I miss the rains down in Africa. This mamsy-pamsy California rain doesn’t make the cut.
Rain didn’t play around in Dar es Salaam. When it rained, it rained with purpose. This rain wanted you to get wet; it was pointless to pick a fight. It was determined to make its presence known, creating rivers where there were none, punching the tin roofs, angry not to be let in. It pounded hard on the earth, awakening toadstools and millions of flying termites, sprouting grassy mold on shoes and beds and belts. The sky was electric; the lion’s roar ruptured the heavens, demanding to be heard.
But it’s the smell I miss the most. The scent of that rain would filter through our window screens, filled with growing things, animated with life. It carried on it the savannah of wild antelope, the ancient strains of the baobab tree, the underwater gardens of coral. I inhaled, and I breathed Africa into my lungs.
Why did it take a war to end slavery in America, and not revival?
Are you familiar with the two Great Awakenings? In the 18th and 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Americans were turning to Christ. It wasn’t just lip service; society was transformed by Christianity. The Industrial Revolution, the modern missions movement, and even our unique political system are all credited to these revivals.
Yet slavery carried on, unchallenged. Human beings, made in the image of God, were bought and sold because of the color of their skin. Children were torn away from their parents, strong men were forced to work themselves to death, young women were beaten at the slightest whim. Even while Christianity was sweeping the nation.
Since the Great Awakenings brought about such stirring influence in politics, business, and individual character, why wasn’t there nationwide repentance over slavery?
Sure, many slaves were part of these revivals. And some abolitionist movements were awakened. But it wasn’t enough. Because it didn’t take revival to end slavery in America, it took war.
Yet even the war didn’t change hearts. Not long after the Civil War, Christians all over America enacted laws and policies that kept black people dehumanized, brutalized, terrorized for another one hundred years. While millions of Americans sang hymns and pledged allegiance to the Christian flag and sent missionaries to foreign lands, black Americans were being lynched in front of immense cheering crowds of men, women, and their children.
The waves of information crash, seeking to drown me. Everyone is passionate. Everyone has a different opinion. And the anger and the fear and the intensity are so strong and so overwhelming that sometimes I just want to put my fingers in my ears: I don’t care. I can’t know anything for sure so just shut up.
But disconnecting isn’t going to help the cause of Christ or humanity or my own soul.
Why do I believe what I believe? There has probably never before been a more important time to ask this question.
I am committed to finding truth. How do I discern what to read, who to trust, what to think? Here are my thoughts.
My worldview is always, always the beginning.
Where did we come from? What is my purpose? What went wrong with the world? How can it be fixed?
I took those questions by the throat and wrestled with them for a number of years before I settled on the worldview presented in the Bible. And how I answer these big questions filters down into how I answer all of the smaller questions. But those big questions have to be answered first.
Here’s an important clarification: Using a biblical worldview to form my opinions is vastly different from cherry picking Bible verses. Individual verses can say anything you want them to say, which is crazy dangerous. It’s like giving a sheriff’s badge to a six year old. Lots of authority, absolutely no wisdom.
For example, when someone writes that 2 Corinthians 3:18 is telling Christians we shouldn’t wear masks during a pandemic, that’s, well, abhorrent. The Bible actually doesn’t say anything about masks. But it does have a lot to say about the role of government and how to love your neighbor. Connect those dots, and I can form an opinion on the matter. But that’s way different than pulling out some random verse and making it say what I want.
This means I must know the Bible. All of it, and really, really well.
I must ruthlessly scrutinize my own bias.
The temptation to believe what I want to believe is ridiculously strong. This is a problem. I have to ask, Do I want to believe what makes me feel safe and merry and smug? Or do I really want the truth?
Do I believe this because I am simply afraid? Or because it feels lofty to be rebellious? Am so I disgusted by the messenger that I don’t want to consider the message? Or am I just too ticked off to consider an alternative?
In May of 2016, I wrote an article called American Christians, You Might Need to Start Living Like Missionaries. I remember I wrote it pretty quickly, without a lot of editing, and I wasn’t expecting it to go very far. To my shock, it became one of my most-read pieces in all my years of blogging. It was shared hundreds of times and linked on a number of different websites. In fact, a magazine contacted me and asked to pay me to print it.
If I had known it was going to be that popular, I would have chosen a less ridiculous picture to go with it. Good grief.
I think the reason it struck a nerve, though, was because that was the year everyone assumed that Hillary Clinton would be the next president. American Christians were bracing themselves for an assault against their core values. So the idea of needing to live like a missionary resonated with a lot of people. In fact, 8 days before the election, that post received 13,000 hits–on one day. That’s astonishing for my dinky little blog.
As we all know, the story had an unexpected twist when Trump was elected on November 8th. And suddenly, Christians didn’t feel they were on the outside anymore. In fact, some of them felt that we had gained the upper hand. Guess what? Nobody was interested in that post anymore.
As I reflect on the last four years, I mourn the loss of that attraction to the missionary mindset among American Christians. Sure, one could arguably make the case that there were gains in religious liberty and conservative values in these last four years. But was there a cost? Being in power makes us feel like we can win battles without winning hearts. It can make us idolize strength, instead of glorying in weakness. It can make us forget that we are supposed to be living like missionaries.
Thirty years ago this month, I left my family for boarding school. According to American assumptions, that must mean I was a juvenile delinquent. Or maybe a wizard.
But no, Hogwarts didn’t exist in January 1991 when I was 14, but Rift Valley Academy did. My family had recently moved to Ethiopia, and there was no international high school for me. All the missionary teenagers were sent off to RVA in Kenya, so after a semester of lonely correspondence school, I asked my parents if I could join them.
I wanted to go, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t terrified. I was painfully shy and very much a homebody, and though I had already traveled the world in my short life, I had never been away from my family for more than a couple of days.
I can remember seeing my mother’s tear-stained face through the glass at the airport, trying valiantly to hold it together myself. Though I was traveling with a number of older missionary kids, I didn’t know any of them. It was my first time going through immigration on my own, getting on an airplane, and landing in a country I had never been to before.
A bus picked us up at the airport, and we arrived at the school at dusk. A crowd of kids were there waiting for us, and I saw my suitcase cheerfully carted away by two of the girls from my dorm. There were scads of teenagers, enthusiastically greeting each other after their Christmas “vake,” as they called it, a new vocabulary I knew nothing of. Somehow I managed to be swept along a path, down a set of stairs and into my dorm, where I met the three girls who would be my roommates.
