Ted and friend in Sudan

I just got back from Southern Sudan, to a people so remote that it takes an 8 hour hike to the nearest road, then a 9 hour drive to get to a town most westerners would call the end of the earth. There is an airstrip at our destination, and the wind conditions have to be just right in order for an AIM AIR plane to land, as they were the morning we flew in.
The place looked a lot like Gatab, where we lived for 5 years, with rolling green hills and the desert visible thousands of feet below. There is not the forest, having been replaced with cornfields on every hillside. This was an agricultural society, growing mostly corn, which mostly goes to a fermented beer called methi. There are no believers here, no church. No one has ever been here to tell them about Jesus Christ, at least until a few months ago.
The few missionaries there now are part of something pretty special that AIM has. It’s a 2 year missions training program called TIMO (Training in Ministry Outreach) that gives young people an opportunity to learn about missions academically, while living it physically and experientially. We were shooting a video for TIMO and using the team here in Sudan as a model.
It was a difficult shoot. We had a script in hand on which we had spent days, laboring over the perfect words to communicate such a powerful and complex idea as TIMO. But it didn’t take long before we realized that the script we had just didn’t work right, that we needed to start over. It’s hard to be that flexible, to scrap what you’ve sweated hours to build when you honestly realize it’s not good enough. Tim, a short termer on his last trip with us, and I stayed up late most nights, sometimes into the morning, squeezing every last creative idea from our minds, writing on the backs of scrap paper by candle light and kerosene lantern in a small mud hut, surrounded by the sounds, both human and animal, of village Africa. Then we had it- something better, something that makes the transition from the mind to the heart, the difference between understanding and action.
Then we had to shoot it. It was different- a presenter style video geared for the college age, with humor and life-altering seriousness mixed together.
The shooting went remarkably well. One scene had our presenter asking some local guys, in their language, if they wanted some coffee. Of course, we shot several takes trying out different ways of saying it. At each successive take, the local guys started getting confused as to why they were being asked repeatedly when they had already given their answer. So they started adding to it. The last response to a request for coffee was, “Yes! And a shirt, and a broom, and some food, and some pants! And why do you keep asking us!?”
The tricky winds weren’t so kind to us on the way out, however. The airplane could not land. So we waited to the next day, loaded up ourselves and some young helpers with all our gear and hiked 9 miles through the hills to the next airstrip to catch a plane there. Tim, Kate, and I -our team- were asking each other what we’d do when we got home. My response was that I would probably try to stay on my feet as all my kids would tackle me after 8 days away. When the moment arrived, I wasn’t even able to get out of the car as the kids piled in on top of me. It was so good to be home. So grateful for my family. I held my youngest’s face close to mine and said, “I love you, Timmy.” He gave his 2 year old wisdom in his response, “So much.”

May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide how long, how high, and how deep his love really is.
Ephesians 3:17-18 (NLT)