Prior to coming to Uganda, I did not expect that I would grow more in my spiritual life than my emotional and intellectual. Although I have been experiencing growth in all aspects of my life, being in Africa has broken me down and opened my eyes to what areas of my life I value too highly and which ones I value to little. Being amongst a culture that is entirely different than my own, I have had to face the fact that the only commonality between Ugandans and myself is God. In fact, this world is so diverse and so complex that I have come to the conclusion that Christ is the only unifying factor for all of humanity. Living more simply and being humbled by the fact that my culture is no better than any other culture has made me realize that everything in this world is irrelevant without Christ at the center. If no culture is ‘right’ or ‘the best’, then I know longer want to value my identity based on where I live. This may not make any sense… it is just my attempt to explain one of the bigger concepts I have been challenged by over the past few months.
Here some of a midterm paper that I wrote for my Faith and Action class. Maybe it will give you a little bit clearer of an idea as to what I am trying to explain:
“Love moves us. Love is a choice. Love reflects who we are.”
“Why is it that the story of someone who has actually done that Jesus commands resonates deeply with us, but we then assume we could never to anything so radical or intense? Why do we call it radical when, to Jesus, it is simply the way it is? The way it should be?” –Francis Chan, Crazy Love
“…Offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God…do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will… think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance wit the measure of faith God has given you.” – Romans 12:1-3
To be honest, up until this point in the semester, I have spent little time meditating over the objectives of this course. Although it may have been beneficial to do so, I have found that I have naturally been applying the majority of the Faith and Action course objectives to most of my courses and the general experiences I have had while in Uganda. In fact, these objectives are so all-encompassing that they are relevant to my journal entries, blog, and conversations that I have had with my roommates and people at home. Out of the four course objectives, the two that I have found to be the most relative to my time here are numbers 3 and 4:
3. Connect what we believe our purpose in life to be (telos) with how we live our life (praxis).
4. Critically and charitably assess our various identities (family, national, religious, etc.) and seek to rightly prioritize those in light of our Christian faith.
Throughout this semester, I have wrestled with, pondered, discussed, engaged in, prayed about, and researched these two objectives more than any other topics. In fact, one could say that these objectives accurately describe what the ‘themes’ of my semester have been thus far.
In regards to objective number 3, this has been one of the biggest challenges I have faced since arriving in Africa. For the past few years, I have really been grappling with the question, ‘What is my purpose in life?’ Throughout this time, my constant prayer has been that God would reveal to me His purpose for my life and that He would align it with my heart, mind, and body. Living in Uganda has clarified, as well as confused me, as to what my life purpose looks like. Throughout the semester I have been reminded that, as a Christian, my main purpose is to love others the way that Christ loves me. Often times, I get so caught up in what I am doing with my life that I forget to focus on the reasons why I am doing it. As stated by Shane Claiborne in Irresistible Revolution, “Jesus is not seeking distant acts of charity. He seeks concrete acts of love” (158). Loving others because Christ’s love is in me is much different than loving others because I feel that it is the moral thing to do.
Prior to taking Faith and Action, I was unsure how to live out my life purpose to love others. I now know that there are many practical and attainable ways to love others. Living simply is not only a way of deterring one’s attention away from the materialism of our world, but it is a form of loving others. In Sider’s novel Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, he quotes Dr. Charles Birch saying, “The rich must live more simply that the poor may simply live” (183). By living with less, we are better able to love those who deserve more. As well as living simply, one can specifically learn to pray and care for others by keeping up to date on current events. Thirdly, a practical way to live out our Christian purpose in life is to practice being present. According to John Taylor, author of the novel The Primal Vision, “The Christian…has nothing to offer unless he offers to be present, really and totally present, really and totally in the present” (136). Loving others is being willing to be with them in whatever circumstance, culture, or place they may be. Just as Christ offered himself fully to us, we must offer ourselves fully to others.
The most challenging aspect of course objective number 3 has been learning how to truly implement these practical ways of loving others into my everyday life. Sider encouragingly states, “Everyone should prayerfully ask God what limited, specific things God wants him or her to concentrate on. It was God, after all, who made us finite with only twenty-four hours in each day. Being called to do all God wants us to do to correct social sin is not a heavy burden” (117). As well as praying that God would show me what limited things He wants me to focus on, my greatest desire is for Christ to invade my heart in such a way that I cannot help but to love every person that I come into contact with. Yet, it is difficult to accept the fact that in order to truly love others, I must first fix my own heart. According to Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, “true change, true life-giving, God-Honoring change would have to start with the individual. I [am] the very problem I have been protesting” (20). My problem is that I spend so much time thinking about how I can best love others that I end up doing nothing about it. As stated by Miller, “the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time” (13). To be honest, I have fallen into the devil’s trap for the past few years. I am ready to practice what I preach, to live in such a way that all that I do exhibits Christ’s love.
My prayer is that God would guide me toward his specific call for my life by simplifying my heart, encouraging me to care about people all over the world, and teaching me how to be present.
As for course objective number 4, throughout the course of this semester, I have learned to appreciate the fact that God purposely created humanity with a diversity of cultural identities. And because God created all humans as equal, no one person’s view of his or her identity is better or more correct than another. By taking the time to examine how I perceive myself, I have grown to have a deeper understanding of who I am as an individual as well as the reasons behind many of my beliefs and actions. Reading Taylor has been particularly insightful when it comes to understanding the Ugandan view of the self. According to Taylor, the Ugandan perception of the ‘self’, his or her identity, is quite different than that of a Westerner’s. For example, an African sees his or her ‘self’, as being dispersed amongst many people and objects, such as a shirt, some dirt, a relative, or one’s shadow. Yet, although there are many deviances between the Ugandan and Western view of the ‘self’, “the Gospel is for men as they are and as they think they are, and this is the self that is potentially the new man in Christ” (38).
This semester, as I have struggled to find similarities and points of connection between Ugandans and myself, I have realized that I have been looking in the wrong places this whole time. Because of Christ, the differences that separate me from Ugandans become irrelevant. As brothers and sisters in Christ, we share a common identity in him; Christ is our common ‘self’ who defines all that we are. Living in Uganda has inspired me to re-prioritize the various ways I identify myself according to my Christian faith. In an attempt to better understand why I identify myself the way I do, my eyes have been opened to the harsh reality that I often place my nationality, family, and social identities over my identity in Christ. In fact, I think that this is a frequent struggle for Christians all over the world. In the Gospel of Matthew, he encourages his readers to remember that Christ’s love is for everyone, thus every person can choose to identify him or herself in Him. Over the past 8 weeks, one of the most significant lessons that I have learned is that although Ugandans and Americans define themselves in starkly different ways, we are all connected by a greater unity, our synonymous identity in Christ.
Missing you all!!!
Btw, I am running in the Kampala MTN marathon in two weeks!!! Uphill and smog! Wish me luck!
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