I’ve thought about how to start this blog for a while now and all I can think to say is that once I peed in a hole in the ground across from a big cockroach being eaten by an even bigger spider, I had to accept that this month was going to break me.
When we arrived in Assafou, a village a few hours north from the capital of Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire, we had high spirits. I was surprisingly excited to be living in the bush with no electricity, no running water and all the unknowns that came with that for the month. We were working with a DTS team from YWAM and were thankful that some of them spoke the village language and could translate.
After the first night, though, (which was an experience in itself, one of which would take way too long to type up) my spirit had fallen. Within the first few days, I realized that this month was going to be 100 times harder than expected. We were the first white people the villagers had seen in person, so we were constantly being watched. No matter what we did, we were being surrounded, poked, petted and examined by scores of children. I’m not even exaggerating when I say there was literally no escape. Wherever you went, children would follow. If you were in your hammock, they would play with your skin. If you were in your tent, they would stand and stare into it. “Maybe the excitement will wear off,” we said. It did not. It lasted the whole month.
We were constantly dirty. Constantly itchy from mosquito bites and rashes from sources unknown. Constantly sweating profusely. Constantly battling giant spiders that would reveal themselves when you least expected it. Once we all started getting sick, I was done. I felt completely depleted emotionally, physically and spiritually. The enemy had enjoyed a presence there in the form of witchcraft and idol worshipping for so long, the spiritual darkness was just an added bonus that drained you. I actually had to look at pictures of my friends from home on my phone one day because I wasn’t entirely convinced there was an outside world. That’s how bad it got.
Almost every night, the DTS team would set up a generator to use a light and a microphone to preach, and they asked us to lead worship a lot. The first night we led, they didn’t set up the generator and it was just us and them, in a circle underneath a beautiful sky filled with stars. The next morning, one of them came to us and told us that one of the town witches (weird to type) complained and said that they couldn’t do any of their magic when we were worshipping. I knew then that my voice, my guitar and my team’s worship had a greater purpose in this village: we were here to wage a war against the spiritual darkness these villagers lived in.
In the book of Jonah, he finally went to Ninevah, where God told him to go, and he brought the message that God sent him with: that they needed to turn from their sinful ways and follow God. At that time, the Jews struggled with the fact that the message of God’s redemption was not only for them but for the whole world; in their eyes, the Gentiles (non-Jews) were better off just being destroyed. When the king of Ninevah declared that the city would turn from sinful ways and that God was Lord, Jonah was pissed. He didn’t think the Gentiles were worth saving. He was angry, and he went to sit outside of the city to watch it from afar. While he was sitting, God made a plant grow over him to shade him from the discomfort of the sun. The next day, the plant died and it said that God:
“appointed a scorching East wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, ‘it is better for me to die than to live.’”
Jonah was, first of all, hella dramatic, but also mourning the loss of his comfort. But God said to him,
“You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, and you did not make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Ninevah, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left hand?”
Why should I mourn the loss of every one of my comforts? Why should I lay in my tent, sweating and itchy and being stared at, and say, “it is better for me to die than to live”? Is bringing the message of Jesus more important than me feeling uncomfortable for a few weeks? Yes. Yes it was. It is always worth it.
This month was so difficult, but it was also so FULL. Full of finding freedom in worship, delicious right-off-the-tree mangos, children falling asleep in my lap, prayers with mourning families, seeing chains being broken and people coming to know Jesus, and moments of being incredibly thankful for my team and the way we all had to lean on each other this month. I even got to preach for the very first time and tell the village that they were not defined by their mistakes- that Jesus died for the person they are right now, even in the midst of their darkest moments. I’ll admit, I’m glad this month is over. But I’m even more thankful that it happened. So now, we go to Ghana. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize I could sing “It’s Ghana be May” before April was over. That is my one major regret.
