Far Away

It feels rather stereotypical to talk about what I have learned about myself since coming to Botswana, how the Lord pulled me half way across the world into the recesses of a sparsely populated country to speak softly once more of His truth and to reveal more of Himself to me. I guess that makes me cliché though, because that is exactly what happened.

Seronga isn’t densely inhabited by any meaning of the word; it’s in the bush – goats outnumber the people and threaten property invasion anytime a gate is left open. Cars brake for the donkeys and cows that meander down the roads built by men, for men. As the sun sets, the sky explodes into a seemingly impossible array of colors, as if God uses it as a canvas to reveal more of His majesty to the people living here. The night brings with it a deep silence and impenetrable darkness that blankets the village in a serene calm that surpasses anything that I have experienced in the remotest areas of Texas and Colorado. In a few words, the natural splendor of this place overwhelms the small villages connected by a dirt road, the people are foreign and different from my very American ideas, and internet is a treasured, albeit exceedingly rare, occurrence.

Not to be redundant, but Africa is far away from the things that I know, the places I’ve lived and the majority of the people that I know and love. The only constant thing that is in both places is God, the Protector and Provider for my soul. His presence has remained consistent and in a place far from everything that I know and cherish well, He has pushed me from knowing the physical surroundings and earthly manifestations of the people that I have encountered, to seeing His hand placing the stars in the sky and Him knitting together the beautiful people around me together, placing His spirit and handiwork in all of them.

Words escape me as I attempt to form sentences eloquent enough to encapsulate the magnitude and wonder of our God, as I have seen Him here. Our God is too big, too great and too awesome to ever be fathomed by the finite mind or language. He is too unsearchable to ever be fully known – but the Word reveals Him to us as well as our personal experiences. He created each one of us to worship and glorify Him, to love Him and to love Him in the way that we were individually created for. A lot of the things I learned, or re-learned, on this trip are so simple – it makes me laugh. Truths that I’ve heard hundreds of times in song lyrics and sermons. Things that are said, that I nod appreciatively at all the time in my daily life. Here though, they’ve unfolded themselves magnificently to me, here He opened my heart and quieted my mind to make me really reflect about many things, like what it means that the Almighty God of the universe is jealous for me, that He took on the weight of my iniquities when I still despised Him and ran from Him, and that when I still run from Him as a believer, He stays beside me and within me – patient, long-sufferingly calling out to me that I am His and that His grace and power is sufficient through any trial and weakness of my own.

So I came to Africa to really hear these words that have been spoken over me my whole time as a believer and to share what I know of God with the people He brings into my life. In the still recesses of a foreign country, He has sharpened me, humbled me, and pushed me to step out of the things that I think build who I am and into the position of a child, loved and treasured by the Most High King. To once again press into Him and lean on Him when I’m tired after five days of buses, ferries, and planes and let Him be my strength and let Him use me when I don’t feel like being used. Being reminded that the God who created the stars and the vastness of this world with its multitudes of people, all unique and made in His Image, died on a cross for me to come to know Him, and for those that I meet to come to know Him.

There are so many things that I could say about my time here, things like how my wonderful team has become a constant source of light in my life here, how the children that I play with here show me the joy and hope that our God gives us, how the classes that we are taking on evangelism and Christian foundations are awakening a love for God’s Word and the lost of this world that I have never known before, the list goes on and on. Those haven’t been the most overwhelming part of this trip though. They all have funneled and redirected my attentions back to Jesus, to our Lord. The different parts of this trip only make me see all the more God behind all of this world, in all things, working in His people, bringing about His plans for this world.

In a moment of divinely ordained irony, I was brought far away, to come to know Him who is most near to us.