How I Was Called On This Mission Trip, Part 2

I was working part time with my housemate and best friend, Brett, at a Presbyterian church in town.  We led the youth group.  On a warm, spring night, the church had a potluck in the parish hall.  Our group was asked to bring drinks and utensils.  We were going to be hearing a missionary speak.

It turned out she was not a missionary.  Not really anyway.  She and her husband spent a few weeks touring through South Africa on vacation and thought it would be interesting to spend some of their vacation investigating what work is being done in Zambia by Presbyterian missions.  She had a guide, a strong Zambian woman. 

The Zambian woman started by showing her the nice parts of her country, “where we take the tourists,” as she said, but the white woman was so enthusiastic to see suffering they soon drove off the beaten path to see pieces of Zambia the tourists never see.  The first stop was a school deep in the interior of the country.  Her husband took pictures of the children, who had never had their picture taken before.  They crowded around the little screen on the back of his camera, looking at their own smiling faces, seeing themselves frozen in place for the first time.  They laughed and laughed. 

During her presentation she showed pictures of the children, of the school that Presbyterian money had built, of her Zambian guide, and of the landscape, with its chestnut dirt and brown grass.  As she talked she weaved in the statistics: the percentage of people infected with HIV/AIDs, the number of AID’s deaths, the hunger numbers, the poverty numbers, the disease numbers.  All of the numbers we Westerners think are necessary to feel pity for others.

I have long been immune to the numbers.  At my religious college I heard so many well intentioned people give heartrending statistics; statistics I was powerless to respond to because of my scripted life.  I had to finish school.  I couldn’t leave to go to Africa that very second, even if I wanted to.  I didn’t want to want to.  It was better for me to want to be right where I was.  So I developed statistic deafness.  Eventually I became deaf to missionaries altogether.  No amount of statistic induced pity or guilt would move me to action.

Something larger than numbers was moving that night though.  It was looming in the shadows of the room, in the shadows of my subconscious.  Where does the spirit of God make its home in us?  Is it in our feet, in our fingers, or on the surface of our smooth skin?  Is it in our brains?  Is it in the nooks and crannies of our consciousness?

If the subconscious is the dark foothills of each individual, if the subconscious is the murky deeps, with its own unknowns, its own rabid coyotes thirsty for blood, its own stripes of black, can the spirit of God make its home even there?