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:
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
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