Jan 08 2007
In Rwanda
The Chosen
Would you believe I have been inspired by Candace Cameron? It occurred to me, in the last week or two, that my own journey to Africa has had a huge impact on my life. I had not really digested it completely into a concise story - not a story about Rwanda, but a story about how Rwanda changed me.
I will start with my own presuppositions on foreign missions. After I became a Christian, back in my callow youth, even then I was prone to deep thinking. I thought about foreign missions, and while they are a cool idea, and there are so many fantastic stories about missionaries in the past, I looked around at my town, my province, my country, and I saw the vast vast majority of this country is, for all intents and purposes, lost. I don’t think it is a judgement to say that even if the average Canadian knows who Jesus is and believes in “god” as an idea, this does not make them followers of Jesus. I know who George W. Bush is and I believe in “democracy” as an idea, but I am not a follower of the President - I am not a citizen of the USA. And I think that if you ask most Canadians if they are followers of Jesus, if they understand what you are saying, they will admit that they are not. This nation is quickly morphing into a post-Christian land, where the days of Christians having a serious say in anything are gone, and the population move counter to God’s will. This realization caused me to believe that we as Canadian Christians should be focusing on evangelism and “missions” in our own backyard first - who are we to be telling 3rd world people to follow Jesus when we don’t even tell our neighbours?
This didn’t negate for me foreign missions. They are admirable, and I will be the first to admit that some people are called to minister to other lands, other places than the place they are. That is fine, but consistency to me is important. So for me, I felt that I should at least be prepared to share my faith with my neighbour before I think about overseas.
However, God works in ways that are not man’s ways. We found ourselves in the winter of 2005, with the means to travel, with the heart to travel, but with the memory of our last vacation, which took us to an all-inclusive resort in Mexico. We had both been struck by the poverty of the average Mexicans, living all around this posh vacation stop. It seemed that despite the cost of our vacation, very little of that money trickled down to the local people. We felt like we were taking advantage of these people’s poverty for our own selfish comfort. We had heard of short term missions, and wondered if it could not be possible to instead of just luxuriating and indulging our flesh, to seek a respite together while serving God. We went to our church’s pastor of missions, to inquire if he had any ideas. Turns out he did. The church was preparing to send a mission team to Rwanda that summer, and he invited us to apply.
In applying, I was somewhat skeptical about us getting on the team. My wife’s career is highly useful in a missions context, being a trained nurse, but my skill set is… um… mostly soft skills. I know my way around computers, but I am not a “handyman” in any sense of the term. For whatever reason, we were chosen!
In the planning stages we did get to help out a lot, especially in the area of cheerleading. I think we were the most visibly excited of anyone on the team. We built a blog for the team to keep people back home informed about how the planning was going and while we were gone. Fundraising is something we had no experience doing, but I was really blessed by the results of my asking around at work if the company could do anything to help. They came through in spades!
…. TO BE CONTINUED
