I remember when I first felt led into missions.  I remember being a boy and visiting the New Tribes Mission field training grounds in Ontario with my father and feeling a kind of affinity for the lifestyle or the image of the lifestyle that you can have when you’re a child thinking of being a grown-up.  I remember being in Bible college or at conferences and feeling ready, strong but aimless.  Hitch-hiking I would evangelize every car and then I found my way to the rigs which I felt was my mission field but in actuality became a mistress and my Delilah.  Yet still on Sundays or in prayer I would beg God for a yoke.  I remember my heart pounding in church and my blood boiling, the muscles along the back of my shoulders and neck swelling as they implored God for labour and abuse that would glorify him.  Begging forgiveness for my wreckless living in one sentence and begging for my harness or my pit in the next.  I felt like I had no place in a church and that there was nothing anywhere for me, that there was nothing worth caring for and the sole answer was to plunge into some sort of celibate, arduous penance and my faith would be perfected and I would be clean and God would be happy.

Two weeks ago I was praying with a group of eight Africans in the little village of Nadiabanli.  There’s a National Bible School there and pastors from various parts of Burkina move their entire families there, farm the land and make a life until their training is over and then return.  I was there with our drill and equipment because life is hard for them while they study and without a well they may have to move the school or shut it down.  So we were praying, and the pastor layed his hands on the drill and prayed for God to open the Rock and called for water in the name of Christ his saviour and an heir to the riches of God as His son.  And I worked and the 50 degree weather put the sting of sweat in my eyes, turned my urine dark yellow and made it stink as it stained the cracked earth.  And I prayed and watched the others pray and drilled the deepest driest hole I could.

Before that was the Fulani Village.  Mocked for by their Muslim neighbours for their conversion and living with a desperate need of water we arrived with the equipment as their brothers and friends with a gift and hopefully answer to their prayers.  They grilled us chickens and served us the best of what little they had and everyone prayed but we left and they had nothing more but two holes puncturing heaps of dry rock dust.

And this is when I tell myself that I am right about God’s character.  That he is impossible to truly know the way we think of, personally.  That there is a God and a saviour that loves us but perhaps there is no real dialogue or intervention in our lives.  And how could there be?  How could we fool ourselves into thinking we have the capacity to interact with the eternal, the universal.  Our capacity is the problem and the source of the despair I have found myself embracing the past years.  Like knowing God only served me to understand my condition and like wallowing in despair, clinging to hopelessness like a whore would save me.  Somewhere my idea of salvation ended at understanding the brokenness of man and became the main tenant of my faith that directs my life.

But it hasn’t always been this way.  I used to live in a backpack and move with my thumb and every car had an earful of joy and the ability to escape from bondage with Christ.  Children in Bible camp had a glimpse of a life lived in liberation and in my early days on the rigs there was a man with a harness for all his appetites.

But despite the love I have held for this despair this brokenness we are born with and brought her in my bed and loved her deeply and passionately she is being painfully rent from my hands.  The pain of my absent fiancée, the frustration of work in a country without infrastructure and the despair of millions at my doorstep push me to one place.  It seems as though it does not matter how many times I analyze my experiences, push myself in my Gnosticism or try to believe that we are cut from true communion with God when I go to bed I am begging him for it and find a kind of comfort there.  And so this sliver of light that I have been unable to expel from my heart for a very long time is finally being let to pierce some of my dark places and dispel the long, sharp-edged dusky shadows I’ve been so diligently cultivating.

So with yet a mild bitterness I thank God for this new (again) hope.  My pain and my work of sacrifice here has done nothing for me but a Bible verse I have not truly seen in some time will bring tears and a line from a hymn joy.  I still don’t know if God’s character is something to be grasped but I do believe in glimpses and slivers and I love and grip my sliver of a glimpse of God tightly and hope to live again with honour and more fully know this freedom I love to turn from.

I suppose this is the type of experience typical to North American Christians in this part of the world but since I’m back into blogging, here’s a bit about mine.