Thinking About Africa

May 2007

The feeling has been strong lately, the stress and worry that doesn’t normally plague me. I don’t know what to do with strong feelings, I’m a thinker and I like order in my mind and a sound ability to articulate my position.

Africa has always been symbolically on my horizon, it feels like forever anyways. I’ve always been wanting to go and always been pushing it back, further back and pulling in practicality and leaning on money and doing everything but listening. I’ve always been skeptical of talking about God calling me somewhere. I feel called to be a certain kind of person, not to do a certain kind of thing and live in a certain kind of place. But I heard him say recently that I wasn’t listening for it. I heard a slight voice say I was leaning on my own reason to make sense of what my heart desired in a deep place that felt intimate to share with just anyone. I keep wanting my motives to be right and pure and perfectly thought out and authentic and original and anything but ordinary…sound familiar? I keep knowing that it is about my heart, but forgetting that my heart transforms, I do not transform it. I think much too highly of my mind and it’s ability to form a reason for anything that will push me towards action.

And so I have been moving heavily and clumsily through my days, reaching out to my students half heartedly and from a tired place where I lost a tight grasp on my meaning. The idea of going to Africa has been getting more and more blurry because I haven’t been listening, I’ve been only fretting and trying to make sense and make motive. The Spirit of Jesus Christ lives in me to make me move and know why I did. I don’t have to try and produce pure motives, I need to listen for them.

I cannot wait lazily for God to affect change in my life and in so doing become a consumer even in rating which forms of religious expression fit my liking. There is a restoring and renewing wave moving that I want to be part of as a minister of the Gospel, not because I spent ample time waiting for my motives to be pure enough, but because I trusted that it truly wasn’t about me and it is okay to go out and expect to be transformed in my going.