Benefits of being a Mazungo

I guess being a “Mazungo” (foreigner) has its perks. Yes, I stick out like a sore thumb. Yes, that sometimes means that merchants try to rip me off. But this week I had two encounters that made me glad I stand out.

After a women’s prayer time at church, Janie and I went shopping at the mall. And by "mall", I mean a ginormous, labyrinthine market with muddy paths and stalls made of bamboo covered in plastic for shade, where you could buy anything from hardware to baby clothes and literally everything in between. I bought some cups and a few Goodwill-reject t-shirts to turn into rags (if you ever wondered what happened to thrift store clothes that don't sell, now you know. They come here by the container load to be sold in piles at the "malls" around Africa).

After we found our goods and emerged from the "mall", a lady approached me. She was quite thin and her dress was dirty. “Please help me,” she said in a voice so quiet I could barely hear her above the traffic and hubbub of the market. I almost missed that she was talking to me. “Please, could you spare 10 mets so I could get something to eat?” (about 30 cents). Her face was so downcast, and my heart was moved. I asked what her name was, and her eyes brightened a bit that I cared enough to ask. “Dina” was the quiet reply. I told her God loved her, and gave her 20 mets. She smiled. I don’t know why I found it so hard to give last time we were here. It’s so easy to be generous above and beyond what people even ask. Seriously, I could make someone’s day with 60 cents. But it was because I look different that she came up to me. Because so many of the Mazungos are missionaries, she saw me as someone to go to for help. I’m so glad God has fixed my heart that I have compassion for the people who view me that way now, rather than getting frustrated at the constant requests.

After leaving the market we wound our way to the bus stop and climbed into a chappa that was still relatively empty, so we went all the way to the back seat and I squeezed in next to a man who was sitting in the corner. He immediately struck up a conversation with me that went something like this (in Portuguese, and I later asked his name, so I’ll use it here):

Sergio: Good afternoon! Everything good with you?

Me: Yes! Everything’s good. And you?

Sergio: Wow, you speak good Portuguese, (then we talked about language learning for a while). So, what are you here for? Do you work for a business here?

Me: No, I work with the Peniel church, do you know it?

Sergio: Oh, you’re a missionary! Is that the one with Pastor Mario? Yes, I do know it! Man, I need to get to church sometime. My life has lots of problems. I need God. When are the services?

Me: Sunday at 9:00 and 6:00, and Wednesday and Friday nights at 6:00.

Sergio: I’m going! I’m going this week! I need God. Do you have a Bible you could give me? I need the Word of God in my life.

Unfortunately I did not have a Portuguese Bible I could give him, so I made a mental note to try to find some and stockpile for the future. But seriously. Just by sitting next to him he got convicted and preached to himself about how much he needed God in his life. Needed no convincing. Needed nothing on my part but to know when to show up. I wonder if I’ll see him there next week. I was so involved in my conversation with him that I didn't notice when we arrived at our bus stop, but fortunately Janie saw it and we managed to get home. Jesus called us to be fishers of men, and it felt like the fish were jumping into the boat with no effort on my part!

Standing out can be annoying sometimes, but this time it was a blessing. 

A Second Chance

Well, now that we're missionaries again, I guess it's time to pull this forgotten blog down from the virtual shelf, blow off the dust, and start writing again! I'll start with a song that has been close to my heart these past few months:

A Second Chance

By Rend Collective Experiment

My future hangs on this You make preciousness from dust

Please don't stop creating me

Your blood offers the chance to rewind to innocence;

Reborn, perfect as a child.

Oh, Your cross, it changes everything,

There my world begins again with You.

Oh, Your cross, it's where my hope restarts,

A second chance is Heaven's heart.

When sin and ugliness collide with redemption's kiss,

Beauty awakens by romance.

Always, inside this mess, I have found forgiveness,

Mercy, as infinite as You.

Countless second chances we've been given at the cross

Fragments of brokenness salvaged by the art of grace,

You craft life from our mistakes

Black skies of my regrets outshone by this kindness;

New life dawns over my soul.

I’m finding myself meditating on and reveling in the idea of a second chance. I’ll be honest: our first time in Mozambique was not pretty. I allowed myself to grow bitter, hard-hearted, far from God, depressed, frustrated, angry, and unforgiving. Those characterized my life far more than love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control did. I lived a pretty miserable life, counting down the days until I could jump on an airplane and escape this personal hell called “Mozambique”. When I finally boarded that plane in 2011, I didn’t plan on returning. Ever.

Yet here I am. Typing this while listening to African rap music booming from the street below, sitting in a wicker chair in an apartment on the fourth story of an old Portuguese apartment building, in Beira. Mozambique. Back where I said I’d never go again.

Funny how God works, isn’t it?

It took three years of Him working on my heart, healing the wounds that had been inflicted and encouraging me to forgive, forgive, and forgive some more. Seventy times seven times. I also spent a lot of time asking for forgiveness. Over time I grew to regret most the decisions I had made during those years. I regretted all the times I had snubbed, turned away, distrusted, rejected, and failed to love the people I was supposed to be serving. Jesus had come to me as the “least of these”, and I had turned Him away. Over, and over, and over again. 

I’m not really sure why, but I grew up with an intense fear of failure. My parents were not harsh task masters (by any means!), yet I always hated the idea of letting them—or anyone else—down. I hated making mistakes, every time it felt like I had failed again. I definitely feel like our first time in Mozambique was one huge failure. As Paul said, “If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t LOVE others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t LOVE others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it, but if I didn’t LOVE others, I would have gained nothing” (1 Cor 13:1-3). I failed to love. Therefore, I failed. Period. I was, in Paul’s words, “nothing”.

When sin and ugliness collide with redemption's kiss,

Beauty awakens by romance.

Always, inside this mess, I have found forgiveness,

Mercy, as infinite as You.

I fell prey to the patterns around me to marginalize the poor. Other rich people would just walk by and ignore them, so I did the same. I’m ashamed to say I even came to view their deaths with apathy. Oh, just another African. They often treated me like I was somehow superior, just because of my skin color, and I returned the favor by treating them like inferiors. Now I am so ashamed of how I acted, thought, spoke, and behaved. I was the priest and the Levite who looked away and crossed by on the other side of the road while the robbed man lay bleeding in the ditch.

All the while, I thought I still wanted to “do missions”. I grew up in a missions-minded family, I’ve wanted to be a missionary as long as I can remember, and my first few short-term forays only confirmed that desire and calling in me. Our first time in Mozambique was nothing like what I wanted from “missions”, but I knew I still wanted to do “missions”, I just decided that since it was so hard here that maybe this wasn’t where I was supposed to be. God, please call me elsewhere, I prayed. Anywhere but here.

I even went so far as to look for other opportunities, other mission organizations in other countries. Yet nothing “clicked” until a certain pastor invited us to come and work with him. In Mozambique.

In all the spiritual desert of our first few years, the brief visits to Peniel Worship Center were an oasis for my soul. After pouring out and pouring out until I was beyond dry and empty, it was the only place I felt genuinely refilled. Where I could connect with God. Where I could sense that maybe all this was worth it after all. Those visits were too few and too far between for my liking, I wished we could just join Peniel full-time. So when the pastor of Peniel asked us if we would consider helping him with a project on his heart, it was one of the only invitations that I could fathom accepting after how burned I was the first time.

So here I am. Graciously being offered a second chance. Even me. Over the past few months, God has taken me on a journey into His heart. I asked Him to show me Himself, and He told me to look to the poor. I am still working through an in-depth study on the poor in the Bible, and God has brought me face-to-face with His upside-down Kingdom, kind of like an upside-down pyramid. Where the rich and famous are at the bottom, almost worthless in His sight, and the poor and rejected are at the top, and the apple of His eye. He loves them. Oh, how He loves them. I felt Him say to me that if I wanted to get to know Him more, I would have to get to know the poor more. His heart is inexorably bound to them. He catches their tears in a bottle. He counts every one of the curly hairs on their heads. If He looks after the sparrows, how much more does He care about these precious people.

Oh, Your cross, it changes everything,

There my world begins again with You.

Oh, Your cross, it's where my hope restarts,

A second chance is Heaven's heart.

At Calvary all my failings, all my sins of commission and omission, were nailed to the cross that changes everything. Jesus' blood came like a giant eraser to my ugly page, giving me a clean and fresh start. A second chance. A new hope.

For some reason, God hasn't given up on me. He wants these people to know how much He loves them, and He has given me another opportunity to tell them of that love. Right in the exact same place where I failed before, He has sent me again to succeed. I don’t think it would have been the same if we had gone anywhere else, I wouldn't feel like that time of failure would have been redeemed quite as powerfully as it will be through the ability to serve the same people in the same place. This time I’m finding a deep love for these people that I never had before, and it makes all the difference.

Fragments of brokenness salvaged by the art of grace,

You craft life from our mistakes

Black skies of my regrets outshone by this kindness;

New life dawns over my soul.

What are the areas of your life where you could use a second chance? Are there any past dreams, visions, or missions that you've had that ended in failure where you would like to see future success? I’d encourage you to pray for the opportunity to set something right that went terribly wrong before. It is truly liberating.

Countless second chances we've been given at the cross