Living in a Red Zone

Area map

Yes, we’re living in a red zone here in Beni, as declared by powers that be. Yes, the Congolese army is fighting ADF-NALU. Yes, Beni is the headquarters for military activity. Yes, one sees more soldiers and army vehicles around town. 

The history of this conflict, like most conflicts, is complicated and many-layered. It’s easy to fall into the “good guy/bad guy” trap to simplify the story and get one’s hands around it. But simple explanations demean the story. I won’t even try to explain the issues, describe the actors, or outline the history. There are plenty of resources for that (thank you, Kyle Hamilton, for your diligence in keeping information and resources on the CI website current).

Home from market

I simply want to make clear that red zone, like any other label, is just that: a label. It’s an attempt to sweep all the puzzles pieces into a pile so they fit into one box. But each of those pieces is just one part of an entire story with complexities, nuances, vignettes, joys, and fears. The sky piece and the flower blossom piece echo nothing of each other. The grey cloud in the right hand corner reveals nothing about the piece of red dress on the child in the lower left hand corner. Yes, we live in an area labeled red zone. But that label ignores the joys, friendships, and daily life challenges that breathe because life moves forward.

UCBC women students

Shops, schools, and churches carry on. The motos run. People go to the market, sweep the street in front of their kiosks, wash laundry, prepare meals, have weddings, deliver babies. UCBC women students discuss how to encourage each other and create opportunities for their voices and their gifts. Reflection days and chapel and classes proceed. 

The fighting is outside of town. Depending on whom you ask, it’s anywhere from 20 to 50 or more km from here. Last week some students reported hearing occasional sounds of artillery in the distance. But there are no such claims this week. Sure, when two or more folks get together, the discussion includes the latest about the conflict. But people also talk about family, work, school, and church.

I love the fact that life goes on.

Cooking for all-campus meal

Regardless of what one thinks about the conflict—its sources, antagonists and perpetrators—that life goes is a statement about resilience, courage, and the gift of being able to “live in the moment.” And that is something most of us (self included) relearn daily, regardless of where we live. In fact, that's one of the gifts of Congo—joy in the moment. We are instructed to pray, "Give us this day, our daily bread."

Sure, there are precautions. I don’t go out at night. But then, I don’t go out any night. When I walk from UCBC to home, I don’t traverse the quiet paths through “the bush,” but the main road. I keep my phone loaded with airtime units, extra cash on hand, and my passport with me. But I do this regardless of what color we are or aren’t. 

Leadership and key staff at CI-UCBC keep ears and eyes on the situation. Through a variety of networks and contacts, they obtain and verify information. They also laugh, whistle in the hallway, rejoice in the day, attend to the needs of others, and “do the work God has given us to do.”

And so I follow their lead.

Cain, Enoch, and Noah

Have started reading the One Year Chronological Bible (New Living Translation), thanks to friends Ned and Marilyn. Thursday’s reading included Genesis 4, 5, and 6: the stories of Cain and Abel, Seth and his descendants, the generations from Adam to Noah, and the beginning of the Noah and the Flood story. A couple of musings.

Cain

Cain seems generally to be known as the murderer of his brother, as someone driven from the family. Yes. Cain did kill his brother. Yes, he was driven away to live in the land of Nod, the land of “wandering.” But God also protected Cain with a mark. He continued to watch over Cain. And Cain’s descendants were artists, craftspeople, and caretakers of animals. Not a bad legacy.

God, in God’s great mercy, provided means by which Cain knew redemption.

Thanks be to God.

Enoch

Among the other daughters and sons that Adam and Eve had, was Seth (Genesis 5:3), “a son who was just like him—in his very image.” And the verse just before, the writer reminds us that God created human beings, to “be like himself.” Hmmm….

But what strikes me about the story of Seth is the listing of his descendants—eight generations’ worth. We have Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah. Each one gets three verses that follow the same pattern as Seth.

When Seth was 105 years old, he became the father of Enosh.
After the birth of Enosh, Seth lived another 807 years, and he had other sons and daughters.
Seth lived 912 years, and then he died.

• Age of father and birth of next son in the lineage.
• How many more years the father lives, "And he had other sons and daughters."
• The final age, "And then he died.

Until you get to Enoch. Enoch “became the father of Methuselah. After the birth of Methuselah, Enoch lived in close fellowship with God for another 300 years, and he had other sons and daughters. Enoch lived 365 years (hmmm.....), walking in close fellowship with God. Then one day he disappeared, because God took him.” [my italics]

What? Enoch just disappears, “because God took him?” What did Enoch’s family think? Everyone else died. Disease. Sickness. Wounds. Old age (different idea of old age back then). The kids come home from school. “Where’s Dad?”

Mom answers, “Didn’t you see him the fields?”

Enoch is simply gone. Vanished. Was there panic? Did the family and friends create myths and legends about his disappearance? Where they angry? After all, Enoch was a righteous man. He “walked with God.” I imagine family and friends crying out, “He walked with you, God. Why did you take him? What right do you have?”

And for what purpose? Why did God do this? “Take” Enoch? Why not give him an honorable and peaceful death surrounded by wife, children, and grandchildren? Simply because God can do this? Only to offer this hiccup in the narrative of Seth’s descendants so a layperson like me stops to wonder, “Hmmmm….”?

Noah

Genesis 6. The beginning of the story of Noah and the Flood.

Verse 6: “So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them [humans] and put them on the earth. It broke his heart” (my italics).

What powerful language. God’s heart breaks. He is in sorrow. She is in sorrow. Our ways hurt God. Did God’s heart break over her disappointment with us? God’s hopes and expectations dashed to smithereens? Did God’s heart break because there was no longer anyone with whom to "walk in close fellowship”? Did God’s heart break because he knew what had had to do to fix things?

But these things didn’t remain fixed. Look at the mess we’ve created around us since the flood famine, war, poverty, slavery (ancient, 19^th century, and now), rape, murder, greed. Surely God knew we’d mess things up the first chance we had. God is and was God. All-knowing. All-powerful. God was not, is not, a dummy. God had foresight and foreknowledge, back-knowledge, history in His hand.

I don’t care about different interpretations, doctrines, dogmas, formal text or dynamic text translations. What matters is that all this mess, “broke his heart.” I think it “broke her heart,” too.

Then Noah appears on the scene. “Noah found favor with the Lord.” Noah “walked in close fellowship with God.” Same language that describes Enoch. In the midst of everything and everyone else, here was someone who “walked with God.”

Maybe that’s the reason for the story. That’s the lesson.

Thanks be to God.

Christmas Eve Musings, December 24, 2013. From Lake Bunyoni, Uganda

Christmas Eve Day, December 24

In the US, Christmas music plays. In shopping malls and grocery stores popular “holiday music” tempts patrons to continue their spending. The BBC and public radio stations broadcast the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings College. If I were at my home in Ohio, I would be tearing up at the last two  stanzas of Once inRoyal David’s City, singing the familiar alto part to Adam Lay  Ybounden, and soaking in the familiar scriptures and relishing the carols familiar and not.

But here at Lake Bunyoni, the music is the birds. The birds sing for Christmas.

Once in Royal David's City, vs. 5 and 6:

And our eyes at last shall see him,

Through his own redeeming love,

For that child so dear and gentle

Is our Lord in heaven above;

And he leads his children on

To the place where he is gone.

Not in that poor lowly stable,

With the oxen standing by,

We shall see him; but in heaven,

Set at Gods right hand on high;

When like stars his children drowned

All in white shall wait around.

Christmas Eve

Sitting here on the dock. Wooden, dug-out canoes rest and bob against each other, slender bodies at rest. A bird whistles above—a trilling and whirring song. Another bird calls a high come here. In the rushes, there is a chuck-a-chuck-a, like a bow dancing on the violin strings. A drum beats in the distance. Christmas adagios.

As I listen, I think that perhaps the sounds of that first Christmas Eve were not too different. There would have been sheep bleating and the soft rustle of hay as cows, and oxen, and donkeys settled for the night. Nature’s adagios.

"Thanks be to God."

The congregation responds to each of the nine scripture readings during the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols with, “Thanks be to God.” It’s the familiar refrain following scripture readings at other Anglican and Episcopal services.  This year, as I listened to a recording of Lessons and Carols, the words “Thanks be to God” startled me at the end of the sixth lesson. That lesson, Luke 2:1-7, tells of Jesus’ birth. It ends with the line, “…for there was no room for them in the inn.”

Reader: “…for there was no room for them in the inn.”

Congregation: “Thanks be to God.”

How startling. We give thanks that there was no room in the inn. We give thanks that God came to us in a stable. Yes. That is something for which to give thanks.

Had Jesus been born in the inn, the weary shepherds would have been barred from the event. It’s doubtful an innkeeper would allow a band of sweaty, smelly shepherds to crowd the hallway. No animals would have snuffled and cooed, and breathed the air where the young family sheltered. God came to us in humble dwellings, “in that poor and lowly stable.” God with us in our sweat and dirt and smells. God with us on and in the earth. 

Thanks be to God.

Saturday Afternoon at Bethel House

Two days of rain finally came to an end this afternoon. The sun is shining. The solar lamps stand sentinel-like and recharge. The dishes dry in the sun. 

Across the street at the 7^th Day Adventist Church, a men’s quartet practices songs from my childhood—songs that my father, Lyle Chase, and their tenor and baritone partners offered during Sunday evening worship. Sometimes Dad and Mom sang in SATB quartets as Sunday evening “special music.” Funny how this place, Beni, calls up memories of the small manufacturing town and railroad stop where I grew up, Corry, PA.

But this day. From my perch at my desk, I look directly at the wall surrounding our compound. Just above stands the top of Renaly’s Alimention, “La Devouverte” (Renaly’s Grocery Story: The Discovery). Renaly’s is a sort of Beni strip mall. It's a long, low building with several “storefronts.” A bar, a shop that sells food items and sundries, a coiffure, and a pharmacie operate on the premises. Renaly’s Alimentation livens our evenings with a repetitive playlist at volumes that meriting a call to local authorities for “disrupting the peace” in the US.

The gospel quartet has disbursed. The street now plays its music. Motos rumble past as the bass and percussion. A radio at the alimentation sings a tenor line. Women call out greetings and a group of children plays behind us. A baby cries a sad melody against the harmonies. A songbird chips an occasional ornamentation, a grace note frequently lost in the din. Sometimes the delicate note calls out of a slice of quiet before the downbeat.

I have to think in these terms and find beauty in the din. Otherwise the sounds crash against each other and scream insults. I want quiet. I want only the songbird’s singular and gentle grace notes. I want the motos and the radio and the honking to cease. 

I want. I want. I want.

 

If I were in the US right now I would be railing against the onslaught of holiday advertisements, cheap music, and the siren call to buy more than I can afford or anyone needs.

So, I have a choice. Wish. Want. Stew in “If only” and “Why don’t they…?” Or accept what is and change what I can. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Oh….and enjoy the sun!

The Armor of Light

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

One of my favorite prayers. The Collect for the First Sunday of Advent.

Sometimes "the works of darkness" are an avaricious ogre, dripping with chaos and slinging terror. Sometimes they personify as a rapist, a corrupt official, an abuser of power, a murderer, a thief. But most days, at least for me, the works of darkness slip in between the cracks of my own humanness. They show up, as they did this week, as small irritants, a meltdown over difficulty learning Swahili, frustration with too many tasks for the available time, self-doubt, judgmental thoughts, pride, a sprinkling of anger, and a dash of gossip. Yup. The works of darkness. Not pretty. Not anything of which I’m proud.

But, thanks be to God, the gift of grace gives us strength to “put on the armor of light," and we feel its weight (or its lightness?). Once I choose to put on the armor of light, I can’t help but experience the immediate and mundane differently. When I put on the armor of light, I assume a new posture in the world. My head lifts and my eyes waken to beauty large and small. My ears hear laughter and song. My hands open to blessings, and my heart opens to joy.

If I put on the armor of light and look back on the week, I relish the simple pleasure of cooking squash on Thursday and the resonant tenor voice behind me in church this morning that caressed then lifted up words of praise. I am reminded of a wooden ceiling bathed in sunlight, like the hull of a great ark, and the treasure of a massive floor of hand-laid stones that will soon be secreted away with a layer of cement. Draped in the armor of light, I smile at the raucous incongruity of wedding party photos while a hen pecks her way in an among the guests, and the trio of turkeys who waggle their way into meeting space where the UCBC faculty is gathered.

Yes, give me grace to cast away the works of darkness that creep into my thoughts each day--the small but pernicious doubts, jealousies, and judgments. Give me grace to put on the armor of light, stand in humility and give thanks.





   

A Not Untypical Day

The day draws to a close. Georgette has prepared and set our dinner: goat, roasted potatoes, cauliflower, and a tomato and onion salad. An afternoon rain has washed the air, and the evening is cool.

As I look back on the day I wonder what I accomplished. The documents that need drafting remain tasks on a list. The documents that need review and revision wait their turn. Yet, the day feels full and I am tired.

The morning began with an unplanned skirmish with our cats. Frieda and Midogo (“Little one”) apply their scavenge tactics outside and inside the house. We keep the bread in a metal casserole dish, put avocadoes in sealed containers, weigh down the lids of serving dishes with plates, and generally try to keep the cats out of the living/dining room area. But they are persistent critters.

This morning, when I got up at 5:00 to start hot water and claim some quiet time, the cats stole into the dining room, jumped onto the table, and managed to push off the lid protecting a few pieces of meat from last night’s supper. I shushed them out, set myself up on the porch to read only to be startled by clanging in the dining room. Somehow the cats had managed to push the door open and jump back onto the table. A battle of wills and tactics ensued for the next 20 minutes until I won. Or did I? It was time to get ready for a 6:15am Swahili lesson.

Yes, Swahili began this morning. Monday and Thursday morning, 6:15-7:15. French is Wednesday and Saturday, 8:00-10:00. Swahili lesson concluded, and the UCBC faculty van arrived to take us to school.

Once on campus there were greetings, turning on the computer, and setting up for the day. Currently we have power and Internet on campus for only 2-3 hours/day. Until the power turned on, I ticked off tasks on the list, queued up emails in my Outbox. Musafiri, the Service Learning Coordinator, and I had planned to meet at 10 and begin working through documents. Power and password problems on the laptop that is storing those documents thwarted plans, however. When the power came on at 10:15, emails loaded up in my laptop, and I scrambled through another round of communications until I joined a colleague for a meeting at 11:30. Chapel followed, noon-1:00, then it was lunchtime. Another meeting convened from 2:00-3:00, after which I headed for home and an hour of studying French.

Did I accomplish anything substantial? I don’t think so. After the early morning cat wrangle, I did turn the day over to God and asked that God use the day and me. I don’t know how or if that prayer was answered. There were no powerful interactions or profound conversations.  I don’t know that I made anyone’s day any brighter. Probably not. I was more concerned with trying to “do” what was on my “list.” I only hope that I did not stand in someone’s way, frustrate a colleague, ignore a student, succumb to selfishness, or give in to pride.

Hmmm… to be honest, I did capitulate to selfishness and pride. No one else would know that pride and selfishness rented a small room in my heart today. But I know.

For good reason, the Confession of Sin opens the Order for Compline, the daily service of evening prayer. So I offer it up, even now, as I review the day:

Almighty God, our heavenly Father: We have sinned against you, through our own fault, in thought, and word, and deed, and in what we have left undone.For the sake of your Son our Lord Jesus Christ, forgive us all our offenses; and grant that we may serve you in newness of life, to the glory of your Name. Amen. 

Taking Action

It was not a pretty week last week. Well, I was not very pretty last week. The line up of tasks, responsibilities, and needs crowded against the counter like mad shoppers on black Friday, jostling and tugging, refusing to queue up or take a number for service.  Then my computer, which has been suffering maladies for the past three months, briefly sank into a coma. It felt like my partner against the mad onslaught threatened to leave me completely defenseless.

At least that’s how it all felt.

In the moments of computer lucidity, I shot off an email asking for prayers for encouragement and strength and wisdom and anything else my friends could think of.

My computer popped a few aspirin and came back to work. The day proceeded and I checked off a couple of items on the “to do “ list. But my heart still sat heavy and I couldn’t seem to lift my gaze from my own feet. That evening I allowed a series of events to compound my despondency until my own discomfort impelled me to take personal inventory, admit my part, choose willingness to have God remove those character defects, and take the action to do so.

The next morning, Psalm 16 greeted me and the last verse spoke directly to me: “You show me the path of life; In your presence there is fullness of joy; In your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” I have to take action. I have to walk the path. I have to accept and live into that fullness of joy. I have to take from that right hand, or grasp that hand for comfort and direction.

An unsettling image came to mind. It was the image of a stubborn, selfish child in the playground, sitting on the outside of the circle, watching everyone else have fun while choosing to wallow in self-pity. It wasn’t a pretty image. It’s certainly not how I’d want others to see me.

Clearly an attitude change was in order. Not just an attitude change about my view of circumstances, but an attitude change about my posture toward God and God’s promises and gifts.  There is a path of life. But standing at the edge and waiting for some miracle is not the same as stepping onto that path and walking into the miracle. I believe that there is fullness of joy in God. But I have to choose to live into that joy and extravagant grace. I have to lean into the wind of it for propulsion. And the hand full of pleasures (the Common English Bible translates, “Beautiful things are always in your right hand.”) invites me to take and hold.

I can’t say for certain what made the difference that day, and the days that have followed: prayers for strength and encouragement offered up by friends and loved ones, my attitude change, or a renewed understanding and willingness to take action with God. But I can attest to renewed strength and joy over the last few days. I can also affirm, based on experienced, that God works with us as much as for us.