Perfect love casts out fear, 1 John 4:18.  The verse suction-cupped itself to that anxious spot in my heart…again.  I read further and found out that being scared means I have not yet gotten Loving down thoroughly.  A little laugh burst out and my eyes widened as I read the verse and the verse read my mind.  And I was comforted that God is still working on me.  It is one thing to be loved- another entirely to be thoroughly understood and still utterly loved.

We have received a new team member named Bess Brownlee, but she is hidden away in language acquisition class and not at the OFM yet.  Looking for time to get to know her a little, we took her with us to our school’s fall play.  Ted’s teammate Andy Brown’s wife Lesa is the Director of Fine Arts at the Rosslyn Academy, where our boys attend.  She and her cast and crew put on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe this past weekend.  It was fantastic, a favorite story of ours anyway, and amazing to see school friends and acquaintances in their alter-ego forms.  But I kept thinking about Bess.  I wondered what it is like for her to begin her life in Africa now.  How odd was it for her to be part of the cheering, clapping audience for a school play in Africa?  I imagined the changes a year will bring in her and in us and in the team.  A year from now we might all know each other quite well.  I kept remembering my first month in Africa nearly eleven years ago….

So scared, I was ashamed to admit how intensely afraid of failure I felt.  After I had lost 20 pounds in about a month, many friends and family began praying for me in earnest.  From home, folks wrote encouraging notes and sent books and music.  On this side, perceptive African eyes watched and checked in with warm handshakes, daily greetings, enthusiastic praise for small efforts in Swahili.  The God I had always talked about was there and knew me.  Internally as deep as where dreams are and where the thinking and feeling goes on in quieter moments, there was nothing even in the clay of my heart to surprise the Potter.

Just a few weeks ago, we received a note from a young Kenyan friend.  He wrote about a time inside of those hard beginning days for us in Africa.  He said we had helped him out of a difficulty, and he wanted to thank us.  We cannot remember doing it.  The note told of the domino effect of the help that came when this young man needed it.  It told of his family being affected -or even blessed- in layers since that time.  It was amazing to read.  It cascaded into finding work, schooling for younger siblings, a roof that did not leak anymore.  His expression of gratitude was to the God who knew him, the God who also knew us and gave us usefulness even when we felt so broken, the God who knew the team sending us and loved energizing their offering.

I look forward to God’s success stories about him giving us more of his deeply loving spirit, ridding us of un-love, weeding the gardens of our hearts and lives of whatever looks or is unloving, and thereby sending all our fears to the point of no return.
~Liisa

One of the really cool things about being a Dad to teenage boys is the permission it gives you to have crazy adventures in the name of bonding and discipleship.  It was under such honorable and responsible convictions that my boys and I decided to arm ourselves with sticks and flashlights and leave our beachfront guesthouse late at night, after the little ones were tucked in bed, and go find some marine wildlife with large teeth.  I’d been thinking of risk, lately, and how we’re scared of some kinds of risk, but  expose ourselves willingly and unthinkingly to others.  Moray eels are nocturnal, and hunt their prey at night. Hopping from pool to pool at low tide, it didn’t take long to find one.  Soon we saw them hunting, lying quiet and just barely moving in the pools.  Usually they were just around two feet long and about as thick as a broom pole.
Then we saw him, the big one.  More than three feet long and thicker than my arm- there was something different about this one.  He didn’t move at all but stared motionless at we couldn’t figure out what.  Wanting to see if he was alive, I pushed a sea urchin towards him with my stick and he bolted- straight towards us!  We all jumped as he came right out of the water, slithering like lightning past us and into another pool, coiling up right next to the path we had just passed through.  Then he sat motionless again, just staring.  Might be better to get some distance from this one, I thought.
We continued out to sea, the few lights on the African shore seeming to shrink in the distance.  We saw several more eels, none as big as “him” though.  Other unidentified and quite strange sea creatures were revealed in the beam of our lights before reaching the end of the tide pools.  Collin’s flashlight died at that point, and we knew we’d have to go back relatively the same way we came, which meant going past “him.”
We were down to one good light and one dim light, choosing carefully our footsteps back, knowing that “he” was somewhere, silent and watching. Walking closely together, sharing the good light, Jonathan took a step onto a ridge between two pools and I saw “him,” the big one, coiled an inch below the water just 12 inches from Jonathan’s foot.  Recognizing that he hadn’t moved from our encounter with him half an hour before, I decided in that instant to just proceed, but a change in my breathing drew attention to the danger, and Collin said, “There he is!”  Jonathan directed the light straight on him, still 12 inches from his foot, balancing on the ridge between the pools.   He sucked in a sudden lungful of air.  You never know how a person is going to react in an emergency situation.  Even those who seem tough can dissolve into panic given the right amount of stress intensity, and you don’t know about yourself until it happens. Jonathan didn’t panic.  He didn’t freeze, he didn’t run or lose his balance.  He simply responded to my words of “keep going.” I followed, with Collin holding the other light behind me, the eel just staring…
The boys have some memories now, memories of witnessing first hand a beautiful and dangerous part of God’s creation.  It was an experience, a story, not possible without taking some risk.  As a storyteller I’m always interested in how danger and risk play a role in making a story interesting.  A lot of what we do in life, whether consciously or not passes through a risk/benefit filter. We’re a pretty conservative family when it comes to what we decide to expose ourselves to from the Entertainment industry.  There are risks there, both in the inadvertent adoption of values foreign to our maker, and in the simple investment of time.  It’s a little more subtle and insidious though, than a staring Moray Eel.
-Ted

Working on the video, my team and I had a lot of fun renting out the tiny wood shop in a small town in Southwest Uganda.  The missionaries and local people we worked with are a great team of faithful people, demonstrating discipleship with their lives.  Thanks to all those who prayed for this project.  It was a privilege to interact with these believers for the sake of Christ’s church in Mbarara and around the world.

Hope stands like a pillar in my heart holding up an immaterial sheltering roof when even the walls crumble.  I read of Christians not so far away hunted down and treated in ways unthinkable.  I get acquainted right here with impossible situations of injustice and sorrow.  I sometimes struggle with possibilities, twisting anxieties, and even realistic fears just letting the kids get on the school bus or Ted go off to his next travel.  But God is so great.  One young friend returned from Rwanda with the amazing insight that the more we get to see the scope of evil, the more our inner eyes can widen at the depth of God’s mercy.  Our jaw can go ahead and drop.  Evil is that big?  Yet Evil won’t be able to even cast a shadow in front of the God who is light.  In Him there is no darkness at all.

“Yin and yang” is a profoundly wrong model, or a model of something other than ultimate realities.  The Holy Scriptures reveal Jesus Christ as the perfect image of an invisible God Triune.  Jesus said if I see him, I have seen “the Father” -Almighty God.  He is slow to wrath but the cup of His wrath will eventually fill up.  And be poured out.  Is God’s wrath against evil the pillar of my hope?  No, in fact I have read Bible verses that indicate there is actually wisdom in dreading “The Day” of His coming, so great and terrible we cannot imagine.  But yet God teaches us to call him “Daddy.”

Ted travels to South Africa- to Johannesburg.  He will be gone a day shy of a week, having been asked to attend a conference of four missions (IMB, YWaM, SIL, and AIM) who are wanting to pool ideas on service, mission, and intentional media.  He will also visit AIM’s sending office in Cape Town.

On the homefront, everyone has caught colds, and the big boys have their year’s musical summit -a band concert they have worked hard on preparing for all year.  The music I have heard practiced is beautiful.  Ted will miss it, but I will video.  I can do that; I am married to an unlicensed professional.  I hope to take Katharina D. with me to hear the music that evening.  She is a friend from Gatab who is coming into town to have the cast removed on her broken arm.  Hopefully it has fully healed.  Katharina will stay with us a few days.

~Liisa

Pulling the soggy jeans out of one side of the “twin tub” I slop it over into the spinner bucket.  My laundry machine wants to save all my water and spend all my energy.  All the clothes are chugged around in soapy water on one side of the machine and then hauled by hand into the other side of the machine which can spin.  The water spins out of those heavy wet jeans and shoots through the hose in my hand back into the soapy water side if I aim it back there, or into a bucket if I want the water for washing the car or watering the garden or flushing the toilet.

So Mama Alex comes Monday and Thursday morning to manhandle the water-saver and make it look easy.  She hangs all the laundry outside on metal lines near the garden and blesses our home with her presence.

The garden is nearly empty right now, the lemon grass, parsley, and one hot pepper plant being all that survived the recent drought.  I was especially sad when the rhubarb died. Poor lonely single rhubarb did not get enough laundry water. Rains have come to Mama Alex’s upcountry home area, so her people are busy planting.  We see clouds building up around the edges of hot sky here, so are hopeful that we should get busy planting too.

Get busy planting, my heart echoes with an ache over precious people who do not love God or know His love for them.  He is God.  Neither I nor they can bend Him to suit my fancy.  But my fancy will hardly reach around the smallest part of the wonders of Him.  In mercy, the intentional Lord Jesus does not only deign to be mindful of me but delights to keep gardening and growing good things in me, to keep washing me clean and putting out new mercies every morning. He is incomparably more demanding than my water-saver-wonder-machine and yet Himself supplies the energy to the seeker who wants to submit and be conserved and made clean and fulfilled in magnificent layers of washings and purpose.

My water-saver-wonder-machine is demanding of both Mama Alex and me, but I am thankful for the conservation, purpose, and fulfillment it lends to a limited water supply.  It muliplies the meaning of one tankful of water.  And today it washed some dust off my cognizance of my loving and determined Maker.

~Liisa