Last year I posted a missions report from Africa written by my good friend Lauren D'Avolio. Lauren and I both have been involved in Gegrapha, a fellowship of Christian journalists who work in the secular media. Lauren recently returned from another Africa trip -- Sudan, this time -- and has some edifying and challenging insights to share. This is her report. Enjoy. -- Huntley Paton
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I returned from Sudan in mid-June and have spent the past five weeks sifting through my experience. My conclusion: Many Sudanese people are blessed beyond measure in very unexpected ways. Through my time in Africa - including the weeks I helped run a Bible camp for AIDS orphans and other vulnerable children in Zambia last year - God has given me an inner peace so unshakable that it makes much of the rest of my life seem tedious and shallow.
To recap our Sudan trip: Ten other members of my church and I worked with an indigenous Sudanese church, the head of which is Bishop Elias Taban. Since Sudan’s peace treaty was signed in 2005, which effectively ended its 21-year civil war in northern and southern Sudan, he and his Evangelical Presbyterian Church have opened the two orphanages where we Americans volunteered.
Each orphanage is home to about 100 kids and employs a dozen African widows, all of whom have lost their families to waterborne illness, civil war, genocide or AIDS. Most everyone we met was a professing follower of Christ, but we took the chances we had to share the Gospel – the creation of the world, sin’s entrance and Christ’s birth, death and resurrection so that all who believe and repent would inherit the Kingdom. We cooked, cleaned and played with the kids. We also pampered the widows with pedicures, but mainly did so because Jesus instructed Christians to wash others’ feet, literally and figuratively.
It was this experience that forced me to once again confront my own inherently sinful nature and depravity in light of God’s grace and forgiveness. I didn’t understand much of my self-righteousness until I physically made myself lower than a Sudanese widow. Sadly, I realized I thought I was better than she was. I’m grateful God mercifully opened my eyes to this prideful attitude.
On the indescribably bumpy dirt roads, we passed patrols from the Ugandan military on tanks with four mounted machine guns apiece and Sudanese People’s Liberation Army soldiers, who helped liberate the south in 2005. They’re keeping the southern Sudanese safe from rebels such as the Lord’s Resistance Army, or the LRA, who still routinely attack and kill civilians.
Our group drove over and near stretches of dirt road that double as tops of mass graves. Locals know when they’ve been worn thin because bits of clothing and bone begin sticking through. We saw bombed out shells of abandoned tanks and huge craters in the earth created by land mines. The north planted land mines throughout the south during the war, many of which are still being found. Main roads are clear, but the United Nations is actively clearing minefields alongside them. At the first orphanage, we met a sweet young man, John, who lost his legs and lips to a land mine. His family disowned him shortly thereafter, telling him he was too ugly for them to keep around.
At the orphanage that day, I had a mind-blowing conversation with a man named Robert, who said he’d been able to forgive the north for the decades of genocide and war. But how?
“We are Christians. We read the Bible and we forgive.”
That left me wondering, “Are we reading the same Bible?”
If they knew the kinds of trivial things with which I’ve burdened myself, it would never compute.
During our time at the second orphanage, the kids prepared a song for us that cites a parable Jesus told at the end of the Gospel of Matthew. He says, in part, “What you have done for the least of my brothers you have done for me.” It was a profound and crushing moment, when I realized that, no matter how much I wanted to believe those Sudanese orphans and widows were the least of us all, it was the Americans who were “the least.” Let me explain.
Since I arrived in Sudan, I’ve struggled with the notion of suffering; why God allows it, what purpose it serves. There was even a pub in the center of the city where we stayed, Yei, named “Sufferers’ Tavern.” These are people who know how hard they have it.
Jesus promises in the Sermon on the Mount that those who mourn will be comforted, the hungry will be filled, the pure will see God. Grief in Zambia and Sudan is overwhelming, but I cling to God’s promise that those who mourn will find comfort. I often shortchange the incredible power of God’s Word, which resonates with the destitute in Sudan just as it does in American or Zambia or anywhere else. I trust that God is molding something good and holy out of a world that includes suffering on a massive scale in Africa. In fact, the book of Hebrews says Jesus learned how to help those who suffered because of how he suffered. Hebrews also tells us Christ was made perfect through suffering. The book of James insists we count it all joy when we encounter trials, because it produces perseverance and mature faith.
For all the agony the Sudanese endure, many of them are rich in faith because of their suffering. While I do not envy the tragic and heartbreaking lives many of them have led, I do envy the fullness of their faith as a result of their suffering. That’s the kind of wealth that matters.
During our two-day layover in Uganda at the end of our trip, we visited a huge, beautiful mosque. It was built by Muammar al-Gaddafi, Libya's leader. Yours truly donned a hijab, wrap-around skirt and bare feet as we toured. God gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about Islam and the Qur’an on this trip, and even to share the Gospel with a few Muslims. It was a powerful time of God, which led me to buy and study the Qur’an in Dallas.
Some of the people who love me most in this world have told me, in no uncertain terms, that they believe I’m a religious fundamentalist who’s been indoctrinated by the Bible Belt. They say this no matter of how many times I tell them I was converted from atheism during my junior year of college Upstate New York. I loved Jesus – and Country music – long before I moved to Texas. (They’re both in Upstate New York, in case you’ve never been.) The Gospel has become the lens through which I see the world – sometimes at the expense of important relationships and the way I’m viewed socially. I’m OK with that. We all have the same need for forgiveness. We all will have a day of reckoning. We all have the same God-shaped void that will never be filled by anything else, no matter how hard we try.
Every believer in Christ -- or potential believer -- has been offered eternal life and infinite joy. For some, that joy on Earth is counterintuitively found in the absence of showers, proper nutrition and decent nights’ sleep. Christians endure some hardships because we know this life is transient, and eternal life is just that – eternal. Christ came so that we could have life, and life more abundantly. He came so we would pursue God and not our temporal selves by helping the poor, the needy and the hurting in every nation on Earth. Praise God that he doesn’t need us to do his work, but that all believers, from Sudan to Zambia to America and beyond, are more than conquerors through him who loves us.
Best to you and yours,
Lauren
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