What's Your Day Look Like?

I don’t know what an average day looks like for you. Mine is doing life with people who are often struggling with something. They want more out of life and more out of God but that something is crushing them. Some days, the breakthroughs are breathtaking! Most days….the brick walls are thick and high. I take comfort in knowing that God loves them with far more intensity than I could ever muster. I just received an email from a friend serving in central Africa. Here’s a look at his average day.

Jesus wept. I think He's getting tired of weeping. I am. Don't you think He must be planning to come again soon? I can't wait, but wait we must, and work and pray for the night is coming. Glory! Oh, that will be glory for you and me, but terror and judgement for so many who have been blinded and cannot, will not, see. My heart grieves for the lost around me.

I interact daily with multiple patients and family members who, even at high noon on a cloudless day in our small clearing in the heart of the Congolese Rain Forest, are totally in the dark. They live in the dark, the heart of Satan's Darkness. In deception. In slavery to sin. They don't even know or understand that they can be free in Christ, even though we tell them until our voice is hoarse and we sound like a broken record. Death has such a hold on people here. Even those who don't need to die, who have no reason to die, sometimes who are not even very sick, sense the inevitable and seem to yearn for it! An incredible tendency to run, walk, limp, crawl, or be carried into the grave!

Death is celebrated so much more than life. Baby's come. Baby's go. But whenever a "real" person (over age 8) dies, the whole family, village, tribe, shows up for the 3-day, all-night drunken dance-seance-trance that follows.
Patients that slowly decline in the hospital for weeks who have no one to feed or care for them, besides our busy staff, suddenly have hordes of people come like flies on yesterday's roadkill, as soon as they begin to breathe their last. And too often, just when the patient is getting better, or the appropriate treatment has finally been initiated, they demand the release of their relative, so they can bring them to the fetisher and pay big money for "Kisi ya BaNkoko." To consult the ancestors as to the "real" cause of the tumor, or infection, or anything more than a cold!

Enough! It is finished! But there is so much more work to be done! "In repentance and rest is your salvation. In quietness and trust is your strength." Isaiah 30:15. God help us.

Well maybe this is more than you asked for...but just want you to know that the yearning is strong here among His faithful. Even so, come LORD Jesus, take us Home!