AFRICAN SUMMER - ON FAITH - PART 1

What words are adequate to portray my summer’s journey? What can truly recapture those experiences? Honestly, nothing. You see, a picture is quite beautiful, but only if you take it in the right light and at just the right moment but done properly you can imprison an image that aids in preserving a moment for a lifetime and beyond. Indeed you can capture much in a picture but a picture you see only arouses one of the senses. You see it, but you don’t touch, smell, or taste. To recapture the journey completely would be to relive every step, every conversation, it would be to touch every head, hold every hand, and smell every smell, both pleasant and unpleasant, it would be to go back and relive every day’s adventure that forged together the whole. That one great adventure that was filled with moments of suspense, fear, victories, and yes defeats. Well if memories are now all I have and words the only way to bring you into this story then my memories are my instruments and my words my muse. I will call it, an African summer.

CHAPTER ONE
On Faith

Departing LA I left behind any and all expectations of what my 2 months in Rwanda would be. I mean I had an idea, as it was not my first time traveling overseas on this type of adventure. But in light of one of things learned thus far, it is good to walk into new experiences with little or no expectations at all. Of course I expected at least a relatively safe journey over, as well as bad plane food, and very little sleep but that’s a given for any seasoned traveler not flying in first class. I mean you always wonder or even dream but to manifest those dreams into expectations is not always the best, it leads to great disappointment. Things seem to go better when you don’t have any expectations. So that said, I walked off the plane having no clue what to expect but walking with the confident assurance that God had orchestrated all my steps thus far and would continue to do so because He loves me and promised me He would if I asked Him to do so and I did, so maybe that is one confident expectation I did walk with.

Two weeks in the no expectation thing seemed to work out and that promise of God establishing steps seemed to fall in line with my reality as well. Yet in those first two weeks I experienced my first crisis of belief followed by several more. A crisis of belief can come at any moment in life. There kind of like walking across a less than busy street then suddenly being struck by a car without you ever seeing it coming. With a crisis of belief comes in a sudden moment at a time when you least expect it, but you defiantly know when it comes because your shaken to the core by it. My crisis of belief came when I had $3,000 stolen from me. No need to go into details but I was robbed and I felt violated. I was angry and didn’t really understand. I stayed relatively cool and was able to maintain a level head but man I was then at that moment forced to say ok God if you don’t provide then what am I going to do? I felt that God assured me in that moment that He would return what was stolen from me. But days passed and even weeks and still that money was not returned. I wandered if I had truly heard God correctly when He had assured me or was I only comforting myself with my own voice in my head. Then came that crisis of belief and it came in the form of the concept of belief and faith. If Jesus spoke the words ask and it will be given. Then why when I asked was it not given in the form I expected it to be given? Why when I asked in His name was the money not returned to me. What does this whole thing ask and it will be given thing mean. Maybe I was not exercising the right amount of faith. Well that must be it. So I mustered up all the strength in me to squeeze out that little bit of extra faith required to receive my prize. Still no money. How does this work? What does it mean to have faith in the first place? What do you mean when you say if you have faith as small as a mustard seed you can move mountains? I mean come on, a mountain! And the faith I was trusting with seemed to be at least the size of an apple seed and an apple seed is heck of a lot bigger than a mustard seed. Wait I still must be doing it wrong. I seemed to make it quite complicated. I got angry and confused with myself and with God. How God can I take you at face value when you are telling me here have faith, keep your eyes on me and I am, yet you don’t come through. So I struggled through this whole mess.

Then I started to ask myself a whole other set of questions. Do I truly believe this is possible for God to restore what was stolen? I mean honestly. It would seem quite impossible to me in light of the situation that God would allow that money to magically reappear. I always like those stories of people who are truly in need of money, you know the ones in those spiritual books and the such, well the stories follow a similar pattern in that people start praying for it and then all the sudden it shows up in their mailbox the next morning mysteriously. Man I love those. But you know that stuff has never really happened to me. Why then should I believe that it would happen to me? But wait if God does impossible things really, like walking on water, or parting the red sea, or restoring site to the blind or raising people from the dead then why should I think that God could not do a miracle for me. I sometimes feel like my faith is similar to winning the lottery. I mean other people win and I see physical proof that they have won it but of course it never happens to me. I mean not that I buy the lottery tickets but you know it mean. Its like sometimes I ask God in blind faith with the full realization that God can accomplish what I am praying for yet for some reason in the back of my head I cannot rap my head around whether He really will come through, at least not the way I think He should and that kind of kills it for me.

I was reading through a chapter in Psalms through this whole process. Here is were I feel things began to make sense to me and when I realized maybe its not God’s fault but maybe it is mine. There is that passage that talks about, dwelling in the presence of God.

“I have asked one thing from the Lord; it is what I desire: to DWELL in the house of the Lord all the days of my life gazing on the beauty of the Lord and SEEKING Him in His temple.”

I mean I have probably read this passage a hundred times, well maybe not a hundred but at least 26 times. And honestly this is only one part of a passage that in its whole context deals with David worshiping God because He is His stronghold. But then one word in that whole series of words jumped out to me, DWELL. What does it mean to dwell? It is kind of a cool word once you start looking into it. What comes to mind when you think of the word dwell? David voices his heart to God…this is what I seek that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.