In the midst of the undulating mass of
dancing Africans I get up to help Lazarus set up the screen. After a
while the preacher settled the crowd and had them sit around the
screen.
The film is titled Raised from the
Dead, a documentary about a
Nigerian pastor who was killed in a car accident in 2001. After
being dead for three days he was raised to life again at a Reinhart
Bonke rally. It had interviews by the doctors who examined him after
the crash and the mortician who interred his body. It even
interviewed the man who died, Pastor Daniel. He talked about his
visions of heaven and hell while he was deceased.
I remember the boy
in the hospital, the boy who was struck by the truck. What about
him, Father? Can you heal him too? What about the little children?
Will you heal them?
No
one knows the time… child will be separated…
And my memory
stretches back to a few days ago, the woman we prayed for at the
hospital in Soroti, the woman who was so thin, whose cheeks had sunk
so far she couldn’t close her lips over her teeth any longer. What
about her, Father? She sat cross-legged on the floor of the entrance
to the women’s ward. The nurses told us she was depressed, that she
wanted it all to end, this endless film of suffering and disease.
She wanted to die. The cancer in her stomach had already taken most
of her flesh, her dignity, had sucked her life from her like a black
hole.
Her
young husband stood behind her, looking at her skeleton with red,
tired eyes while Denise talked to her and encouraged her, gave her
the nice words of a young, healthy mzungu. He
looked on in silence while Dez sang to her a song of God’s love,
while we knelt beside her and prayed. What about her, Father? Will
you raise her again in three days? She who looks like an old woman,
so old I can’t believe she is married to the young, healthy man
standing behind her. Are you with her? Are you even speaking to
her? Because she can’t hear your voice, Father. She can’t hear you
over the dull murmur of her dying body.
No
one knows the time… husband will be separated from wife…
And what about the
old man with the tumor on his elbow, the one who said he couldn’t be
a Christian because he was in too much pain, that only after the
tumor went away could he believe?
No
one knows… father will be separated from child…
Or the young man
who was crippled and in a wheel chair that his old and wrinkled
father pushed around the packed dirt “living room” into the round
mud hut “bedrooms?” Will you heal their wounds? Will bring them
the life abundant you promised?
Child
will be separated…
Where is that life
you promised? Where is it because if you show me how to find it,
maybe I can show them too? Maybe I can help them find life because
there is too much death and dying here.
But I need you to
show me how to find it… I need you to show me… Because this
preacher’s shouting isn’t enough and his waving fist pointed to
heaven isn’t bringing heaven to earth, at least not to my eye. I’ll
surrender, God, I promise, if you show me that life. I can surrender
to death if you show me the life. So show me, Father, show me how to
find that life, that abundant life you said you came to bring us.
But the questions
remain unanswered and I go with Lazarus in his Toyota truck back to
the house, where my team is eating ice cream sundaes and Coke floats.
I eat some french fries for dinner and a couple cookies and have a
Coke float.
