I love Africa.
I love the quiet stillness. I love the beautiful blue skies and stunning green valleys. I love the peaceful breeze that blows through the hills. I love the red dirt that gets caked on your feet and stains your toenails. I love the smiling people who beam at the simplest “hello”. I love the curious children who delight in every little moment. I love the vibrantly colored clothing of the women in the village. I love the way the people worship with such fire and passion. I love living this life of simplicity.
It’s been almost a month now since I moved here to East Africa. And it’s hard to believe, too. After living in this culture for the past three weeks, I feel as if I’ve become a part of the landscape. An ordinary mzungu, learning how to live peacefully in the quiet hills of Rwanda. The promise of home is on the horizon, but for now, this home will do.
I started this month overwhelmed by blissful peace and optimism. Debrief in Kigale was a beautiful time of refreshment and restoration. After four long, arduous months in Southeast Asia, my tired soul was brought back to life by the beauty of African living. I left that debrief full of hope that these last three months would be full of Jesus, full of adventure, and full of life.
But then things started to happen. Frustration set in, communication became difficult, and I started to lose that hope. Before I knew it, I wondered if there was any hope left for the remaining three months.
And then the Lord stepped in, turned me around, and restored me.
In Rwanda, God taught me about hope.
Life in Kabuga, Rwanda was not entirely ideal. At first, I started to feel anxiety growing in me, as I wondered how I would survive a month with the kind of conditions we would be subject to. Squatty potties. Cold bucket showers. No wifi or cell coverage for miles. Sharing a bed with a teammate in a room the size of a closet. Eating the same staple foods every day. Language and cultural barriers with the host. A couple items getting stolen on the first night. Disorganized ministry schedules. These kinds of inconveniences are things I’ve had to grow accustomed to dealing with on the Race, but by Month 9, these things only triggered the desires for home that I was trying to suppress. But even though I struggled to adapt, I eventually came to the resolution in my spirit that this life would not last forever, and for now, there were far too many beautiful things about our situation that I needed to appreciate. Pretty soon, the Lord gave me peace, and I found myself falling in love with our life in Rwanda, quirks and all. Crisis averted.
Ministry began with preaching in our host’s church. Initially, I imagined church in Africa as being full of people, singing and dancing for hours. I imagined our preaching would speak to the hundred people in the congregation in a powerful way. I imagined encountering the Lord in church in a greater way than I had ever experienced before. But as we walked in, I realized that this would not be the case. A tiny little cement building, with dirt floors, five little wooden benches, and no electricity. “That’s fine,” I thought. “Maybe once the congregation got here, this church would come to life.”
Church started that Thursday night. Only four people showed up. And as two of my teammates went up to give the message, I looked around realizing that my team constituted a greater percentage of the congregation than the actual locals.
To be honest, I was discouraged. Not only because my desire for a real African church service would not be an experience this month, I also struggled to understand why our team of six American men was needed to preach to a church of four people. Just down the street were far bigger churches with larger congregations – so why did God call us to this one?
During the day, our ministry was to go with a local pastor and visit homes to share the Gospel. My squad was familiar with door to door evangelism, as we had spent a month doing it as our ministry in Nicaragua (Month 2). However, as we started to visit more and more houses, I realized that the entire village was already Christian. Again, questions started to rise. Why did God call us to this village of Christians to share the Gospel when there are other villages of people who have never heard of Jesus?
And then we started doing construction on the church. Our goal was to help lay a cement floor in the church by the time we left, and so we started digging up and leveling the soil to start creating a foundation. By the time we had finished leveling the ground, we asked the Pastor to provide cement bags for us to start laying the floor. But because of communication barriers and financial issues, several days went by until we were able to get started. And by the time the month had almost finished, we still hadn’t gotten the progress done that we had hoped for. The Pastor then hired an outside hand to start laying the floor, and asked us to lay rocks across the floor to “strengthen the cement”. Not only did we feel somewhat useless, as we had spent a month wanting to work on the church but another hired hand would actually end up laying the floor after we left, but we also knew laying the rocks across the floor diminished all the work we had done in leveling the ground in the first place. “What was the point of all of the work we did?” I wondered. Again, it felt like we were useless. Maybe we had been misplaced.
The team struggled with this. Even though we knew that we were here to serve the Lord, these questions started to berate our minds. Negativity started to spread, and the struggle to find purpose only added to the daily struggle of enduring difficult living conditions during Month 9 of an already exhausting Race. Passion started to wain, spirits fell, and most of the team started to retreat into themselves for personal comfort. I quickly became convicted of this, and knew that the team needed a boost to keep going. But after a discussion with the team one night early in the month, where I attempted to reignite that spark, most of the team settled on the fact that simply getting through the next three months was the only goal worth fighting for. I was thrown for a loop. Not only was I struggling to find hope in my ministry, but I also was struggling to find hope in my team. They seemed to want different things than I wanted, so much to the point that I didn’t know if I could even feel unified with them. Everything was suddenly starting to collapse on itself, and I didn’t know what else to do.
I spent a good amount of time that week sitting on the front porch, talking to God. I was frustrated, feeling trapped with a ministry that seemed to be futile, a team that had lost energy, and three months left of a Race that were starting to fall apart. At Debrief, I believed that the last three months could be the most fruitful months of the entire Race. Now I wasn’t so sure.
I had lost hope. I thought it would be a miracle if my team came back to life again. I thought it would be a miracle if any fruit came from this ministry. I thought it would be a miracle if this month ended well. And I couldn’t imagine the scenario in which any of this came true.
Over the weekends, as my team went into Kigale, I went to visit the Genocide Memorial. A small building on the hillside overlooking the city, I spent two different days wandering the various exhibits in the museum, wanting to understand the history of the country. Horrified and heartbroken, I passed by pictures of children with gashes in their skulls, men with blood running down their faces, and bodies left scattered on the streets. Seeing the faces of victims and hearing the stories of survivors, I shuddered as I tried to imagine the horrors of what they endured. Many survivors had escaped to other countries and lived as refugees until the chaos ended, returning back to their homes months later. After a catastrophe like this one, it was remarkable to me to think of the people ever wanting to come back to a place so scarred and hopeless. But what was even more remarkable was that the people didn’t choose to be defeated. As hurt and heartbroken as they were, they believed that life could still go on. In the aftermath of such a horrific tragedy, the Rwandan people chose hope.
As I began to reflect on this, I wondered how they might have felt, knowing that their lives would never be able to return back to the way they once were. Many families were fragmented, homes were burned down, and joy was difficult to summon. But still, as I stood there in that museum wondering how God could have brought so much hope to these people, the Lord helped me come to an important realization:
Hope doesn’t come from knowing exactly how a problem will be solved, or knowing where to go next. Hope doesn’t come from trusting in our own abilities to work through something. True hope comes in trusting the Lord’s ability to do the impossible.
How could I say that there was hope for God to bring restoration and life back to a nation torn apart by genocide, when I couldn’t believe that there was hope for the situations I was going through? How could I believe that God could reunite two people groups that once were ruthlessly slaughtering each other, when I couldn’t find hope in Him ever bringing unity back to my team? How could I believe that there was hope for God to do amazing things in a nation that once was broken, when I couldn’t find hope that He could do much of anything in our small-reaching ministries?
So I began to pray. Even though I didn’t believe it, I asked God to do a miracle. “Reuinte the team, Lord.” “Bring people to Christ here.” “Show us the purpose of why You called us here.” He told me before the month started that this would be a month for miracles, but these weren’t the kind of miracles I was expecting Him to fulfill. Regardless, I continued to pray.
And suddenly, things started to shift.
After a couple of days of doing door to door evangelism, I started to realize the purpose of what we were doing. My best friend from home gave me a bit of prophetic advice for the month (which I didn’t read until later), saying that my purpose in Rwanda was to give hope to the hopeless. At first, I didn’t know that these people needed hope, as it’s been 23 years since the genocide, and I assumed they’ve been able to move on by now. But then, as I started to have conversations with different locals, I realized that when people presented their prayer requests at the end of our discussion, God was giving me the opportunity to instill them with hope in their personal walks with the Lord. Whenever they were worried about whatever was ahead, I was able to point them to Scripture, and remind them of the hope they can find in Christ to take care of them. I realized that many of them didn’t have Bibles, and were hungry to learn from Christians who understood Scripture and could teach on it. And by the end of the month, the Lord provided us with two separate people who wanted to accept Christ! I was overwhelmed by how our ministry to a community of Christians had a greater Kingdom impact than anything I could have imagined!
Work at the church continued to be slow and frustrating. By the end of the month, only the front step of the stage was completed, a task that only took two days out of the three weeks. On the last day, the whole team struggled with wanting to honor our host’s request to lay rocks on the church floor, when we knew that the cement could be laid without it (“This is just the way we do it in Africa”, our host explained). Because of how slow construction was happening at the church, and how few people were a part of the congregation, I doubted this church would ever become anything. But in the last day, I spent time talking with the Pastor’s wife, and she started sharing her dreams for the church. With a light in her eyes, she told me her dreams of one day having a choir, and a band, and classrooms, and offices, and even a second story added to their little church building. Even though our work wasn’t much, I realized that our work there was just the beginning of what God wanted to do there. In our month serving this tiny little church, we were literally laying the foundation for some incredible things that God was going to do. And suddenly, I was filled with hope believing that if God gave this family those dreams, then the fact that He sent them entire team of m’zungus to help with construction meant that He was serious about making those dreams come true.
And then there was the team.
The first week in Kabuga, I spent most of my day stressing over my team’s spiritual and emotional state. I feared this team was so burnt out, they wouldn’t care about any ministry we had for the rest of the Race. Our times together were tired, and spiritual discussions were few. Even our hosts were wondering what was wrong with us. I felt like I was now responsible for carrying the team through ministry, when I knew that I myself wouldn’t be able to do this alone. I prayed for God to bring revival, but given the kind of spiritual burnout that I was seeing, I didn’t see there being any hope. But then, we started a dialogue one night. As my team leader and I expressed our frustrations with the state of the team, the rest of my teammates started sharing their struggles and explaining where they were at. And I realized that there was so much of what was going on that I was making judgments about instead of first taking time to understand. I saw that there was still a fight left in the guys, and even though things were difficult, they still wanted to fight to finish this Race strong. And that left me astounded, humbled, and hopeful.
I realized this month that finding hope meant surrendering my limited perspective to see different sides of one issue. Our team spent some time studying James 1 – a particularly convicting chapter of Scripture that talks about finding joy in trials, choosing to persevere, controlling the tongue, and committing to living by Scripture. But what was most convicting to me was James 1:19, which says “…Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.” This verse was like a stab to my heart after my discussion with the team, because I realized that in the midst of my frustrations and “righteous anger”, I wasn’t taking the opportunity to be “quick to listen and slow to speak”. And after hearing the perspective of my teammates that I disagreed with, I realized that there was so much hope to be found in the fact that God still was working in their lives in the same way He was working in mine.
Sure, by the end of our time in Rwanda, we never got to see the whole community of Kabuga become saved. Sure, by the end we never saw the church building in its completed state. Sure, the team is still struggling through some stuff.
But the beautiful thing about hope is that it doesn’t need to come to completion for it to exist. Hope, I found, is something that carries strength of its own, because it’s built on trust in a God who promises to bring everything to fulfillment, even if we never see it in this lifetime.
It’s funny how clouded our judgment can get whenever we are in difficult situations. In those moments where I was frustrated, I knew that God could work a miracle, but I had very little hope to believe that He would actually do it. Especially when it involved the hearts of other people, I didn’t even have much faith to ask God to move. And yet, after all God has done for me on this trip, I don’t know why I lost hope in Him. Maybe it’s because I wanted to believe that God wanted to just teach me different things through having some tough situations, instead of believing that God could redeem the things that I thought were lost causes. But really, this month, God wanted to show me that He could do more than I expected of Him. That even though I saw things one way, He always saw hope.
Going around the World this year, that’s been my goal: to give hope. Hope that no matter what circumstance a person can be in during this life, there is hope in Jesus to redeem them. Hope that in the midst of horrific tragedy, God can still bring reconciliation and forgiveness. Hope that even when I’m ready to give up and walk away, the Lord can still bring revival. And even though I, a messenger of hope in the Gospel, often lose hope even in the little things, I’m grateful to my Lord that He still continually brings my eyes back up to Him.
This World Race is not over. Even though some days I feel like I’m coasting out, there’s still even more that the Lord wants to do. So – here’s to two more months of following Jesus, loving people, and living a life I’ll never take for granted. May they be better than I could ever imagine.
Lord, I know that there are still more trials ahead. But regardless, I’m grateful for a hope in knowing that You will do always amazing things even still.
“Lord, how many are my foes! How many rise up against me! Many are saying of me ‘God will not deliver him.’ But you, Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, the One who lifts my head high. I call out to the Lord, and he answers me from his holy mountain. I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me. I will not fear though tens of thousands assail me on every side.” Psalm 3:1-6
