The Journey...

...Through My Eyes

*A month-long overland journey up the coast of Southern Africa*

July 2, 2009

"One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things."

Our first stop of the journey is at the small coastal community of Victoria Bay. We are staying in safari tents in the middle of a mountainside, surrounded by trees, solitude, and monkeys. 

I am blessed, in every moment, simply by the vibrancy of being alive. There is magic in every breath of wind, every rustling branch, every bird's whisper, every stroke of the Painter's brush across the sky. 

Beauty.

Magic.

Life, in its rawest form.

That people go through their lives without fully awakening their senses to experience and engage and live is one of the greatest tragedies in the world. 

Peace. I am enveloped in it, as the sun casts its final glow across the day. Life, for this brief moment, is perfect. 

July 9, 2009

I was up before the sun to witness its awakening... it was surreal, casting brilliant hues of light across the sky, their reflections turning the sea into a glistening mirror of color. It was entrancing... 

one of those moments when life stops and you forget to breathe. 

I went on a safari today. It was a journey that cannot be adequately described with words.

July 10, 2009

We crossed over the Kei today, entering the Transkei area where we will spend the rest of the month. We crossed the bridge on foot, praying as we entered the territory. 

The change is drastic...dry, arid landscape; mud huts; no white people anywhere; poverty; women in long skirts or colorful dresses carrying water on their heads; animals roaming free; barefooted children running alongside the road, waving as we pass...

...it is beautiful. 

"A traveler without observation is a bird without wings."

-Moslih Eddin Saadi

July 15, 2009

I think you cannot truly know that a world like this exists until you actually see it. 

There are so many thoughts to think; sometimes my head is not big enough for them all.

July 16, 2009

The Peach Hut

I sit on the doorstep of a mud hut in Lubanzi watching the sunlight play tricks across the valley. It is a peach-colored hut. It smells of paint and must and cow dung. It is my home for the next eleven days. 

The Peach Hut sits atop a mountain, overlooking the sea on one side and a valley on the other, with cows and donkeys and sheep wandering freely, littering the ground with future flooring material. 

Lubanzi is a world removed from the world I left... It is a world where time is marked by the rising of the sun and the returning home of the sheep; a world where candles are a necessity rather than a festivity; a world where a "shower" consists of a small basin of water carried up from the river; a world where light switches and faucets and stoves and televisions do not exist. 

We hiked 21K's along the coast to get here; up mountains, down mountains, across long stretches of deserted sandy beaches, over rocks jutting up from the sea, alongside pods of dolphins...

It is an hour and a half walk to the village of Zithulele... a walk I will become very familiar with over the next week as I work in the village's HIV/AIDS clinic and the pediatric ward at the Zithulele Hospital. 

July 19, 2009

Today my friend and I led Sunday School for a group of 70 Zithulele children. They had no chairs to set on the dung floor, no brightly-lit classroom, no craft materials, no books, and no marker board, but they were the most enthusiastic sunday school group I have ever seen. 

July 23, 2009

Winter has descended with fury... the wind howled around the peach hut all night; I feared it would be picked up and hurled into the ocean. Such a terrible clamor... our hut is unusual in that it has a tin rather 

than a thatched roof, and it makes a dreadfully frightful racket in the wind. We made a painstakingly long drive to the clinic this morning, under the cover of a menacingly dark sky... so cold.

July 24, 2009

There is one little girl that has completely captured my heart... she is in the malnutrition room, but also has TB. She is nine, but looks to be about four, and is the most frail child I have ever seen... I don't know how she could weigh more than 20 pounds. Every bone sticks out; her thighs are as tiny as my wrists; her wrists are no more than an inch wide... every part of her body looks elongated, because it is so narrow. She has long lashes and the most hauntingly beautiful eyes in the world,  huge in her tiny face. She is shy, but will occasionally peer up at me with a little smile...

There is no spark in her, but she is so incredibly beautiful...

July 25, 2009

We cooked dinner for our hosts this evening... they have been very generous throughout our time here, feeding us four dinners of milli-pop and chicken. We invited them all into the hut after dinner to watch Spiderman on a laptop run off of the truck battery. They were mesmerized, despite not being able to understand a single word. It was a unique experience, all of us crowded into a mud hut in the middle of the Transkei, 20 English speakers, 15 Xhosa speakers, lots of body odor... 

I am realizing how privileged my life has been, simply for having experienced flipping on a light switch... little things you never even think about until you live for two weeks without them... but I could not say "my life"--or the western world--is "better"... and I have developed a deep respect for these people and their way of life. A person's level of happiness is not dependent on whether they live in a two-story house in Suburbia or a mud hut in the Transkei, which is made obvious by the number of both happy and terribly unhappy people living in both worlds. 

July 26, 2009

With every step we take, we are writing our past...

We crossed back over the Kei today, in the same way that we entered, walking by foot across the bridge. It was a unique collision of two times, past and present, every step I took in the present mirroring the steps I took 16 days ago, except that the unknown that I was walking toward then is now in the past; fixed, unmovable, imprinted on the pages of my memory, but never to live again. Time is such a curious thing... so fleeting, and the only dimension we can live in is 

the briefest thing in the world...the past and the future are huge expanses of time (or can seem so), but the present--what we live in--is ever escaping us to take its place in the past. We cannot slow, or stop it, but I think that for the most part we are unaware of it... 

Beginnings...

Over the past ten days, Team South Africa has been slowly winding our way up the Eastern Coast in an oversized yellow "truck", on the first part of our month-long overland adventure with Cross Country Missions. 

We've made stops in Victoria Bay, Jeffrey's Bay and Cintsa, and are currently in the Transkei region in a small coastal town called Port St. Johns. 

The primary language spoken in the areas we will be visiting during the rest of the month is Xhosa, a language filled with pops and clicks that make for interesting truck rides as we all practice our clicking skills. 

Our ministry has taken a variety of forms--weeding gardens, ministering to street kids, making connections with people through our cameras, praying Scripture out over a region from a mountain top, street evangelism, and sharing God's love to kids by joining them in their national sport, soccer. 

We have had the opportunity to experience a wide variety of South African-style worship, from the very colorful and eclectic Jeffreys Bay YWAM base worship to the liturgical formality of an Anglican service (conducted entirely in Xhosa). 

It has been a delight to be able to see and experience more of the contrasts that exist in South Africa, and we have been filled with excitement and hope as we imagine what God envisions for this land and these beautiful people. 

After 40 of the longest travel hours of my life... I am in Africa!

I will not even attempt to describe with words the beauty of Cape Town, because I would fail miserably. 

It is a city of contrasts; it seems that when God painted Cape Town on the canvas of the world, He chose from some of His best creations and put them all together in this one place... I have felt as if I were on a mountain top in the Swiss Alps, on an endless stretch of white sand beach in the Caribbean, in the heart of third-world Africa, and even in Paris' Montmartre... all on the same day. 

Our team will be leaving tomorrow on an "overland" journey up the coast. I would appreciate your prayers, specifically along the following points:

-It is quite a bit colder than we anticipated; there is no heating anywhere, and many of us "freeze" our way through the nights. Coming from Hawaii's hot temperatures, this is quite a shock...please pray we stay healthy!

-Team unity... we will be spending the next 30 days together living out of a cramped bus (with no access to showers for much of the time :-) )

-Keeping our focus on God regardless of our circumstances is so key in effecting our ability to share God's love. Please pray that the next 30 days are a time of drawing closer to the Lord and learning to walk in His presence as a lifestyle, unhindered by distractions. 

Life.

I want the fabric of my life to be woven by the skilled hands of the one who created me. 

Life is a patchwork of twists and turns, unexpected endings and beginnings, choices and decisions... As I look back over the past year of my life, and in particular the last few months, I am amazed by the Lord's faithfulness to me. I am grateful that I am here, that I am living this reality rather than any other.

Time is a strange thing, one of the most binding aspects of our physical reality.Three months ago, my orderly seam of life was disrupted and I faced a great unknown (which has now become some of the best three months of my life). Three months from now lies another great unknown. I feel like the author of my life is writing with an invisible pen; as I walk, the path appears. But right now, I am directly in the middle. The end of one season, the beginning of the next. The past three months have been extraordinary. Jesus said that He came to give "life, and life abundantly." If I had to sum up what took place in my life since I arrived here, that would be it. Six days from now I will board a plane for Africa to share that life with the masses of humanity, one person at a time. 

As I contemplate the next step of this journey, the greatest prayer on my heart is that I would continue to daily "die" to myself, that He would be more in me and I would be less. I have nothing to offer on my own. Throughout the past couple weeks, this realization has been rather discouraging to me at times, and has even made me wonder what I am doing here.  But it is not a reason for discouragement; it is simply a truth. It is why I am called (as is every believer) to surrender my life so that through Christ I can truly live, and enable people to see, hear, and touch Jesus reflected through me. 

The calling of Jesus is really a rather simple one. To serve. To love. To have compassion. We are not asked to do anything He did not do; but we are asked to do what He did do.... to relinquish our rights and desires, and to live and love in a way that seems like complete madness to the world. It is my earnest desire to remain free from the shackles of passivity that paralyze me from being the hands and feet of Jesus to the world around me, and I would appreciate  your prayers as I continue to walk this out.

Grace.

I have never sat still for a few hours and simply thought about grace. But yesterday, I did.  During those few hours I laughed, I cried, I wondered, I imagined, and I felt rather like a child who one day realizes that he has failed to completely unwrap a gift given him long ago, tearing off only enough of the paper to see what is inside, but stopping before reaching the treasure. 

We have been saved by grace alone. 

All that is asked of us is to lay down our lives at the feet of the King. 

Grace.

A free gift that is so often not freely accepted. Why? It is a gift of forgiveness, of life for eternity in place of death and punishment. Why do we struggle to add something more to it, or say that it is not enough? Why do we continue to walk with a head hung in shame when God has cast our sins as far as the east is from the west and made us into a new, blameless creation?

Grace. It is the greatest gift we have been given, and so many of us barely unwrap it. 

Grace. It is the gift of life as it was meant to be, lived in intimate relationship with our Maker. Pure, raw, radical, supernatural, life-changing grace that was won by a journey that led from the light of heaven to a bloodbath of brutality to the depths of hell and back again. 

Grace. It is a gift that was won by the ultimate sacrifice, but a gift that is freely given if we will only believe, unwrap, and step into the new life it makes possible. 

To cling to feelings of failure or inadequacy or shame is to insult the sacrifice made at the cross. It is a scandalous gift that changed the course of history. It is our only hope of salvation, but it is more than that. It is the key that unlocks the door to a life of relationship and freedom and power and raw, radical love. It swings open the door between us and our Creator and bridges the chasm between. It gives us a glimpse of His power and love and nature that is more than enough to cause us to run hard after Him for all of eternity. 

A single glimpse, and life is changed forever. 

A single glimpse, and we are wasted for anything but loving Him with all our lives.

A single glimpse, and laying down our lives becomes a joy.

To try to add to grace takes away its power to truly and radically transform our lives, because the essence of grace is its complete sufficiency. It is enough. It has no need for further striving or works on our part. It requires us to humble ourselves and accept it freely, admitting that we are incapable of attaining salvation by any amount of merit or good works, humbling ourselves at the foot of the cross and looking with all of our strength to Jesus... for only when we take our eyes fully off of ourselves will we be able to put them fully on God and understand the depth of the wonder and possibilities given us through grace. 

THE BUG.

This blog post is not about God or photography, nor is it related to anything that I usually write about. 

It is about a very big bug. 

Last night I was sitting on my bed after a very long photography class, working on my laptop, when I felt the sheet on my bed moving. I looked over, and a cockroach of extraordinary size scurried past. 

I am accustomed to cockroaches of extraordinary size jumping out from unexpected places when I am sorting garbage for campus "recycling". It is a garbage dump; they belong there. But in my bed? No.  

Normally my bed is bug free, although since arriving in Hawaii I've shared my bed with spiders, fleas, mosquitos, and a variety of OUBs (Other Unidentifiable Bugs). It's not that big of a problem, I can share my space. 

BUT. 

Cockroaches are on an entirely different level. They come in a variety of sizes, but this one was four inches in length, from antenna to end. You would probably be unable to imagine in  your mind the sort of creature I am trying to describe, so here's a picture of a similar cockroach.

They do not make good bedmates.

All in all it's not really a big deal. I will be a missionary whether or not there are cockroaches in my bed. 

But, I'd prefer to be a missionary without cockroaches in my bed. So as you get into your own bed tonight, I'd really appreciate it if you'd take a minute to pray that God would keep the cockroaches out of mine.

Reason for Existence.

Jesus continues to shatter my passive existence on a daily basis. 

The other day I was thinking about how nothing that I am feeling or going through in my day-to-day life changes the reality of who God is for me or His lovingkindness to me or my relationship with Him. 

He is constant. 

Unchanging. 

Always faithful. 

He says, "I will never leave you or forsake you." If I feel disconnected or distanced from Him, it is because I have distanced myself from Him by focusing on what's going on around me. As a result, I lose sight of reality--my reality with my Maker. He has chosen me, He chooses me every moment of every day. He loves me, and longs for me. That is reality. Reality is that He is always with me, even when I mess up or get distracted by what is going on in my life. He never leaves. I can always rest in His presence, even if I feel overwhelmed with life or like I can't stop messing up. Those are the times I need to cling to Him the most, rather than pull back and feel like I need to straighten things out on my own before I can approach Him... I need to focus on the reality of me and God in constant relationship. Everything else is just a shadow; an apparition that fades in the reality of the presence of God and His love for me. He is not looking for people who have it all together, He is looking for people who will keep choosing Him. 

I cannot do it on my own. 

I need Him. 

But, that's how He designed it to be. 

He created me to be in relationship with Him every day of my life. He wants to complete me. He wants to be strong where I am weak. He wants to fulfill me. He wants to be the one that I cling to... all the time, not just when things are good. He wants me to cling to Him in my sin, in my hardships, in my struggles. He wants us to be one, inseparable. He wants me to lose myself in Him.