I Cannot, Not Go

Less than a week before our departure. It is hard to believe that at this time next week, we will be on the ground in Nairobi.

Yesterday afternoon I opened up Brian McLaren’s new book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. While I don’t always agree with Brian, God has used his thoughts and ideas in powerful ways to leader me to a new place in my journey with Jesus. As I read the opening chapters, I realized afresh why Brian is a compelling author and I am doing something other than writing books.

Often people ask me why I am going to Africa. I do my best to present a compelling picture of why I believe God wants me to travel to Africa at this point in time. Sometimes people seem to “get it” and other times I feel like I have failed miserably to present a cogent vision. And so yesterday my heart leapt as I read Brian’s in the chapter entitled “The Amahoro Flowing between Us.”

In some ways I could not not go on this trip. As a follower of Jesus, and as a pastor for over two decades, I knew that in the Bible God shows a special concern for the poor, the vulnerable, the forgotten, the oppressed. I knew that Jesus said, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these…you did for me” (Matthew 25:40).

But I also knew that most churchgoers, including myself, either didn’t share that concern for the poor or didn’t know how to turn concern and good intentions into constructive action. Even though we believed that the poor should be helped - that poverty should be fought - we didn’t know how. We had heard liberal and conservative arguments blaming poverty on everything from capitalism to communism, from corruption to bad trade policies, and from debt, to the selfishness of the West, racism, family breakdown the irresponsibility or immorality of the poor, government regulation of business, and badly administered charity. We seemed polarized by our ideological diagnoses of the causes and cures of poverty, and even worse, we were paralyzed by our polarization, and so the poor continued to suffer - trapped by their poverty and our polarizing, paralyzing arguments about poverty.

I was forty-eight years old, and if I was ever going to do something about poverty and injustice, it seemed like high time to get more first hand experience.” (Everything Must Change, 15-16)

Eerie, almost creepy (in a God sense of things). In my forty-eighth year of life, after over two decades of ministry, I cannot not go. Thanks Brian for reminding me of that reality.

Dream Venti…