September 1, 2017
The
Sunday morning offering in Lalonga. It
was so big that she had to get help counting it this week
In the few years that I’ve spent in Lohutok I’ve had more
contact with dead bodies than I ever have in the rest of my life combined. In the USA we are pleasantly separated from a
lot of the gross realities of death most of the time, people die in hospitals or
are covered and carted off quickly if they don’t. Here it’s different. There are stories I could tell that would
just scare my mother, so I won’t, but with the lack of healthcare and cultural
violence/civil unrest here, encountering corpses has just become more of a
reality.
It may seem like I’m trying to be shocking or morbid when I
write this, but bear with me for another few lines. Today during my 7 hour round trip drive to
Torit for supplies I was meditating on the death of Jesus Christ (with the help
of an online sermon from a friend). Have
you thought about that? We have some
nice, sanitary pictures of Jesus (with a loincloth) hanging on a cross, and
then we see the sealed tomb, and then it’s empty, but there are a lot of
intermittent steps there!
Paul says that Jesus, who existed
in the form of God, humbled himself to the point of death on a cross, and I
don’t want to miss just how humbling and humiliating that kenosis was. Someone, perhaps Joseph of Arimathea, had to
pull the metal spikes out of Jesus’ broken bones and flesh and take his
lifeless, heavy, floppy, cold body down from that cross and carry it to a
tomb. Have you ever carried an
unconscious person? There’s a reason we
call it “dead weight” because it’s difficult!
Today when I’m struggling with that same recurring sin, or
self-doubt because of my failures, or worried that maybe God won’t provide this
time or that He doesn’t have my best interest in mind (you know, because things
don’t go my way…) I’m called back to the morbid reality of Jesus’ death on the
cross and subsequent victorious resurrection which accomplished for me the
adoption to Sonship and a privileged position in the Kingdom of God. Not because I earned it, or because I deserve
it, or because I’m better than anyone else, but because Jesus thought I (and
you) were worth paying the ultimate, humiliating price.
The
building work is going about as expected (for South Sudan), lots of delays and
hang-ups, but still some progress. Amy
has started doing Kindergarten with Ezekiel and that seems to be going well. The church in Lalonga is growing in
numbers. Paul has been meeting with a
group of people from the church to rehearse a gospel set of Bible stories, and
then he’s having them go into the village and tell these stories to different
people and bring back reports!
Keep praying for us during this
trying period while I try to get the house finished so that we can all be
reunited back in South Sudan!
Philippians 1:3-4,
Ezekiel wrote
his name by himself. It was quite the
exciting accomplishment!
Justin (for all of us)
