The Two Options

It is still odd being back home. My lovely civilized little apartment is set up just the way I like it, a haven for my spirit to rest in and a cozy spot to receive guests needing refreshment. The flowers are recovering from my neglect the first few days I was home, and the tomato vine is exploding. The cat did remarkably well while I was gone, bypassing her usual 3 days of neurotic scruffy anxiety when I got home and being her normal, sleek cuddly self. She currently has herself plopped across my lap between myself and the laptop on my knees, cradling her head in the crook of my elbow. It's all very soothing and comfortable.

Yet nearly every moment I am really conscious of the contrast between this bubble of safety and a teeming life that beckons me back to Rwanda. Concrete floors, rutted dirt side roads, hardly any flowers except in swanky hotels, dry fountains, frogs in the bathroom, geckos on the walls, huge nasty bugs here and there, mosquitoes and malaria (I'm guessing one can't take malarone for a whole year...and the expense is insane). Boring food that the whole country eats every day: sawdust peas, "chips" (ie: big french fries), cut green beans, battered fish, soupy chicken, rice, powdered cream in the tea. Zealolusly teetotaling Evangelicals who live on water, Coke and citron Fanta soda pop (thank God I'm a Catholic and can drink wine! HA!). Hand-washed clothes never looking that clean, red dirt on everything, showering off a pound of dirt daily (including a face gritty with dust), standing in a red dishpan under an Italian-electric trickle that you pray will keep delivering warmish water (and then you pray afterward that the dripping will stop so water isn't wasted and water pressure down to zero til they buy another tankful of water). Brick walls with anti-climbing broken glass cemented to the top, grass only in the rainy season, people carrying jerrycans of water for miles every day. Holding babies covered in their own crap on their clothes (diapers? What're those?), dealing with begging people on an entirely different standard of whether or not to give (though our hosts in general said not to give to professional beggars, because it encourages a demeaning culture of begging instead of dignified work). Asking for "African Tea" at the uber-modern American-style coffeehouse and being told repeatedly, "we're out of it." "No, I just had it here this morning." "Oh? Okay." How can you be out of a national staple? And just when you're dying to write and tell the folks back home about the car full of goats you just saw, or about the profundity of a genocide survival story someone shared, the internet is so aggravating to access (even with the wireless of the much-touted "American" cafe) that a Silicon Valley-spoilt native must remind oneself, "TIA - This Is Africa - deal with it!"

In Nairobi we saw a billboard that caused us to laugh hysterically - showing a man knocking his open laptop to his head in frustration. "Troubles with the internet?" Oh gadzooks, do we know troubles with the internet. Hopefully I can get the picture from the person who caught it on their camera from our taxi.

One story I love though, happened when our group's pastor Ben found out his flight from Kigali to Johannesburg had been cancelled. It was on the brand-new "Rwandair," and we learned that they have only one airplane that does all the routes at different times and on different days! They cancelled the flight a month in advance without bothering to notify any passengers, and when the Rwandan director of our mission went with Ben to the airport to schedule another flight, they told him that they would not return Ben's money or pay for another flight. John, the director, is an intense, brilliant, extraverted Rwandan, full of energy and resourcefulness and godly idealism at age 32. He scolded the desk agent: "This is not the kind of Rwanda we are building! We do not do business this way!"

With statements like that, it hits home once again that this is a nation being rebuilt one brick at a time, one person at a time, one interaction at a time, and every single citizen is responsible to participate in culture renewal. (John's citizen-to-citizen exhortation got results: Rwandair arranged and paid for Ben's flight on another airline.)

So my East-coast-beach-house-style apartment is wonderful - but I can have it and live a "life of quiet desperation", as John Eldredge calls it, with whole days staring at a computer, or I can give it up and live life to the hilt, immersed in relational transaction and nation-building all day long, every day.

When I first got the open invitation to come back to Rwanda for a year's internship, I laid awake all night, the wheels in my head spinning relentlessly. I thought about my cozy apartment and liquidating it, and waves of panic set in. "Oh God, what do I do about that?!"

And the Word of the Lord came to me right away, as I lay there in the night: Sell all you have and follow Me.

Oh NO, I groaned inside. I can't believe God just laid that one in front of me. I have to do it, or I'll be like the rich young ruler who "had great wealth", and went away sad.

In that moment I realized how rich I really am, and what an obstacle relative wealth and comfort is.

But yesterday in a downtown Los Gatos café and along the streets, the conversations I overheard just about drove me through the roof. I felt a huge annoyance with shallow society. We are so spoiled! We are bored, absolutely bored - life is about amusing oneself, buying more stuff because there is nothing to do, shallow silly talk, endless petty dramas and analysis of he-said-she-said, fake excitement about things not worth blinking at, just so we can emotionally prostitute ourselves to get a client to pay us for a service that is absolutely optional for survival.

I'm sick of it. It's worthless. It's shameful. And it destroys us. How many people do you know whose bodies are freaking out with reactions to normally harmless foods, who ache all over in trauma-related disorders that doctors can't seem to solve? We're all tired and miserable and addicted to adrenaline and comfort.

Even if we don't work in a "Dilbert"/"Office Space" office (which is the ultimate in this pathetic boredom if we don't make ways to redeem it), we are still living in a world that is completely self-serving in the worst possible way. We can get everything we want - even rare foods are now imported like it's nothing from all over the world. We have no longing, no self-denial, no patience, no nobility, no sacrifice, no challenge other than excelling at impressing others and making more money, getting more competent with our time (doing what??). We rush and demand it NOW and get angry, because others get angry at us when we don’t deliver to them, like, yesterday. And the regional term for a non-African in Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Congo and environs really shows all this: muzungu - "one who spins around in circles."

The Brazilians have a beautiful word in Portuguese: Saudades. It is fairly untranslatable but it essentially means a longing for people or a place or thing from which you are apart. They use it to sign letters to show they love you. Californians don't have that kind of longing for anything. We don't deny ourselves of anything, and we just complain til we get what we want. When we finally find the ultimate longing - someone to love and share our life with, we destroy our relationships, marriages and unborn babies with selfishness and refusals to sacrifice and give with generosity. One man at my church commented yesterday that if there was ever a serious disaster in California, people wouldn't sacrifice or share - they'd just loot, because they think they're entitled to it, under the circumstances. Is it any wonder that narcissism is such an observed epidemic in America?

Each of us, if we desire to live right with God and man, must make a choice. Either we live for self or we find a calling and go serve others at sacrificial cost to ourselves. You can do it in Rwanda, and you can do it in America. But you must do it, or you will lose your soul. Even your faith will only be about getting what you want and your feeling of satisfaction with God will hinge on whether or not you feel depressed. But that depression comes from having a purposeless life of no sacrifice. God is not to blame for that.

And as I write this I realize that part of my frustration over the last few years of career-searching is that I didn't take the opportunity to spend myself on sacrificial service. I should have been serving in the soup kitchen down the road, or tutoring kids, or helping out with home visits for people requesting assistance through my church. The only time I really sacrificed in the last year was when I ran Prop 8/Protect Marriage election operations for several months last fall. I was exhausted and my house fell apart, but I felt great and it made a big impact, not just in the outcome, but in the lives of individuals who tell me they are now inspired to go out and do the same thing in the next round.

When I grappled with my fear of getting hurt relationally if I took the risk to move to Rwanda, a priest in Kigali gave me one of St. Ignatius' great discernment tests. "If you had one year to live, would you choose to come to Rwanda or stay home?"

Immediately I said, "I'd come to Rwanda, because if I died at the end I wouldn't care about how I'd have to recover from whatever went wrong."

Just as instantly, I got the point: I had to leave that fear to God, whether I died or not. Control is a self-limiting illusion. And then the Word of the Lord came to me a second time: "Give your life away - spend it on this. If you try to save your life, you'll lose it."

At the National Genocide Memorial in Kigali, there are several gardens depicting themes and phases in Rwanda's national tragedy. One is called "The Garden of Self-Protection."

It is all cactuses.

And there are upwards of 250,000 coffins buried at that memorial alone, and bones too numerous to count in memorials all over the country.

Oh Lord, show us how to redeem the time,
to give ourselves away for You and for others.
Help us to make other people the priority of our lives
in the way You call us to, so that we all can find true life.