Questions...

(Pictures are taking forever here...  so I guess they'll just have to wait till I get home...)

Today was quite a day… I’ve never had a trip start quite like this one! We literally haven’t stopped running since we got here… Today was Litsemba, which means ‘hope’ in Siswati. We had 3000+ children arrive on buses, as well as from the community around Project Canaan, and we spent about 4 hours worshiping with them and just loving on them!


The children here are something else… In the USA, you would pretty much expect chaos to reign with that many children in one location, but not here. The children are so orderly, well behaved and respectful, even when they’re in line to receive a meal and a gift. I was so impressed!

I was on the photography team for the event… I know, don’t throw me in that briar patch! It was a blast!!!

But the thing I want to write about is my conversations with a couple of the people from the church we worked with last year, and will be serving at during the week…

The first was the Pastor… He was so surprised that I came back and he said, “Ever since I heard you were coming back, I’ve been thinking, ‘What did God put in your heart to make you want to come back to our community?’” The only thing I knew to answer was, “HIS love!” How else do you explain the desire to go around the world, to a culture that is vastly different than your own and far less comfortable… I can tell you, it’s nothing good in me… So it must be God’s love!

My next conversation was with M… I met her last year and just loved her, she’s so beautiful! She just has this light and peace that shines out through her eyes… I got to just sit with her in good ol’ African dirt today and I loved just being with her… For the first time she opened up to me and we started to get to know each other on a deeper level, not just two strangers thrown together… I’m not going to share the heart of our conversation out of respect for her privacy, but she asked me a question that shocked me...

She asked, “Did you have a choice to go to another church this year?” ‘Yes, M… I did…’ She thought for a minute and then she said, “So why did you come back to our church?” In some ways, I guess her question wasn’t that much different than Pastor M’s…

But why is it so hard for them to understand that they’re loved? Is it because they’ve never experienced the love of God, through the body of Christ, caring for those in need before? I would guess that’s it in part… Last year, Pastor told me that we were the first group to ever come and help their community… But it also made me think how I’m not that much different than them… Sometimes I have the hardest time just receiving God’s love…

As I kept talking to M… it’s like she kept looking for some quality that made them ‘lovable…’ But isn’t that what we all do… we measure our ‘lovability’ by what think is valuable, or worthwhile, in us… We add the possibility of love for what we think is good, but take away what’s possible in love for what we see as the bad…

But that’s just not who God is… As I sat and talked to M, I reminded her (and myself) of what God told Israel in Deuteronomy 7… That He didn’t choose them because they were more than any other people, but simply because He loved them and was keeping His promise to their forefathers…

Here’s the thing, if God needed a reason to love us… well… that would be that… He is a great, holy and mighty God… We have nothing to offer Him… Our sin is offensive to Him… But while were still His enemy, God just made a choice to love us… No reason, no justification, nothing to earn… He just loves us… And I think that’s how God wants us to learn to love also… I have a long way to go… More often than not, I get it wrong… But I can’t begin to describe what joy it is to love someone, just because God put it in your heart to love them…