Friday, August 7, 2015

A New Thanksgiving

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The author of this blog post is a missionary in North Africa with Pioneer Bible Translators. She, along with her husband and two little girls, lives on the outskirts of a refugee camp working to facilitate disciple-making, Bible translation and mother tongue literacy among two least-reached Muslim groups. Her favorite things about North Africa include drinking scalding hot mint tea, wearing colorful robes, watching her daughters play on ant hills, and hearing people’s stories. Her least favorite things include rats in the kitchen and dry season dust storms.   

“A couple of years ago we had our first karama. We had just finished building our house in a refugee camp in North Africa, and in good North African fashion, we decided to have a party celebrating God’s generosity. Like most average Americans, we had never really held a karama before, (as opposed to North Africans who hold one to thank God for just about everything – a new baby, a new donkey, a new house), so we asked our friends and neighbors to show us the ropes.

The goat and the sheep were slaughtered just after sunrise. The women showed up a few hours later, heads laden with smoke-stained pots, charcoal stoves, and burnished clay jabanas. As guests filtered in our bamboo gate throughout the course of the morning and settled into plastic chairs and reed mats laid out in pools of shade across the compound, the smell of roasting coffee beans, mint and smoke wafted across the yard. Our girls ran around with plates full of brightly wrapped toffees, handing half out to old men in white turbans and stuffing the rest into their own grubby mouths.

By early afternoon enormous aluminum trays were carried out to the crowd, two men on each side limping under the weight of the folds of dark brown kisra, pyramids of pita bread, dishes of roasted meat, wheels of limes and small dunes of red pepper. We all washed our hands from the same ibrit, and then circled around the platters and ate and ate and ate.

At some point, when most people were cradling scalding cups of ginger coffee in the sockets of their palms, a plane few overhead. What I noticed first was not the distant drone of an Antanov engine, but the sudden electric silence of the dozens of men, women and children gathered around our home. Everyone shielded their eyes and gazed nervously heavenward as the bomber flew overhead, winking brightly in the sky as it took a shortcut across the finger of the country where we sat. A few minutes later several people nodded knowingly and asked if we heard the distant thud of bombs falling on the home they had fled only months before. Eventually, we turned back to our thanksgiving feast, eating and drinking and tentatively returning to laughter as the presence of an enemy faded into the distance.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. (Psalm 23:5)

I have been turning these words over for the past year or so, becoming better acquainted with the roll and feel of them in the palm of my mind. And I keep coming back to the same question.

Why there?

Of all the places to set a table, why in the presence of our enemies? Couldn’t it have been somewhere else? Somewhere more appetizing, more comfortable? More safe?

I am still learning how to answer the why part of the question, but I can’t shake the deepening belief that God truly delights in setting a rich table in some of the deepest mires of humanity. The gore and mess of this world have not scared him off; in fact, he is holding out a steady hand, inviting us to join him there, in the middle of all the brokenness.

My North African brothers and sisters are already much better at this than I am. Their ability to return to communal laughter moments after a plane has brought back terrifying memories of the government bombing their villages is not the only reason I say this. I remember one time seeing an old woman holding a malnourished baby that was surely only days away from death. I watched as she bounced the listless infant, singing it lullabies and pouring love into the very thing that was about to leave this life and cause her and her family great pain. I often see kids clamoring around old men who have outlived their usefulness to society but who are nonetheless integrated into community in everyday life with no complaint or suggestion that there should be any other way.

There have been times I have been tempted to loosen the tendrils of my heart from North Africa. One more evacuation, one more rumor of rebels, one more rat or blistering hot day and I feel like I have had enough. There are days that I think, this place is just too hard to love. And each time I think that, I feel God closing his hands around mine as I cradle the sharp edges of this beautiful place and let it cut me to the bone once more.

He scoots my chair up gently behind me as I rest at the table. My enemies lurk in the shadows behind us. Sometimes it is Antanov bombers and rebel soldiers. Other times it is sickness or weakness. Sometimes pride, sometimes insecurity. Most often it is fear, nebulous and ill-defined, but pervasive and sometimes overwhelming.

And yet, the table is spread with such bounty. In North Sudan, my table it is laid with the delicacies of spiritual formation that comes through friendships with refugee women. I daily gorge on the delight of simple living that I was too weak to actually make happen in America – eating only whatever is ripe and local, hosting strangers regularly, having a small house and walking alot. I savor getting to share almost every meal with my husband and watching my daughters carry around baby goats. I taste again and again the sweetness of having to trust in God alone, and finding him faithful. Every time.

So I wash my hands in the water pouring from the ibrit alongside my North African brothers and sisters. We turn our back on the Valley of the Shadows of Death and tear off a piece of bread from one loaf. For surely goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives. And we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

 
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