The greatest joy is not found in satisfying your own desires, but instead seeing the fulfillment of God’s love in those that you care about.
I have now reread and slightly modified what I just wrote about nine times and am wondering if this is even something I wholeheartedly agree with.
You are welcomed into the deepest crevice of my mind.
I find myself sitting at a hostel in Lilongwe, Malawi two weeks away from reentry to a culture and life that I honestly am not sure if I remember how to operate in these days.
I have heard so much about Malawi and it is the build up of a thousand stories and memories.
I bet you’re confused now.
They are not my stories and they are not my memories.
I have been doing life with 45 amazing and wonderful people and they all have their own dreams, wants, revelations, love languages and personalities. These people have absolutely wrecked and challenged my life and walk with God over the past year. They are my family and my friends and their stories have become tangled and intertwined with that of my own. We have laughed often and cried a few times, but the revelation is that I would honestly go out of my way for any individual here. Not that it is about a title or leadership, but because I honestly care.
This is the way I remember one of these relationships forming and when I first thought about this tiny country in which I currently reside. I remember walking around training camp getting to know these people that I now call family and asking about their lives, travels and interests. One such guy walked up to me, covered in tattoos, rocking a pretty sick mullet and wearing a carved wooden Africa and cross upon a small piece of twine around his neck. He looked at me and said, “I’m Brian”. His almost sarcastic, very straightforward tone and smirk would be something that I would come to love about the guy standing in front of me.
We went back and forth for a few minutes with the same questions you ask everybody at that point in our journey. “Where you from?” “How did you come to know the Lord?” “What do you do for fun?”
“What country are you looking forward to the most?” That was the one that I would never forget.
Brian looked at me with a sheepish grin, “I cannot wait to get home!” I was thinking, "this dude is off his rocker." We haven’t even left yet and he is ready to get home. I nodded and smiled and looked to someone else to talk to. That’s when it made sense. “I lived in Malawi for a while working at a hostel, when a World Race squad (soon to find out Stace’s squad) came through and I came to know Jesus!”
That is weighty. If only I unpacked things then the way I do now. We chatted a few more minutes and he beamed talking about this country that I knew nothing about and wasn’t even on my radar being that we wouldn’t even be there for another year.
Fast forward to month eight, Kenya for a few minutes. At this point in our journey, my relationship with Brian had changed. He was no longer the same strange person beaming about a country I knew nothing about. He was three full months from coming home. At this point, the mullet had left, we had lived and worked together in Nicaragua (even though he was dead most of it), I had been raised up to lead the squad and had done it for four months giving ample opportunities to chat with Brian and check in with him and to be honest I would say it wasn’t just a friendship, but a brotherhood had developed.
I remember sitting out on a tattered old van seat couch at their team’s contact’s house in Kenya. Brian looked at me and said, “Can you see what is special about this place (speaking of Africa), I am almost home!” He looked at me with tears welling up in his eyes and asked, “Can I ask you a question and if you say no it’s okay?” I felt myself welling up. “Yea man, anything.” He looked at me tears starting to break over the corners of his eyes, “I just talked to Marie and they are taking a team in August, it would mean so much to go back to the place that I first came to know Jesus.”
Finally, fast forward now, to month eleven or as I started thinking of it, homecoming. The squad dispersed after a couple nights at the hostel that Brian had worked at here in Lilongwe where I am actually sitting to write this blog. Ryan, Kay and myself had decided we would go out with the two teams heading to Senga Bay to Johan and Marie’s ministry to spend the beginning of the month. However, there was not room in the bus that would carry the teams all the way to the house. Instead, Brian hung back with us and we were going to head out on good ol African local transportation. Long story short, we made it to Selima, which is fifteen minutes or so from where we needed to get to after sitting on a bus for an hour or two waiting on it to fill up. We had to catch a mutola or the back of a pickup truck to make it the rest of the way.
This moment I will never forget. The road was straight. The sun was setting.
Brian peered out the back of the truck, he looked at us and said, “You want to hear something?”
“Yea!” we all replied.
“I remember riding back to the hostel after spending time at the ministry with the team there. I was right here, on this road and I was looking at all these things that I had seen a million times. But something was different. I was viewing them with a new light. Everything was more beautiful then it had ever been.”
All the sudden flat land, side shops and people standing on the side of the road took a new light. This was the place that I had heard about and it was the place that will write the future of my good friend’s life.
We spent ten days at the ministry. We were building a Bible College, hauling water half a mile for anything you can think to use water for and we were in deep fellowship every night getting enveloped and intoxicated on the Spirit. Johan and Marie became two of my favorite people in Africa and spoke a lot of things into me. We made lifelong friends with a team of twenty something South Africans volunteering there for a year. And I witnessed Brian, through sickness and the hurting of his hip, beam at the vision that God is swelling inside of him. Not to mention, I yell at his hip everyday! That sucker’s going to be new, if it isn’t yet.
One night we gathered in the lodge. Brian grabbed the key to a room and led a few of us back to it. He opened the door and stepped inside. Johan straggled in from behind. “This is it!” he said. I looked around at the spacious room crammed full of twelve or so beds. “This is it!” I thought. Brian looked around, “That is the bed where I received Christ!”
It is crazy to me, how something that normally wouldn’t be considered light can change in the flick of a second. That room was not special, but it was impactful. It wasn’t the room that changed the atmosphere. It was the person! And man did it change. It was that room that began to write a story that will ultimately impact this country… The story is being written! It is not complete, but I tell you with all my heart the vision is absolutely crazy and beautiful.
That get’s me excited! It’s not my vision! I hope one day to stroll into the vision for a week or so, because the truth is now I believe that seeing God’s love in those close to me sparks a joy inside of me that cannot be contained. It is the joy of the Lord and it’s infectious!
I know what change looks like. I have seen it! I have seen God work so thouroughly through everybody that comprises B-Squad and I have felt the work being done with in myself. We come back changed, but in another sense we come back whole. We come back knowing and believing that God can take the most messed up parts of our lives and make something extraordinarily beautiful out of them.
