This is my Jonah.
I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I often feel out of place when I look around and find myself in my 28th year of life. On either side of the “late-20’s” spectrum, I seem to be an outlier. I don’t own cute high heels or expensive jeans, I haven’t been on a date in a couple of years, and I’m rarely out of the house past dark. I also don’t have a husband, kids, car payments, or silverware.
I spent last month living in Gulu, a village town in the Northern part of Uganda, where about a third of our Hope Alive! children live. Despite the fact that I lived out of a hotel room for a month I grew to really love the lifestyle of a simpler rural life outside the sprawling modern African city of Kampala.
It felt easy, natural, to establish routines even in a month’s time. The town is small enough to walk most anywhere so most days included walking about 3 miles on dirt or pot-holed roads under one of the biggest, bluest, and most beautiful skies I’ve seen. I became a “regular” of the chapatti man on a certain road-side corner stall (a chapatti is a delicious Uganda version of a tortilla), and the skirt man named Walter who had neatly organized walls of skirts in his market stall. It was easy to learn the maze of the dirt paths of the market, which was small in comparison to any in Kampala. When I wanted pineapple or avocado, I always bought from Florence, who smiled sweetly and never tried to over-charge me. I went further into the market to buy my tomatoes and cucumbers from either Sunday or Patrick, brothers who usually ran a family-owned stall. Nearly everyday I had to stop by a small supermarket and buy a juice box from Salim, the Indian man who owned the store. Wednesdays were bible study times at the Sports Outreach farm father out in the village followed by fun and silly times of soccer drills with the women there. Sunday morning hours were filled with church with people from the village who may not have shared the same language with me, but definitely shared the same love of the same God. We visited children who live miles out in the bush, in huts surrounded by open space and tall dry grasses, and experienced the generosity of families expressed through meals cooked for us (sometimes with some “exotic” dishes...yes, I did eat ants and the equivalent of what could be called “ant-loaf”) and gifts that cost them more than we would know (our live chicken, Sal, stayed in Gulu and may or may not still be living..).
Small details of a life that is a little simpler, less full of being busy, and more open to stopping and chatting with a familiar face on the street.
One of the last evenings I was in Gulu, I stopped briefly at stall run by (my now friend) Patrick. When I asked him how he was, he replied with the common Ugandan answer of “Fair, fair” (meaning “I’m fine, but kind of not fine.”). Unexpectedly he asked me, “but why would you come here to Uganda from your country?” (many Ugandans envision America something akin to how a 5-year old dreams of Disneyland – a land of Happily Ever After).
Seemed like one of those openings you just can’t ignore, so I told him how God was the one who had called me to come to Uganda. It was as if the word “God” opened some place deep inside him, a place he had been waiting to unlock. He asked me what I believed about God, heaven, forgiveness…As I posed the same question back to him I heard that he already believed the gospel essentials, only, as he put it, “I think I’ve done too many bad things to be forgiven.” Then, a sweet conversation in which I told him what I believe about God and why, and he kept nodding in agreement. I am not a street evangelist by any stretch of the imagination, but there seemed like there only one question left to ask – “Do you want to pray right now, Patrick?”
Too often, I think, belief in God and salvation gets muddled and smudged in semantics, rhetoric, and lofty theological terms; in sects, traditions, and rote Musts and Shoulds. In the end, is there anything as beautiful in its simplicity than the Gospel message?
Patrick told me he didn’t know how to pray. I told him it’s just talking to God, saying what you feel. So his prayer was a few short sentences, confessing his own sin and declaring his belief in the death of Jesus, asking for God’s forgiveness. There were no words about dispensationalism, Calvinism, or his particular beliefs about the trinity. Just Patrick, talking to God, asking for forgiveness in front of his vegetable stand.
Simple words that cut out the busyness of lives that crowd out the one relationship that matters eternally.
After he prayed, Patrick marked the day in his cell phone calendar as “my new birth day, the day I got saved.”
I don’t tell you this story so that you will be convinced of what a cool person or life I have. Remember? I'm the one that often wears frumpy skirts and is a couple years behind in American pop culture. In fact, I have a tendency to not talk about things that will put me at the center of attention. But this is my Jonah. What? You know, Jonah…who got swallowed whole by the big fish and vomited out later on?
God gave Jonah a story, a message to tell about His character and His glory. Jonah tried to ignore God’s call for him to shout the message out loud and…well, he had a hard time.
So this is my Jonah. My life does not always make sense in a typical way but in moments of clarity I know that for this time, being where I am is no mistake and the things I see and experience are not coincidences. I believe that God not only has a message He wants me to tell the people I meet in Uganda, but also to share it back with so many of you who keep up with my life. It’s a message about GOD – His faithful character and endless forgiveness, His fathering towards each and every one of us.
We recently enrolled 20 new kids in our Hope Alive! site in Kampala and they came to their first Saturday club last week. The new kids were asked to stand in front and say their names and grades in school. I was touched by the words our site manager told the children, “these new ones are visitors, but after they say their names and we clap for them, they become one of us, they join our family.” Just like that, family. Something like saying a simple prayer of forgiveness and being celebrated into God’s family.
{{All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.}} 2 Corinthians 5:18-21