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I was not really prepared for how God would rock my world. He would make me question every decision I had made about the church as an entity.
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I was forced to rethink what the church ought to be motivated by and what her work should look like in the rest of the world outside her doors.
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See, I had always said I really didn't have a desire to go to Africa. In the African American community the relationship to that continent is somewhat like the relationship of a Muslim to Mecca, or a Jew to Jerusalem: you are supoosed to long to make the pilgrimage "home" at least once in your lifetime. But Africa is hot and dry and poor. I had already experienced hot and dry growin up in the country in Lancaster, South Carolina.
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When I thought of Africa I didn't think of home or of finding my ancestors. See some Black people have a need to "know who they are." Some have even successfully traced their ancestry back beyond slavery to the Mother continent. Most Blacks can only trace their lineage back to the time of slavery because the slaves were given new names by their masters. Sometimes their names were even changed when resold. See the miniseries ROOTS by Alex Haley for a good picture of this. Kunte Kente is broken when he is beaten in order to make him accept his slave name Toby.
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Africa represented for me a history with which i could never fully connect because i didn't even know what part of Africa was "home."
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To complicate matters I should show some grace to my parents. It is not surprising that parenting and emotional intimacy was difficult for them. Neither ever met their own father. neither was sure who their father was. My mom grew up taking care of her 6 younger siblings, sometimes even missing school to do so. But I imagine she was reminded everyday that their father was only her stepfather. I'm sure she grew tired of explaining why her last name was different than theirs. I remember when education became important to me. She told the story of how she didn't graduate on time because at the end of her senior year she had missed too many days helping out around the farm and helping her mother with the kids. She did receive her diploma a few months later but missed out on an invitation to college. I refused right then to be trapped in Lancaster.
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I must also say I that bear my father no grudge or ill will. But it HAS taken years and some revelations to forgive and love him. See we had a grandmother, Azalee, on his side. And she was the sweetest most perfect grandma you could imagine. We knew that she had helped raise my father. So I couldn't understand how someone so mean, my father, could be that way after experiencing such pure love.
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As a teenager I remember the agony of weeping FOR this man I thought I hated when mom told us some of his story. Not only did he never know his father, but his mother was killed when he was young by a man who may have been his father. He spent the rest of his childhood being passed around from relative to relative. Eventually he ended up with his Grandfather and his second wife Azalee. And his grandfather was uncommunicative and authoritarian. I wept because I realized he probably had never felt loved or wanted in his life. And he was probably angry that his mom was taken away and angry that he had so many questions that could never be answered.
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Questions I now knew I could never hope to answer. Who am I genetically? Where did my people come from? Do I look like them? What did they do for a living? What were their talents? Would they be proud of me?
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The Leadership Summit made all of that irrelevant. Several speakers really rebuked the Bride of Christ for her lack of compassion and outreach to the poor and needy in the world. They challenged us, me, to reach out in our local community AND to reach across oceans to end the AIDS crisis and World Hunger. They called it stupid hunger because there is enough food on the planet to feed everyone on the planet everyday. In our country alone we throw AWAY enough food to feed several Third World nations. The more they urged, cajoled, and chastised the more this restless I became.
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I remember at the end of the Summit that I grabbed my Pastor by both shoulder and looked him in the eye and said "We have to reach out beyond the walls of our own church! When people hurt or are in need, it should be our hands and feet, in Jesus' name, that show up to help." I commited then and there to fight to see our church more outwardly focused and globally involved!
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So naturally God challenged me not long afterwards with an invitation to help establish a missionary relationship between CUMC and an orphanage in Uganda. We had raised an incredible sum of money, the Christmas before, to construct shelters for the children made famous by Invisible Children. They were forced to flee their villages and towns by the hundreds every night so as not to be abducted and conscripted into the rebel armies. Often their first act after being kidnapped was having to kill one or all of their family members. This was designed to make them feel too guilty and alone to turn back.
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They would flood the cities where they expected safety but end up sleeping on the streets because there was no room for all of them. Finally organizations began to build shelters where they could come nightly and find beds, food, and compassion.
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We wanted to be able to send misionary teams from our church to be involved in that work but it didn't work out. So we turned to an orphanage in the same country, Uganda, that took in abandoned and abused children. The orphanage emlployed Ugandans to care for the children and procured adoptive parents for the abandoned.
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How could I say no to that, even if it meant eating the words I had foolishly uttered many times. "I'll never go to Africa!" This spitfire tiny misionary girl named Tasha and I would co-lead the trip which she had done all the work to organize. We recruited a team that included my brother/son Brandon and his future wife, and several other young women from the church whom I really admired already for their godliness. I packed bags and my portable keyboard and headed to Africa.
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A note about the keyboard. 4 years earlier I had been working at First United Methodist Child Developmnt Center when they received a donation of unwanted playthings. Among them was a 2 foot long miniature keyboard they thought might be fixed but didn't work. I jumped right on that offer. Every morning I would arrive at work early to play piano a bit, and then again on my lunch break, because I didn't have one at home. By then someone had taught me how to play praise songs using the cheat sheets and chord charts of worship musicians.
I took the keyboard home and turned it on. It still worked! I opened the battery compartment and removed the 6 D batteries that had burst open and corroded inside it. How could it work with busted batteries? I replaced them, and as the Lord is my witness, I would play for hours a day but never, never, had to change the batteries unless I left it on without playing and forgot to turn it off. I played it in Honduras, in France, for my friends from Refuge, for the Youth at CUMC when I worked with them, and it went everywhere I went.
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Months before Uganda it was stolen out of my car which had broken down and been towed. They caught the thief in the act but held the keyboard as evidence until just before our departure! I knew God meant for me to take it. I ended up leaving it there with one of the Ugandan men who wistfully aid that his church needed a keyboard. Now I would like to appear unselfish but I knew I had a state of the art full-sized keyboard back at home. The praise team knew how much I loved playing. So when mine was stolen they all chipped in and bought me a Yamaha for Christmas. When they presented this familiarly shaped wrapped box I just wept. I still play it almost every day.
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I digress. So we get to Uganda and literally just join the staff as volunteers caring for and teaching these preschool childrn and infants. We changed loads of diapers and worked in 6-8 hour shifts. Three of the women, (two young moms, and a single young adult) even seriously considered adopting one of more the infants they each had cared for and become attached to. I of course was attached to several children as well. Jeremias is clearly handiapped, mentally and physically. One might even say unattractive but I gravitated towards this kid who most people would avoid. Several children reminded me of my brother and sister as kids and made me long for my own. None touched me as deeply though as Tolo.
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Tolo had been rescued from malnourishment. She had the unnaturally large belly and small limbs of one who has almost starved to death. She would only allow a few of the workers to touch or hold her and never seemed to smile or play. Some part of me desperately wanted, needed to see her connect and heal. You may have attended the service at CUMC where we shared some about our adventure and each team member held up pictures of the children from Amani Baby Cottage. If you had looked closely you would have noticed that while everyone else held up 2 different children I held 2 pictures of Tolo. And my tears were not just from the power of what we as a team had experienced it from what I saw in the 2 pictures.
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The first picture, in black and white, showed Tolo as I remembered her, wounded, remote, alone, and inaccessible.
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The second, Tasha had saved to surprise me. It was taken during the weeks she had spent at Amani after our team had left. It showed Tolo in full color with the biggest happiest smile. You know, the smile that makes your cheeks ache. And the smile was not just a polite smile, it reached her eyes and came from her soul. She was laughing and happy!
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I admitted to the congregation that day that although I felt called to France, I would go anywhere God might send me to fight for and care for the world's poor, abused, and neglected children.
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That's still true. If for some reason God were to make France impossible, it would be to send me someplace that is more forgotten and where the need is just as great.
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