spectacle spent the month in the ‘bush’ of botswana this month. if you find yourself a map, we rented our car and crossed into Lobatse. our missionary base was there, and we spent a few days working there. then, at about 8am, we jumped on an African bus (asian buses were like Greyhounds…these were not…) we took about an eight hour ride northwest to a town called Ghanzi where we spent the night at a different missionaries house. Then, at 5am the next morning, crammed into a bus heading north to a town that sounds like “Superman.” i forget its name. It dropped us and our ginormous bags off on the side of the road where we waited for about four hours for the bus that we were told “is supposed to come by today.” that bus took us north and dropped us off in a village called Nakanang. if you find that Botswana map, it’s in the far northwest corner. From their, our missionary took us about 150 km (90-100 miles) through the Kalahari desert into a village of bushmen.
i’ll try to tell more about the bushmen, but here’s one thing they did i found interesting. they burn poop. there are lots of cows all over NW Botswana, not a ton of trees. so they burn the animal dung. but here’s the interesting thing…they mix in salt to make it burn brighter and hotter.
it kind of changed the way i read Jesus words in matthew 5. “you are the salt of the earth.” it made me wonder if sometimes, as a follower of Christ, i need to quit being so worried about appearances, formalities, how things look (our team coach is known for his quote, “if how things look matters, how things really are rarely gets dealt with.”) etc. I really think God’s calling his bride as a whole into the gutter. he’s calling us to get uncomfortable and dive into the streets, into the broken places, to where Christ isn’t being worshipped or honored.
this month i’m going to be living in Johannesburg, South Africa. so far, i love it. I’m living here without my team – they’re all off to Swaziland to work at an orphanage and with HIV/AIDS individuals. they’re there and i’m here living with BLING, and all girls team on our squad with six great girls. we’ll be serving at a church working with homeless adults and youths. we’ll be working with burn victim children. we’ll be getting onto the college campuses in jo’burg. we’ll be dreaming about church planting and it’ll be a month of being students of the missionaries God’s placed us around.
it’s funny how much i already miss spectacle. they know me real well, my sins, my quirks, my flaws…and love me through them and call me out because of them. i miss that real deep love that doesn’t happen overnight. pray for spectacle, and pray for me this month as i let God define the me of today, so i can become the me of tomorrow he needs then.
