on the razor’s edge of existence and who is taking each day a foot, a morsel, or a minute at a time now and for the innumerable tomorrow’s to come.



The heat, dust, and mosquitos fade into non-existence on even the faintest hope that one day a simple seed that God has allowed me to plant will become that slightly familiar smiling face who greets me with an outstretched hand and a small sack of drinking water in the life to come.