Friday, September 1, 2017

September 1, 2017

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)