Update 4-27

I am cheating today. I usually write out my blog entries beforehand on paper in order to make them worthwhile to read - today I'm simply going to include parts of an email I recently sent to my friend.

One thing that has changed in me that has turned my world inside out is daily meditation. I did this to a very small extent in TN but now those times listening in complete silence and stillness have grown to overwhelming proportions. Its much like physical exercise and everyday it is hard but I am able to do it for longer and with more concentration. It's an absolute necessity and I do it every morning from anywhere like 15min to maybe even and hour or more. Complete silence, complete stillness! It is nearly inconceivable in the States. The hardest part I feel is not making it a formula for "summoning" God on up or something, but instead bringing myself to absolute desperation for the Lord and then crying out for him. I want to tell you all of this because I want to encourage you to try it. Praying and speaking in my mind is also something that is not enough, my breakthroughs come from when I am actually listening with my whole spirit. Listening, not speaking! I can hardly find how it happens in my world of tasks and checklists. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. It has become something that has attached to my life and expanded.

I was at an island for a midterm retreat and sat in silence on these rocks where the sea was washing up, and I just sat and heard God's voice teaching me about everything, the connectedness of life and re-centering my thoughts, my desires, my tendencies and addictions. What is peace? Now that I have felt it, steady, constant, unmistakable for anything else, I now find how useless and superficial my earlier ideas about it were. Most of all God has taught me what love means and how to love. What an overloaded word it can be when it is one of the purest and most difficult tasks we can take on. We all talk of it, but how little do we know of it except to feel it on us? To love more fully and more purely, there is no end to how much we can love.

The Life God Wants

Cooking, teaching, singing, playing an instrument, reading a good book, listening to some lovely music - God is opening up to me the truly great things over the merely narcissistic ones. Absense of TVs, computers, and in general luxuries are opening up for me the true luxuries. God's luxuries: working hard and with integrity and love, enjoying beauty, maintaining silence and contemplation, enjoying food in the company of others, edifying talk, patient teaching - these good things arent rubbing off on me with no long-term effect. A life more than appointments and schedules, a life more than tasks and effeciency. A glimpse of the kingdom of God.

God, today help me to feel your presence in the midst of little external peace, help me to live freely in a world of many shackles and addictions, to work diligently in a place and time where work is hard and toilsome, to love others even as they fail to love us. Amen.

What can I say to you reading my blog? Pray for me.

Communion Meditation at Monday Retreat 4-7

So often within Word Made Flesh we hear that what is so important is being, even more than doing. Then the question becomes “What are we supposed to be, and how are we supposed to become it?” Here we find Christ’s words “Take of my body, become with it, drink of my blood, take it into yourself.” And these words come to us in a space. Not just any space, but in the space of a room, a room filled with the intimacy Christ shares with his disciples, in front of him and to his sides, leaning and laughing with him, sharing their lives with him and soon his death as well as resurrection.

As we sit here, having shared the day together, we find ourselves eating together, laughing together, sharing our sorrows and troubles. And as Christ says, “Do this in remembrance of me,” we slowly find that as we look to the left and right of us we not only find sons and daughters of God, but God himself. God himself laughs with us and suffers with us, God himself serves us and is served by us. We are in the presence of God himself. Here is where our life begins and where it ends.

And so we find that Communion is not something that we simply do, but the very reason we are. With it, all our hopes are confirmed and all our fears are relieved. Without it we have no room left to stand and each of us is a divided self, ready to fall.

As we serve one another the cup let us in recognition of what we do: being served and in turn serving others. Be served knowing that God himself serves you, serve knowing you serve God himself. We are the body of Christ, and as we take of the bread and wine we will be renewed, God coming through to us through one another.

Pictures 4-9

On the street walking home
(right)








GIANT tree on our way walking to a meeting,
th two tiny figures below it are my teammates giving the tree some perspective.
(below)
flowers at a retreat center
(below)



















Sierra Leonean Servant Team members
Noah and Florence

My Day

My average day. Wake up at about 6:30 to the sound of some native African birds, don’t know what their names are. They start at precisely 6:30 sharp; you could tell time by them! I am met by the noises of the morning neighborhood activities such as (most often heard) babies wakening and putting out an outright fit, hah. People in the tailor hut about 10 feet away from my window start these days with radios and washing and conversing about the day to come, all in thick Krio. I finally get up at about 7 and begin the day, most commonly sitting in meditation for the day’s events and tasks. I might write in my journal and I always read some of Thomas A Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. Then I suit op my backpack with the tutoring materials and any other supplies I might need. Every third day I am responsible for spending for food and transportation for my two housemates upstairs. Mondays I go to morning prayer in town, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays I go to Krio right after devotions. At about 10:30 the team heads out for town to go to out corresponding places for tutoring appointments at 11. At about 12:30 everyone has lunch and then I go to the City of Rest. My time there is highly variable depending on what has gone on before – maybe a few guitar lessons on a worn out old bunk bed or chess or draft on a bench. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we host an art class from 3:30-4:30 and that wraps up the day. Much of my time at the City of Rest is spent with a select few of the people who have been recommended to me by Helain – The Dutch woman in charge – identifying those who have very few friends and loving relationships . I get on a poda-poda (public transport) to get home in time for dinner either to make it or to buy it off the streets (usually an egg and cheese or banana and peanut-butter sandwich). Every dinner is different and demanding of itself, either cooking or simply deciding what to eat. We usually eat (me and my two teammates living together) at about 7-8, and at this time the sun has set so that we are eating by candlelight or completely in the dark. We make enough that we’re all usually stuffed with rice and some sort of sauce, and sometimes we top it off with a delicious mango. And then we’re exhausted so it’s time for sleep (where I hope there will be electricity for a fan to be on so that I don’t sleep coated in sweat, ugh). Then: a new day begins! Wow, what a life!

Sojourner – Pilgrim – Traveler

Disillusionment can be such a gift – especially when it doesn’t lead you to cynicism, such as it often does. Humility, and so many other truths, often demands disillusionment. What else can dissipate those oh so well intended maxims of our early childhoods – the ones that so often build an ego that is only capable of crashing down later. How wonderful a disillusion when one realizes that no one culture can contain the gospel, truly understanding that the kingdom of God is so beyond what good infrastructure and available electricity may be in place. But the price of realizing the Kingdom is invisible and from God alone, bearing no flag and boasting no borders, is that I find myself craving for the presence of a Lord I so often cannot see and the presence of peace that evades so easily. One thing that amazes me is the omnipresence of God. I’m amazed because finding him can be so completely challenging. Even finding him in the stillness and carefully crafted silence can so often bring a sense of grasping for what can’t be grasped, squinting my eyes and ears for something without form and without sound.

The depths of human heart – the innermost courts of the Kingdom of God – so intimate and slippery a thing. The psalms speak over and over again about loving and pursuing God with your whole hearts, how ridiculous that’s seems in light of the how fractured my heart is and how little I know of it. And always the same issues exist for me: I’m in Africa talking about what is so much the same, so much the same questions still haunt me.

Would the comfort of an air-conditioned room and the 24/7 accessibility of movies and a surround sound stereo system erase my struggle with my spirit and the God it seeks after, sometimes so desperately, and sometimes so disparagingly? Jesus was sent from a place and has returned there, seated there even now. And so I have been sent, knowing so well and being so incessantly reminded of the pleasures and comforts I miss from the place I have been sent. The truth is that many times I can’t think of anything better than a cup of ice cream or an American pizza! But simply eating some ice cream or diving into a few hot slices of bread, cheese and pepperoni would not give me the home I desire. Family and friends are as close as home gets anymore, simply because I know even they cannot satisfy my heart’s deep homesickness. But I take heart knowing that home is in the God I have craved for even before I knew that I craved him. In this time in Africa I truly feel the weight of a pilgrim’s burden, the immutable urge to keeping taking steps to my destination: at the feet of my great Lord and King, Jesus Christ.

Pictures from Sierra Leone 4-6

Coming Up the Steps to My house (I live on the bottom floor)

Looking out the window of the living room

Coming back home from a retreat in a cab

Pigs in the muck and rubbish

Some Friends at the City of Rest

Playing Chess with My Friend Alpha at the City of Rest