Can you find the first world questions?!

I have not blogged here for some time. I have been concentrating on Gramasylum in blogging for the last year or so. Now I am preparing to go to Africa, Malawi to be exact. I am part of a four person team and we actually have been preparing for about three months using a short term mission team manual. Very good stuff and our team has been challenged and had fun already!

But today we leave. So today I am doing the last minute packing and the questions that I have been pondering have been curiously all across the board! I have been a bit stunned by how deeply I can be thinking one moment and how very shallow my thoughts are the next. I came to realize just a few minutes ago that it is the result of first world living versus third world living. Though I have been preparing to enter and serve in a developing country, I am still very much entrenched here in the United States of America. Here you often hear people make some remark about a difficulty and then, a little embarrassed they say, "First world problem." Today, I haven't said it out loud. But I have thought it at least 2o times this morning as I do the final packing. See if you can find the "first world problems/questions".

So I have been asked to teach evangelism to volunteers who will be coming to a school from many villages around. Some of them walking many miles to attend. All of them sleeping in tents for one or two weeks in order to  be at this discipleship event sponsored by Fishers Trainers and Senders out of Lilongwe, Malawi. The Executive Director is Louise Laubscher who is from South Africa, but been ministering in Malawi for 30 years. She is a saint. And she has worked hard to raise up indigenous leaders so that most of the ministry is led by men and women from Malawi. Stonard is her right hand person and a real gem of God's work! I was asked to teach on WHY evangelize and WHO to evangelize. These are very straightforward questions and easily supported and taught by the Bible. I did lesson plans using familiar and story based scripture. And then I got to the part of creating questions that will  help these folks apply these biblical principles to their every day life. I. Know. Almost. Nothing. About. Their. Everyday. Life! “How can I possible teach them evangelism?” I wonder.

Five minutes later I am finally packing up my bathroom stuff and wondering, “How will I keep my hair from going flat? Should I bring my hair texturizer?” And, what hair blower should I bring? I ask myself. “The one I am used to or the smaller travel one under the sink?” And, I wonder, “will the outlets where I will be staying will be able to handle the wattage?”

As I start to pack my make-up, I congratulate myself silently that I am not taking it all. No eye shadow, no highlighter, and no lipstick. Nope, not third-world ready me. I will only take my eye brow brush and cake, my eyeliner and brush, and my mascara. Wait. Maybe I will take my blush, too.  Of course then I realize I need make-up remover to take it off each night. Then a question I hardly ever ask enters my mind…What would happen if I did not wear any make-up while I am there? Then I would not need the make-up or the remover. But, how would they view me? How would I view myself?! Then came the haunting questions, “What is the best way for me to go and be with them in the most authenticate and humble and servant-hearted way?” Why do I care about any of this stuff?

Oh for goodness sake! Then forget about showering for the two weeks, I don’t need soap shampoo, or towels, or deodorant. Well, maybe deodorant, if I am not going to shower for two weeks. And, I’ll just wear the same clothes for two weeks. No need to pack multiple anything and no need to wash clothes by hand when I get there. Shoot! I don’t even need a suitcase! I will just bring a backpack. I do need to brush my teeth. I can imagine not showering for two weeks. I cannot imagine not brushing my teeth for that long. The fuzz and slime would make me throw up and that would not be good!

You can see I have gone back and forth from the sublime to the ridiculous pretty effortlessly! The bad news? I leave in less than an hour. No time to rethink all this. The good news? This mishmash of questions, first and third world, are evidence that God is already working in me substantially. I can count on one hand the days I have gone out of the house without make-up on.  (Notice blog picture is WITH!) To ponder such a thing can only be God invading my space! And, I will trust the saint who invited me to come and teach. She DOES know these people and this culture and believes that God can use me there. What a crazy thought. Which brings up another question. How can God do that?!

Gramasylum and a Funeral

I was honored that a reading club group at church chose to read my book and invited me to be their guest for their monthly discussion. The same day I ended up caring for my granddaughter so I arranged for her to be in the nursery at church while I met with the book club. As I carried her to the room she touched the necklace hanging around my neck and said, "Cece, will you tell me about this?" "This" was my cross necklace. What could I say?! What an amazing opportunity. My four year old granddaughter was asking me to tell her about the Good News of the gospel! I responded, "Lo, I would love to tell you about what this cross means!" But I was pretty close to being late for my morning book club invitation so I dropped her off at the nursery and told her that I would tell her when I got back.

I do not think LoLo knows that I am a pastor or what a pastor does. And she did not know that just a few weeks ago I had introduced  a sermon about the Good News using pictures of crosses--Madonna with a big cross necklace, a convicted murderer in prison tattooed with and wearing a cross, an arch entrance made up of hundreds of wooden crosses, and my own picture wearing this same cross she was now asking about. What was the meaning of all these cross displays? Who knows?! But now my wearing a cross provided me the opportunity to tell LoLo the story of Jesus' amazing love for her. I could hardly wait.

When I picked her up at the nursery she had not forgotten and was all ears. As best I could, in four year old vocabulary (hers, by the way, is pretty incredible!) I explained to her that Jesus came to the world to tell us how much he loved us. I told her that Jesus told everyone and especially people that no one else loved. It was very hard for me to tell her that religious people (like me!) did not like it that Jesus was loving these kind of people and that they disagreed with what he told people about God. Jesus was telling people that God had sent him and that if they believed in him they would never die and that even if they did die, they would live again.  It was really hard for me to tell her that religious people actually punished Jesus like a criminal. Criminals were hung on crosses to die. They hung Jesus on a cross to die. And he did. But he did not stay dead. He came alive again! And then he continued to love people and tell them that because he had died and lived again, the same would happen to them if they trusted him and believed him. I told her that I wear a cross to remind me of how much Jesus loves us. It all sounds a little crazy when you really think about it.

I told LoLo that this meant that some day she would get to meet my father, her great grandfather, the person I wrote the book about. I told her that even if Cece (that's what she calls me) dies  that she will get to see me again because I believe and trust Jesus. I told her that death is hard and makes us very sad, but that Jesus said not to be afraid, because he will take care of us when we die and one day we will all be together again. LoLo said, "I trust and believe Jesus." I said, " I hope you do, Lo. And I hope you will learn more about Jesus and how to trust him as you get older."

Wow! What a holy, crazy sacred, moment. A student of Christianity for decades and an ordained pastor for twenty years  and I was challenged by this request. I had read lots of books about Jesus to LoLo before. I have sung "Jesus Love Me" to her hundreds of times. But now she was asking. She was initiating the conversation. She was wanting to understand what the cross means.

Later that day I officiated at a memorial service. I had prepared a brief message based on I Thessalonians 4 where Paul explains that Christians do not grieve as others do without hope. He says that because Jesus died and rose again, we have hope and are supposed to encourage each other with this Good News. I knew I had a very mixed audience at this service and did not know many of them at all. All of a sudden I  realized that LoLo's question and the answer I gave her was exactly what Paul was teaching in this passage. My four year old granddaughter became a fresh example of the message I wanted to give this family and these friends of this man who suffered and died way too soon. The meaning of the cross is the only sure and hopeful word for people facing death and loss. And explaining this to even a four year old, maybe especially to a four year old, can bring great clarity to the truth. I told those gathered for the memorial that surely my granddaughter did not fully understand the things I told her, but then, neither do any of us! But there are all sorts of things (like electricity) that I use and live by and depend on that I do not understand fully or at all. It does not make them false, or any less dependable. Such is the meaning of the cross. Crazy!

I wear my cross necklace often. I will wear it with more sense of purpose from now on. Being a grandmother and being a pastor are not all that different at the core. Being crazy in love with my grandchildren reminds me a lot of just how crazy God's love is for us. Gramasylum is a great place for a pastor to live.