Why Go?

We got our airplane tickets today. Thanks to the diligence and phone calls and emails of our fearless leader Erin (who will blush to be called that, but how’s she going to stop me?) we’re confirmed on our 2-day flights to South Africa and Swaziland. On October 27—six months from now—we leave to meet our brothers and sisters in Swaziland.

Why? Why fly 10,000 miles across the world, across continents and an ocean, if we’re building no church, no school, and no roads? What value do we bring?

I’ve struggled with that question, and I’m not sure I know the answer yet.

But I read something today that may help explain it. It said, “The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular, local.” *

I think this makes sense to me. I’ll give you an example.

The previous post on the SOS program for Swaziland youth is true, and it truly states the conditions there. But it is also abstract. None of us know any of the children in the picture even though we understand and ache for their plight. We want the world to ache for their plight. But it is only one small step from being a statistic, and it deserves so much more than that.

At the top of this post, though, is a picture of Justice. When Columbia Ridge began to sponsor children last year, Justice was the boy sponsored by Joie and I. We sent pictures and cards to Swaziland, and talked about Justice at our dinner table. And then a few months later he died.

We still have Justice’s picture on our refrigerator and on Joie’s dresser. I look at him every day. I don’t want Justice to be an abstraction. I can't let him fade into abstraction. He's not a statistic on third-world hunger or fatherless children or poverty and asthma in Africa. He was a five-year-old boy who laughed and played and cried and hungered, and he was real.

I want to walk the land he walked. I want to kick a soccer ball with kids who may have known him. If it’s at all possible I want to meet his mother and his aunt and tell them that Joie and the kids and I remember him. I want to tell them he was and remains real for us.

By being in the land, by walking with them and by listening to them, perhaps we can make our relationship personal. Maybe we can rescue it from abstraction and make the story of the people of Mhlosheni real for the people back home, too.

It is how Jesus goes about "loving and saving the world." And this is a loving and saving that's needed by us as much as it's needed by anyone we will meet in Swaziland.

* The Jesus Way by Eugene Peterson