A Post Worth 94,000 Words

...And some because of this short paragraph explaining. These are not all of my pictures- just the ones that comply with Word Made Flesh's photo policy of not publishing photos of our kids. I can show those in person and many of you may already have. If you haven't, perhaps we can get together, but here's 94 pictures worth 1000 words each. Enjoy!

Final Support Letter

My time in Sierra Leone may be over, but I am sure that the work God has set before me is just beginning. I want to express how grateful I am and was for your support and prayers while I was living in Freetown this fall. Not only did your dollars provide rent for my room, buy every meal I ate for four months, and pay every vital taxi fare, but your prayers made even more difference in my life. It was a physically and emotionally taxing time and without the knowledge that God was there to help (and that you were there bringing me before Him in prayer) I would not have been able to learn and do all that I did.

I went there expecting to learn more about the plight of the poor and to have my perspective changed on how God blesses each person and I certainly did experience a great deal that has changed my outlook on those issues, but there was more. I learned a lot about myself and how I struggle with the tension between learning and doing and I opened my mind to the idea that as a well educated Christian I may not understand all that is true as well as I thought I did.

I originally wrote to you with the idea that I would be "helping spread God's Kingdom by serving the poor" and while that certainly remained true, I slowly began to realize that I was there more for my own education that to do anything monumental in the lives of my new friends. A stanza from a poem I wrote while there encapsulates this idea well:

I am here now to join their shift

Yet can I lift some from their plight?

It's not my part to do this deed

But plant a seed; to sow God's Light

Realizing that I came to Sierra Leone to have my own assumptions challenged and not to bear the burden of some great social change was hard for me to understand until I remembered that St. Paul saw himself only as someone who simply sowed a seed, let others water and care for it, while God made it grow (I Cor 3:6).

As I continued to grow in this realization, I found myself challenged by more. Like most Christians, I am convinced that what I believe is right and nothing in this world can challenge those truths. This belief still stands for what I consider to be true theologically, but I realized that I had made the common mistake of transferring this infallibility to my cultural beliefs as well. In Sierra Leone I found my Western worldview challenged by things that still fit into my Christian worldview. When a local pastor friend of mine was telling my team about witchcraft in Freetown and how some witches have spiritual vision, I was skeptical. He told us that witches see Christians as having a flaming sword around them and the sword terrifies all evil things. As I considered what this well-educated Christian was telling me, I remembered that I live in the same world in which Satan physically attacked Job, Jesus cast out demons, and Balaam's donkey spoke. This caused me to put some serious thought to what might be true that I had not given a chance and I thought about the flaws in my own worldview. I wondered what it might be like to understand the cosmos like Moses did, or King David, or even the One who's got it all figured out- Jesus! When I read in I Cor 2:16 that we have the mind of Christ, I wondered what was getting in my way of comprehending what I should understand. It is a process, but I am attempting to widen my worldview and stretch my perception how much of the truth I am able to see.

Of course, not everything can be told in one letter, so if you want to hear more, read my blog or email me and I will answer questions about my time there as best I can. But I really do want to thank you for holding me up in the hard times- I really depended on your support more than you know and I am very very thankful for it. Let us keep praying for one another because we don't stop learning and growing in our everyday lives

Home at long last

It was sleeting in London on Wednesday morning and that made all the difference.

It made me arrive in DC a half hour late.

Which made me two minutes late for my connection to Indy.

Which put me on a later flight that night.

Which got cancelled.

Which put me in a $500 room in the Hilton over night for free (Culture shock time!)

I flew to Chicago Thursday morning and got delayed again.

Then 21 hours later than planned and 50 (!) hours since I boarded the water taxi to the airport in Freetown, I was hugging Kelsie and my family in Indy... Finally!

I am back and still trying to figure out what to make of it.

The End

Well our last days here are really looming and I'm very excited to see everyone at home, but the bittersweetness of leaving is also setting in as we realize that we're saying goodbye. We had a farewell party for the kids we tutored on Wednesday and they prayed for us all before we left and the last Lighthouse was big series of goodbyes (but promises that we'd see each other on Saturday at Noah and Florence's wedding).

The harmattan (dry wind from the Sahara) came through and I started to get a cold but on Friday we took off to River Number Two! Cami has been to some of the best beaches in Thailand, New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, California, the Caribbean, and more and she says that the beach at River No. 2 is her favorite! And with good reason- the finest, whitest sand I've seen yet and a steep slope down to the water which made for some killer waves. At low tide they'd break far out and roll perfectly in (great for body boarding) and at hide tide, they'd reach up the slope of sand, then crash back with such force that the next wave would be pushed twice as high as it normally would have been. It was awesome- I played hard and got my self beaten and battered by the waves, just the way I like it.

But I played too hard for having a fresh cold and it ended up taking it's toll that evening as I developed a very high fever that night and Cami made me stay at her house. She was very nice and helped make me comfortable but I ended up having to miss the wedding and not being able to say goodbye to everyone. It was sad.

But it came with some good memories too. The night before as my fever was raging, Joseph M. was helping out around Cami's house and she sent him to buy a bucket of water so I could shower and get my fever down. I remember watching him come up the stairs with the water balanced on his head and I realized that I had come here to (among many other things) serve him and here he was loving me right back. He's always called me "my brotha!" and as he left that night, it was much more meaningful to me after I had seen how much he wanted to help me feel better.

The fever disappeared soon and I'll be good to travel in a few days, but it's gonna be hard to say goodbye to everyone. And yet, I'm so pumped to get home!

Still trying...

(Trying in Krio means to do your best... I know it has other connotation in English)

For those of you who prayed that I would be able to continue working whole-heartedly here in Freetown up until the last day, I think our prayers are answered. Ever since we got back from the retreat, we've been very busy from planning the Christmas story skit for the Kroo Bay Christmas party, to taking part in that crazy Saturday, and squeezing everything else in these last days.

One thing that was very interesting was that Jan, in proposing his idea for what we should do in Lighthouse this week and next was that we send the boys out for evangelism and service. Since this is more or less the topic of my entire ministry proposal I've been working on for a month, I volunteered to help him, and we've been putting some things together to integrate the Christmas story into the impetus for missions. It's exciting to see my proposal taking place even before I'm done writing it and planning for things that will happen after I've left. Things like this keep me very involved and I'm glad for the chance to help out all the way to the end.

Today we're having our farewell party with the kids we tutored and Friday will be our last day playing with Remie and Saidu. Monday will be our last full day and I think Tuesday will be mostly cleaning and packing. I'm ready to be home, but not so ready that I'm not still trying here.

Thank you for all your prayers!

Final Retreat

We took our end retreat this past week to a beach resort on the peninsula, near the village of Sussex. Franco's was the name of the hotel, and Florence's the restaurant- husband and wife, Italian and Sierra Leonean respectively. It was a super nice place and very good for the topic of our retreat- going home and reverse culture shock. For the first time in three and a half months, I took a hot shower, slept in airconditioning (underneath a sheet!), was able to take a shirt off without it sticking to me, and all sorts of wonderful physical comforts (including good Italian food, fresh lobster and crab, and carpaccio. And yet we are all still ready to be home. It was a nice reminder that it's not the physical comforts of the West that we miss. Even when we had those, we still missed family, friends, and our own culture.
We had some good talks about coming home and reverse culture shock (and how it will be much worse than any other reverse culture shock we may have had before because of our interactions and living in poverty here). We did a Bible study focusing on the poor in Scripture which I felt wrapped up a lot of the things we have experienced here.
But most of our time was spent laughing, playing, eating and swimming. The restaurant is right on a tiald river that chages directions with the tide and was so much so swim in as the water came rushing in our out. As high tide gave away to low tide, it was almost dangerous getting sucked out to sea, but it was shallow enough at the shore that you could walk out. We heard that there were crocodiles up river, but we never saw any. It was a very nice beach and we were practically the only ones there.

Giving Thanks in Freetown

My Thanksgiving was interesting- it was really nice in the physical sense (that is we watched the Macy's Day Parade and football, sat on nice couches, and ate all the glorious traditional Turkey Day food you can imagine- and all in air conditioning) but it wasn't at all like Thanks giving. Just a nice party with good food. No family, no prayers, no sitting around a table, no (explicit) giving of thanks really. Don't get me wrong, we were all thankful to be there and expressed that to our generous hosts and we really enjoyed chilling with friends and having a good time but it just lacked that "holiday family feel".

On the other hand, the dessert I made (pumpkin squares) was a hit. Erin told me that it was the best one there :-)

We're going on our final retreat this week. It's to a place called Franco's which I gather is some sort of hotel near the beach. Run by an Italian guy (Franco, presumably), they've got good food and air conditioned rooms (!) and are very near the famous River No. 2 Beach. We're doing some debriefing and how to re-enter our own culture and such and we'll be back Thursday.