I recently read C.S. Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and found that he and I have some personality traits in common. I do not boast in this, for they are bad personality traits; “bad” because God found cause to weed them out of both of us. We hate (or once hated) most to be “interfered with”; our idea of the perfect lifestyle includes much solitude, the company of books and writing, and only as much interaction with people as we intentionally sought. But you know God… He shook C.S. Lewis out of it simply by being God – so undeniable, so glorious, that His very nature demands we abandon such self-absorption. And He shook me (or is shaking me) out of it using His image-bearers, the Body of Christ.

 

Gone is my tendency to call men too arrogant, boisterous, stupid, to be worth my time… and if you met the young men in my youth group at church, saw their fire for God, heard their hilarious and fascinating conversation, and joined in their love of honest, clean fun, it would cure you too. Gone is my hatred of large groups of people, and I no longer walk with a book in hand, ready to retreat when people get too noisy, emotional, boring, intrusive… and if you sat at dinner at Suzy’s table, laughing until your sides hurt, somehow having everyone get to say everything they felt like saying without talking over each other, finishing your meal and staying in the dining room for hours after, just to talk or play cards, you would love company too. Gone is my dread of meeting and greeting new people… and if you lived here, you too would grow to love the ritual of greeting your neighbours with every question you can think of: “Are you well? What’s up? What are you saying? Are you well in body? Is your wife good? Are you children well? Are your chickens well?” All these greetings are in Dinka, of course, but I’ll only translate the first and the last: Yin apuol? Ajith apuol?

 

I tell you, God is messing with my head. The old me left to go to college and didn’t miss her beloved family at all – not till it started snowing, anyway. Now, I’m even missing the folks who come here on short-term missions trips – people I only knew for a week, for crying out loud! Three years ago, it would have taken me a week just to learn their names. And you don’t even want to know how I feel about being away from home and all my friends – pieces of my heart are in Jamaica, in the U.S., in Israel… Oh, and leaving here is a prospect I don’t even want to entertain. How can I leave Suzy, who somehow alternates between being a girlfriend and a mother to me, depending on my need? How can I leave Kate, who has taught me so much about what kind of doctor I want to be? How can I leave Hannah and Agum and Jedi, and Aman and Nichol and ka-Sabet, the sweetest, most adorable, most eager-to-love-and-be-loved children I’ve ever met? How can I leave the Dinka?

 

Pastor Matt Tague went back to California after his mission trip here, and told his congregation this story from his team’s trip: On the Sunday when they were here, we visited a leper colony, and the night before, Sabet said to Pastor Matt, “Oh, by the way, you’re preaching.”  When we got there, we were blessed by the lepers’ singing and their amazing abandon in worship to God; and then they knelt down and began to chant. Sabet leaned over to Pastor Matt and said, “Oh, by the way, they’re Catholic.” Pastor Matt says inwardly he was like, “Is there anything else you want to tell me?! Like, are they Buddhist refugees too, man? You know, I missed that day in seminary; when they were teaching Preaching to Catholic Lepers in Sudan 101, I just happened to skip class.”  But he reached out to God, and in obedience, preached on Luke 8:43-48, the healing of the woman with the issue of blood. It was amazing… I can’t even describe to you how the Holy Spirit showed up that day, in His Personhood, not just as an “influence on the gathering”. There were two preachers there, Pastor Matt, and Sabet; and Sabet didn’t just translate – the Holy Spirit through him carried the message through with just as much intensity as Pastor Matt (and it is hard to match Pastor Matt’s intensity – *whew*). That’s what it’s like being part of the Body of Christ, which surpasses all barriers of geography, standard of living, stages of life, length of time as a Christian physical health… It is a true revelation to find that I can love someone almost instantaneously, because we know the all-encompassing Love, because we both embrace the truest Lover, because we are the Bride of Christ.

 

Ted Miyake, who came here for two weeks to help Sabet and Suzy prepare to build their new clinic, preached a sermon here in the compound about the Great Romance. For all eternity, Jesus Christ will be the Lamb who was slain, and we will be the Bride He died to redeem. Can you picture it? The marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelations 19 is the culmination of the continuing tale (a contradiction in terms, I know) of God making us into a bride worthy of His hand. He would do, has done, anything for us, including imparting His own righteousness to us, and take on our sin, and our death… I was thinking: you know those love songs, where the guy (usually it’s a guy) sings about all the ridiculous things he would do for the woman – swim across the ocean, bring her the moon, save her from anything and everything, be by her side at all times…? It’s impossible for him, but we forgive him his nonsense, because he’s carried away in the reflection of the love of God, the things that Christ has already done for us… Wow.

 

So how do I respond to that, Lord? Simply to remember that this is who we are. God had to teach me that His relationship with me, the times when we are alone together, is only part of the call He has on me. Everything I do should be done to glorify Him, first; and second, everything I do ought to go towards the building up of the Body of Christ (Ephesians 4:12-13, 16). The first step for me was to begin to love His people – and I’m finally learning that it’s really not that hard. You are now part of my reason for living, par t of the reason I finally love life. Of course, it means that life is a little rougher now. I’m experiencing the agonies of loving others: feeling their pain with almost physical intensity, feeling the frustration of not being able to help some of them, missing those whom I may never see again. But I’ll end this note with the famous quote from C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves: “The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the dangers of love is Hell.”