I’m going to Africa.
I’m going to Africa, and it seems very strange to me. The strangeness isn’t in the fact that I’m going to this place, because I’ve dreamed of this journey since I was in grade school. The strangeness—the wonder I feel—is in the reason why I'm going there.
When I was in second grade a kindly neighbor took me to a lecture at a local college. That sounds funny, even to me. But this neighbor was a retired school teacher, and he knew I’d inherited my dad’s interests in science in nature, and he knew that my dad had recently left for Vietnam. So he invited me to a lecture by Dr. Richard Leakey.
I don’t remember what the famous anthropologist said that night. But I remember the wonder and amazement I felt as bright slides of digging sites, bones, steep cliffs, savannahs, smiling black faces, reed boats, and canvas tents flashed across the screen in a darkened auditorium. I remember hearing names like Lucy and Homo habilus and Tanganyika and having no clue as to what they meant, but knowing with certainty that they were the most beautiful, lyrical, mysterious names I’d ever heard.
As I got older I read all I could about Africa. I read Hemingway and dreamed about the snows of Kilimanjaro and the plains of Kenya. I read Wilbur Smith and learned of places like Dar es Salaam and the Transvaal. I studied biology and read the “out of Africa” hypothesis for human evolution. I learned to fly and read the books of pioneer African pilots like Antoine de St-Exupery, Karen Blixen, and Beryl Markham.
By the time I was twenty-four I imagined that all the great passions of my life—flying, photography, science, music, writing—would one day come together in Africa. That was My Dream. I informed my girlfriend that I would one day leave without notice, and be gone for some time. (She said she didn’t think so. This caused a serious argument, and I’m sort of surprised that she married me a year later.)
Needless to say, times changed and I changed. Life changed. Children came. Unimagined crises came. Wonder came. Impossible things happened, like travels to equatorial South America—which was NEVER in my plans—to meet our new teenage daughter and bring her into our family. And, because of the love and the faith of the argumentative girlfriend who married me, Jesus came to meet me where I was.
Now, with seven members of my church—the church into which I was baptized, the church I’ve entrusted with the exploration and growth of my fragile faith—I’m going to Africa. We’re going to Mhlosheni to meet our extended family, and to share our lives with them.
The passions of my life are still there, and each one pricks its ears like a puppy at the thought of traveling to Africa. But now the overriding passion is Jesus.
Over all else is Jesus and his insistence that we trade our own dreams for God’s dream. There is his patient urging that we forget what our culture teaches us and instead learn from a people who walk in his path, in and through circumstances we can never truly know, understand, or appreciate.
We go to meet “the least of these.” We go to meet the forgotten and overlooked and underfed and the dying, and tell them that we know they’re there. We go to assure them that we care, that we are their family, and that we’ll not forget them. We go to learn from them.
Life is funny. Beautiful, but funny.
When I was in second grade a kindly neighbor took me to a lecture at a local college. That sounds funny, even to me. But this neighbor was a retired school teacher, and he knew I’d inherited my dad’s interests in science in nature, and he knew that my dad had recently left for Vietnam. So he invited me to a lecture by Dr. Richard Leakey.
I don’t remember what the famous anthropologist said that night. But I remember the wonder and amazement I felt as bright slides of digging sites, bones, steep cliffs, savannahs, smiling black faces, reed boats, and canvas tents flashed across the screen in a darkened auditorium. I remember hearing names like Lucy and Homo habilus and Tanganyika and having no clue as to what they meant, but knowing with certainty that they were the most beautiful, lyrical, mysterious names I’d ever heard.
As I got older I read all I could about Africa. I read Hemingway and dreamed about the snows of Kilimanjaro and the plains of Kenya. I read Wilbur Smith and learned of places like Dar es Salaam and the Transvaal. I studied biology and read the “out of Africa” hypothesis for human evolution. I learned to fly and read the books of pioneer African pilots like Antoine de St-Exupery, Karen Blixen, and Beryl Markham.
By the time I was twenty-four I imagined that all the great passions of my life—flying, photography, science, music, writing—would one day come together in Africa. That was My Dream. I informed my girlfriend that I would one day leave without notice, and be gone for some time. (She said she didn’t think so. This caused a serious argument, and I’m sort of surprised that she married me a year later.)
Needless to say, times changed and I changed. Life changed. Children came. Unimagined crises came. Wonder came. Impossible things happened, like travels to equatorial South America—which was NEVER in my plans—to meet our new teenage daughter and bring her into our family. And, because of the love and the faith of the argumentative girlfriend who married me, Jesus came to meet me where I was.
Now, with seven members of my church—the church into which I was baptized, the church I’ve entrusted with the exploration and growth of my fragile faith—I’m going to Africa. We’re going to Mhlosheni to meet our extended family, and to share our lives with them.
The passions of my life are still there, and each one pricks its ears like a puppy at the thought of traveling to Africa. But now the overriding passion is Jesus.
Over all else is Jesus and his insistence that we trade our own dreams for God’s dream. There is his patient urging that we forget what our culture teaches us and instead learn from a people who walk in his path, in and through circumstances we can never truly know, understand, or appreciate.
We go to meet “the least of these.” We go to meet the forgotten and overlooked and underfed and the dying, and tell them that we know they’re there. We go to assure them that we care, that we are their family, and that we’ll not forget them. We go to learn from them.
Life is funny. Beautiful, but funny.
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