Better late than never. This has been written for about a month now and I just haven’t posted it. So, without further delay my month in Kazakhstan… I have been giving a once in a lifetime opportunity this month in Kazakhstan. Me and my team will be going to a remote village in Kazakhstan to be part of an archeological dig team. This dig team has been digging for a burial ground of Nestorian Christians that were in Kazakhstan and are looking for Christian artifacts. If they can find bodies with signs of Christian influence, then they extract DNA from the teeth and will be able to tell the heritage of the people. The thing about this is, in Kazakhstan there is a saying “To be Kazak is to be Muslim”. They believe that Islam is the only religion that has existed in their country and so that is the only “Real” religion. This dig team has started two years ago and have found grave stones that have Christian influence and we will be digging in hopes of finding the graves. They have done seminars showing stuff they have found and showing that Islam was not the only religion in their country. One of the leaders of this dig team said, “these findings are causing hardened attitudes to soften and embolden the local church to share the previous legacy of bygone cultures and tribes who claim to follow Christ.” These findings are destroying ingrained myths and is changing a countries mindset and their cultural stereotypes. The hope for this year is to find a body that they can get DNA from to show that there were Christians living there before the Russian influence and that they were not Muslims.
The Dig
On the third day of being at the dig site was when we actually started digging. They had dug a few units the year before in that area, so they used a tractor to scrape the topsoil that they had back filled from the previous year. While scraping, the tractor had uncovered three grave stones and a skull. First day out there and we had already found a skull not how we wanted too but we found one. The real question was where was the rest of him? The next three days were the most tiring and tedious days of being there. For eight hours each day we had to flatten the entire area and make it smooth, which doesn’t sound all that hard right…But in order to do this, you had to take a square shovel on your hands and knees and scrape the dirt until the area was completely flat. It was like taking a piece of sand paper and rubbing a desert flat. That might be exaggerating a little, but you get the point it was easy. During that time, we had found the tops of the heads of three more bodies and a couple of grave markers which we had to just sit there until the area was flat.
For the rest of the dig I was paired up with an archeologist from Texas who had just come from Israel and we dug a unit or a pit around one of the skulls that were uncovered during the scraping days. The unit that we dug was very interesting, and we learned a lot about the people from it. In that one unit we uncovered 6 bodies at different depths which showed that some were buried at different times. We found evidence of what we believed to be grave side meals (fire pits with animal bones) next to the bodies. The cool thing about that is that burnt wood can be dated using carbon dating, so we can figure out the year that these were dug and what year the bodies were buried. We also learned placement of the bodies and how they covered the bodies. I can’t share too much because we must wait for the actual findings report to come out. When I get back to the states if you see me feel free to ask me and I can show you pictures and tell you more about this.
There is something that happened one day that I do want to share with you. This was about halfway through the dig one of the bodies that was uncovered was approximately 8 years old. Me and Joey were standing over this body and it hit us. This was an approximately 8 year old kid who believed in Jesus, who had been dead for over 800 years and his life that all seemed to have ended was being brought back to life. This child is being sent to a lab for DNA analyzation to show that they were Kazak and to show that 800 years ago or so there were Christians in Kazakhstan. Now I can’t be for sure, but I am going to assume that this kid never thought that he was going to be used 800 years later by God. As I looked at this kid I couldn’t help but to think that he was looking down at us from heaven and finely seeing the impact that his life was going to have on the world, seeing what was going to happen because he believed in Jesus. I can’t wait to meet this kid in heaven knowing that I was a tool in his story.
The moment that we try to measure our impact is the moment that we try to constrict God. If we focus on our impact and what we do then we are missing out on what God can do. When we say “oh nothing came from that conversation” or whatever, we are limiting God. Just because someone doesn’t accept Jesus into their hearts when you share with them doesn’t mean that it was a waste, you just planted a seed in them. I want to encourage those that are saying “how can God use me; how can I make a difference?” You have Christ in you. You are a difference. Everywhere you go and everything you do is leaving an imprint behind you. So, the question to ask is are you leaving Jesus behind you for others to see or are you leaving something else, something of this world?
