Beating Around the Bush
The Way Home’s “Servant’s Retreat” in the discipleship village is filled this week with….well…Servants! Let us share the blog of one of those servants, Fred Langeland, who has come with one of our two senior advocate’s, Heather Osborn to accomplish a very BIG job…photo journaling our, now 60, Granny Families:
Fred writes: Today was an adventure unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. We were on dirt bikes literally beating through the African bush. When I talk about Africa I normally hesitate to use words like “bush” and “village.” In one of my classes in Bible college we had a student from Africa and I remember her complaining that Americans all thought everybody in Africa grew up in a grass hut out in the bush. She was from a modern city and found our presumption both ignorant and arrogant. Well, we weren’t in the city today! We visited 17 granny homes, meeting with them, taking photos, and looking at their gardens. We were really in the African bush. We went down roads that weren’t even roads – some of them just a path between villages. If we had lost our leader you never would have seen Heather or me again – there was no way to know where we were or where the next turn would lead. I’d be building our grass huts as you read this.
My being here is an incredible gift and an experience I don’t want to squander on myself. I believe God provided the means for me to be here for a reason. Today in the solitude of my motorcycle helmet I recalled a thought from our devotions last night. The person who shared it didn’t remember where she got it so I can’t cite credit but it goes like this: “In Christian life and witness so much is lost because we are indefinite. The devil is not worried by our pious aspirations. He is troubled when, in obedience to God, for the glory of Christ and in the power of the Spirit, we make firm practical decisions to do specific things for the Lord.” Pious aspirations. Ever have any of those? To be the best wife or husband your spouse could ever dream of. To be the dad that yours wasn’t. To get out of debt. To save for a secure retirement. To have deep conversations with your kids so they don’t make the same mistakes you did. To be a godly man or woman. I’ve certainly had more than my share of them and many of them have ended in my being indefinite. My prayer is that through this experience I’ll move beyond pious aspirations about spreading the gospel to the poor in Africa into practical decisions to do specific things. In obedience to God. For the glory of Christ. In the power of the Spirit.
