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.”

A long day has passed

A hard day

and I steal away to a quiet place

No one can see me

and that’s important

and I can be alone with you

my loofah. 

 

One of God’s surprise luxuries

things I never expected to be blessed with

Here in this harsh land, where I only expected sacrifice

God has hidden for me

Suzy’s fantastic cooking

mosquito netting that feels like being swaddled in angel’s wings

all the mangas I can eat

and my loofah. 

 

To think, you grow here on a vine

I can see you scattered about, as if you weren’t a precious treasure

Why does your plant produce you?

Was it just “to gladden the heart of man”¹

like wine

and oil

and stars?

I care not why you are there

whether as the plant’s fruit or its waste

All I care is that I have you

my loofah… 

 

You’re kind of like the Word

already I am clean because of you²

And every time I have an encounter with you

I want to run and tell everyone how wonderful you are

 

how each of us should have one

To wash away the dirt we accumulate each day

living in this filthy world

To scrub away the dead skin

the old man

and reveal the new man beneath³

And man may try to make a softer, easier version

like the polyethylene ones I could buy in a store

but nothing is better at cleansing me

than God’s original design

of my loofah. 

 

And so three times a day I steal away

to a quiet place

where no one can see me

And each time I emerge refreshed

alert

strengthened

to face the challenges of new dirt

Twice I steal away with my Bible

and the third time, it is with you

my loofah. 

 

 

1 – Psalm 104:15

2 – John 15:3

3 – 2 Corinthians 5:17; Colossians 3:9-10

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every morning during wound care, a line of boys comes into the clinic. They’re all of different ages, but you couldn’t tell; unless their wounds are fresh, they’re all laughing and joking with each other, whether they’re 80 or 8. (RICHTER!!!!)  They’re funny little things, and they use the same verve that got them into trouble to carry them through it.

 

They’ve got wounds everywhere on their bodies, but it’s the expendable limbs that get hit the worst – the stuff that flails about and gets banged up, likes legs, and arms, and heads. A frequent source of fresh injuries is the bicycle; children sit on the back, and their legs dangle; soon enough a leg gets caught in the spokes, and a new boy limps into my clinic.

 

Dinka boys try not to acknowledge pain. They can’t, or their mother or father (or in fact anyone who happens to wander by) will shush them up. One of my favourites, Wur, got pushed by another playful boy into a machine for grinding groundnuts. When his mother brought him here, he was quietly holding his bloody, mangled hand. He barely winced as we cleaned and examined it. He didn’t cry until we began to amputate his finger – I guess he was hoping we could save it, and was distraught when he saw we couldn’t. But now, he greets me with a smile every day, and stalked me to church once (now I’ve just got to get him inside it). His wound is healing well, and I’m sure to say “apath apei” (“very good”) whenever I remove the bandage.

 

Once, I removed the bandage of an older boy who spoke English. As I cleaned it, I was very careful, sponging instead of scrubbing, to avoid tearing the tender new flesh. He took it as an insult, demanding why I was being so soft with him. He must have been surprised when I laughed aloud at that. If only he had seen me in Basic Training; then he would know how hard I can be on my boys.

 

Sabet’s nephew is younger than the general crew. He has Sabet’s name, and Kate and I call him “Ka-Sabet” (“ka” is a prefix for “small” in Swahili); and he’s perpetually in here. As his broken arm heals, he breaks his toe. As his broken toe heals, he tears the nail off. But he HATES the clinic. Several men have to carry him inside if he even suspects he’s getting an injection; I once followed him around for 15 minutes promising “tuom alieu” (“no injection”) when I only wanted to wipe his wound clean. He trusts me now, but I wouldn’t dream of being the one to give him an injection ever; he has, reserved just for them, the most piercing scream on the planet, in all the ages that have passed and all that will ever be. All my other boys cover the ears and giggle, and all the patients waiting outside wonder what we’re doing to the child.

 

 

 

And then, of course, there’s Superdude. For the longest time I didn’t know his name, and didn’t want to; you’ll agree that Superdude is quite apt, if you look at the picture at right. He wears a cape tied round his shoulders, and he uses a cane – it’s probably his crime-fighting weapon, and the limp is just for show. When he first gashed open his shin, he sat on the line all day, waiting his turn, even though it counted as an emergency and he could totally have been seen first. And Superdude is perpetually telling us how to dress his wound. For some time, he kept demanding an injection because he thought it would speed his recovery. Finally I stuck him with a very painful (but very effective) drug. I couldn’t help giggling as his limped away, mewling; it must be his Kryptonite.

 

You would think it would be hard to get my ka-boys to show up every single morning to have someone poke and prod at their wounds. Here’s the secret; as much as I like boys, they also like me. I smile at them, and learn their names; when I’m cleaning their wounds, I sing and talk with them, helping them with their English, and learning Dinka from them. Soon I’ll be proficient enough to discuss sports :-).  They jostle one another for the chance to have me be the one to dress them. I haven’t got them trading valuables for the privilege yet, but give me time… though I suppose I’ll need candy to accomplish that feat…

 

And none of them know that whenever they win, and I’m their wound-dresser, I’m really just looking for an excuse to lay hands on them and pray for them. Their wounds will heal without my prayers, and they’ll go back to their normal lives; but I pray that their lives will never be normal again. If you get a chance to be one of my boys, I pray that one day you’ll become one if His boys too. And so I spend the rest of the day with people of all ages, most of them pregnant women. And I wait patiently for the next morning, so again I can see, and smile at, and serve, and pray for, my rambunctious, goofy, shy, outspoken, never-seem-to-learn, always-have-learned-something-new, laughing, wonderful, hilarious boys.