I apologize for my minimal blog posting recently but let me tell you that the struggle for internet in Africa is real!
Last month in South Africa was probably the most amazing month on my race thus far. I had the most delicious food you could imagine, the most fun hosts and ministry yet, and I was in a surfers paradise where I fell asleep listening to the waves crash on the beach every single night. Telling you about all that would make it a month to remember but on top of that I probably had one of the most spiritually impactful months of my life.
Identity; it’s who you are and in a Christian community it is a foundational understanding, knowing who you are in Christ. I never understood this concept of identity. It made no sense to me. People always talk about how their identity being misplaced in being a student or an athlete or something equally as material. When your identity is found in titles that can be lost it is inevitably that one day you will lose that title. The thing is I never found my identity in titles of this world. If you had asked me who I was beyond my name, city of residence, and occupation I would tell you that I was a good person, who was passionate about experiencing all the world has to offer, who cared about the oceans and looking after the world, who believes in social justice, and who had a lot of thoughts about a lot of things. I never understood what it meant to ‘find my identity in Christ’ even though it is something I had heard about for the last 7 years of attending church.
One of our ministry roles in South Africa was teaching bible classes in a high school for a week. The organization which runs the camp we worked and lived at has partnerships with schools and part of that partnership includes visiting and teaching within the schools. You would think that being a teacher this would be easy for me but actually it was quite difficult. Running your own classroom is very different than walking into a classroom that is not your own to teach about the bible for an hour in a language that is not the majority of the students first language. That was compounded by the fact that I have never taught or prepared lessons on the bible and I did not have access to google to help me out. Needless to say the devil had a field day with my thoughts and emotions and kept on telling me how stupid I was and how bad my lessons were going to be. On our second day at the school I was partnered with Jason and we shared the teaching between the two of us all day long. Jason’s lesson was on identity and he wrote on the board the question of ‘Who am I?’. For the first time in my life something finally clicked and the concept made sense. Finding your identity in God meant believing what the bible says about the kind of person God made you to be.
Another thing that made our month in South Africa was great was the four South Africans who essentially joined our team for the month. Gerhard, Zonika, Hannah, and Larnelle like us have given up a year of their life and fundraised to spend the year volunteering for the camp organization and experiencing God in their own lives. We lived together, we ate together, we ministered together, and we did life together. We became a family. Gerhard and I connected immediately through our love of music as he is a talented guitar player and musician. He, Jason, and I spent many a nights just jamming out together. A few days after Jason taught about identity at the school Gerhard and I were hanging out at the beach and telling each other our testimonies. Gerhard told me how who he is today is unrecognizable from who he was a year ago before he gave his life to Christ. A once self-conscious, timid, hide in the background guy became a confident, bold, outgoing, camp leader all because he found his identity in God. After sharing with him my testimony he spoke the same things that people back home have been speaking to me about my identity for years but just as with Jason’s lesson something about it finally made its way through my thick skull. That evening we were having a worship night and at one point during the night Gerhard came and prayed over me that I would finally learn to find my identity in God and see myself how others see me. Later that night I was journaling about my day and I just felt God calling me to recommit my life to Him, not because I had strayed away but more so because I had never handed over my identity to Him. So that night on February 18th my teammate Kim and I prayed together to recommit my life and identity into God’s hands.
The changes in my life since that day have been tangible. Our last few days in South Africa were spent doing a fun team building competition. One of the challenges was to create a restaurant and serve a traditional South African meal to three guest judges. I volunteered to be the waitress as I didn’t think I had a lot to offer in the cooking or creative vision department. Unfortunately being the waitress meant I didn’t have anything to do until the actual presentation of the dinner and so I was recruited to help with the decorating. Typically in that role I would take backseat and do only what was given to me to do while always second guessing myself and asking for opinions and feedback on if other people liked how it looked. I would pass the buck so that if it ended up being criticized I could say I was only doing what other people told me. But the bible tells us that God did not give us a spirit of fear and timidity but rather one of power. With my identity now rooted in who God tells me He created me to be I found myself taking charge, making decisions, and not asking first for people’s opinions on things that really weren’t make or break issues. Someone else was the overall visionary and I just took her concept and what props and things I wanted to use to accomplish her vision and how I wanted to lay it all out. I couldn’t believe the confidence I had in myself, even my team noticed it.
2 Timothy 1:7 For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity but of power, love, and self-discipline.
I don’t know what led to finally finding my identity in God after all this time but I trust that it was God’s plan and timing. I feel like so much of the growth I have had over this journey is linked to me not knowing my identity in Christ. With my identity I also found joy. I always felt like I was a happy person but the idea of joy was another concept that I just didn’t seem to understand, probably because it was a feeling I never really identified with. If you were to look at my journal over the last month the word smile has shown up a lot, God kept telling me I needed to smile more. Well our first day in Swaziland I found my joy which given the physical circumstances was pretty unmistakably from God.
Imagine this. We leave South Africa for a nice short 5 hour bus ride to Swaziland for round two of All Squad Month. Because it was so short of a bus ride I didn’t even buy any snacks to bring on the bus because I figured we wouldn’t be missing any meals. We arrive in Swaziland around lunch time and our bus pulls off the highway into what looks like the middle of nowhere. I kid you not, the first thought through my head when I realized this is where we would be living for the next month was “Please don’t make me get off this bus, I think there has been a mistake, this is not the right place!” It’s 30 something degrees outside, not a cloud in the sky, and dust storm tornados are a regular occurrence. Our ‘house’ is a concrete floor, with plaster walls, and a tin roof. We have 2 rooms, a girls room that holds 15 and a guys room that hold 6 (14 of us are using tents and sleeping in the enclosed ‘backyard’). We have approximately 30 plastic chairs and one folding table in a large barren ‘living room’. We have three washroom stalls (two girls one guys) and we each have two shower stalls. We have two refrigerators, a deep freeze, 6 gas burners, 2 kettles, and a toaster. Outside the ‘backyard’ is enclosed with chicken wire and covered by mesh. There is a small covered section with a small table make from a wooden pallet. There was no lunch like I thought there would be and dinner that night (and basically every meal for the next three days) was rice and beans. Not exactly a situation that screams joy but once I got off the bus and faced the fact that this was in fact reality for the next month I felt happy and content and actually joyful.
Swaziland has grown on me. It took two weeks but I have come to appreciate this place and it’s beauty. The stars and breath taking and the sunsets beautiful and even our 7km walk to and then from the care point we work at twice a week no longer seems as bad as it once did. We are doing a variety of ministry this month. Twice a week we walk to our care point where we hang out with a dozen or so five year olds who go there daily to get for most of them the one meal they will eat that day. One day a week we spend in prayer and the other two days we spend helping and teaching at the local primary and preschool.
One thing that is not our officially ministry but that I, and many if not all of my squad mates, have taken on this month is praying for rain. We are in the last month of what is supposed to be the rainy season here but this region hasn’t seen rain since last April, almost a year ago, we are told. Thousands of cattle of died as a result, people are losing their jobs, and crops are withering. It is estimated that the farmers will harvest less than 10% of their crop this year. Swaziland needs rain! Everyday many of us walk to over to one of the many sugarcane fields around us here and pray over them asking God to bring the rain before we leave this month. Usually when I pray asking God for things I don’t put timelines or a lot of specifics because I know that Gods plan and timing are not always the same as mine and so I don’t want to set myself up for disappointment when a pray appears to go unanswered. But at the same time I recognize that without asking God to show up in big was I downplay his power. So I decided I would trust God and pray that by the end of this month we would see rain. Finally after two and a half weeks of faithfully praying for rain the heavens opened up and the rain fell. Since then it has continued to rain almost regularly. No more where I put God in a box and be afraid to pray big prayers. God is a faithful father who likes to show off sometimes and if I keep myself from praying for things to happen God has nothing to show off with.
One last thing. Being All Squad month I have had the opportunity to reconnect with other friends I have on the squad who are not on my team as well as past teammates. During a conversation the other day with a former teammate he noted how much I seemed to have grown (before I even told him anything about last month). How I was now seeming to walk around with a confidence I didn’t have before. I told him I owed it all to finding my identity in God.
So I will end this by sharing a poem I wrote the other day:
Green Shoots
Green shoots spring up from the ground
Jesus your blessings are all around
At first I did not see them, my life seemed still the same
But I kept on going and one by one they came.
Comparison breaks my heart
It robs me of your joy
My walk is mine
They only on the outside look like everything is fine.
The truth is they are human
They are no different from me
Their life is not all roses
Sometimes they too want to flee.
I had a fear of failure, I never wanted to be out front
When it came to responsibility, I did not want to bare the brunt
But I learned that great reward comes only from great risk
That if in God my trust is found, His grace and mercies will abound.
I never felt known, always felt on the outside
I wanted to be involved but instead I would always hide
Hide from people and hide from God
Every single day felt shrouded by fog.
I couldn’t take it anymore and the darkness closed in
But it was in the darkness that the Light finally broke in
I broke down the walls and showed people my heart
And the family I had been craving final got its start.
Green shoots spring up from the ground
Jesus your blessings are all around
You planted good seeds that have finally taken root
Please I pray that they start to bare fruit
It was hard and slow to start
But obediently I played my part
You tore down my walls and softened my heart
With my identity in you I feel like I have a fresh start.
You’ve taken and transformed me
In you I firmly stand
You’re redeeming my unworthiness
You tell me I’m seated at your right hand.
Jesus let it rain
Let your spirit flood my soul
I want to make being Christ-like
My number one life goal.
Green shoots spring up from the ground
Jesus your blessings are all around
Where life will take me I can’t wait to see
All I know is you’ll continue to bless me infinitely.
