Stem the tide.  Stay in the real.  It is uncomfortable, yes.  It is burdensome, yes.  It is unsettling, yes.  It is troublesome, yes.  But, it is life.  And in Jesus, it is peaceful.  It is good.  It is new.  It is full.  It is everlasting.  God made us with his own hands in Christ Jesus, to do good works.  How can we do the good he has called us to unless we engage the real.

Let’s commit to the real and disengage from the fantasy.

There are other times that you seek it. Call us crazy, nuts, whatever, it is pretty fun to be chased on foot by a bull elephant, and live to tell about it. Holding a crocodile by the tail can be rather low key at the moment until later you realize how quick that moment could have changed. Of course driving here is the real kicker. Every time you sit behind the wheel, it is as if God calls out an extra angel or two.

Then there is life for your kids. One such game park occasion that I have a wonderful picture of is that of three of my sons being charged by an elephant while they just stood there with a pea shooter toting park ranger. He did stop, by the way, but in the picture it looks as though it could go either way. Then there is the risk of sickness for them. Me, I don’t mind malaria so much for myself (my number of cases has been in the double digits now for years) but it is pretty scary when those unexplained fevers, body aches, and chills hit your child broadside on a day or night that you can’t get a test.

There is their future to consider. What will they do one day? Where will they live? What language will they speak? Who will they marry? Will they go to college or tour the world (especially since we have vicariously trained them to travel on a dime, adapt to cultures as they go along and learn languages on the spot).

Then, there are the real tests. There are the attacks from people motivated by spirits of division, greed, deceit, and whatever else is dark and light absorbing. Often it is in the shadows, undermining us and our work. Sometimes it is petty, but when twenty petty things occur in one day, especially after a real good one, you begin to see it as an attack. Then there are the blatant frontal attacks that can even come from those who claim the spirit of Christ. Those are scary and bewildering.

You are beginning to get the picture. Satan hates us being here. He will take any opportunity to hurt us physically, spiritually, or emotionally in order to get us to leave, especially if we are bent on spreading the peace, joy, grace, truth, and love of Jesus. I want to take this a step further, though. It is you, as well, who walk along the edge, at least I hope you are. It is you as well that the enemy hates and wants to destroy. For you have made a series of decisions that have put a very large target on your back and price on your head. The enemy hates everyone he cannot control. So, every day that we grow further from his grasp because of the deepening submission to the Holy Spirit we get a little closer to the edge.

I like the edge. When I am aware of the edge, I walk carefully and I pray a lot. I take advantage of opportunities and live a fulfilling life. I long for His Word. More than anything, though, it makes me want to go home to be with Him. He is King of the edge walkers.

Be at peace. Enjoy the journey. Persevere in the times of trouble. Focus on Jesus!

John 16:3 “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

I was dumbfounded.  It made sense because of the aims of this time in Rwanda of remembering the victims from the genocide, but it kind of became like that moment when you were laughing in church and your mom reached over and thumped you telling you with that look that this was unacceptable and then it was impossible to stop.  I wanted to clap.  Here were orphans of the genocide standing before me having seen their parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and siblings hacked to death before their very eyes singing beautiful songs of healing and God’s mercy.  I wanted to clap, but no, I obeyed the rules and didn’t.

You can, though.  You aren’t here right now.  Clap for these brave young men and women who have continued on.  Many of them are outperforming their peers in school and are having to fulfill all family roles for each other while bearing the physical and emotional scars of the tragedy of fifteen years past.  They have bad days, don’t get me wrong, but they still know how to smile, sing, pray, and be thankful for life even in all their confusion and trauma.

It was a great Easter weekend and although I am tire of hearing, reading, writing, and speaking Ikinyarwanda, it seems I was able to cross a threshold of sorts and am finally, after three months more comfortable.  I was able to preach and give devotionals through the weekend without translation and was so thankful to God that he has made me able to speak other languages in order to share his love.  That is definitely not worth clapping about though.

My heart was broken yet again as we visited the worst of all the memorials as I have been told.  This memorial near Nyamagabe was a technical school where around fifty thousand were killed and later the French soldiers of Operation Turqouise played volleyball by the still open mass graves.  You can see a sight with many photos from it, but I warn you it is very graphic and disturbing.  http://homepage.mac.com/stevesimonphoto/Murambi%20Memorial/index.html

We met with those orphans on Easter Sunday and I definitely wanted to clap for them.  By God’s grace they have come so far in the last fifteen years, but they bear the telling signs of the journey in their tired looks and solemnity.  They smiled, though, as I stumbled through my sermon, even encouraging me with amens and thank yous.  They smiled when we handed out T-shirts, calculators, and dictionaries for those who performed well in school and they smiled as we ate a meager lunch of one meat pie, two pieces of bread and a soda of their choice.

So, as you pray for Rwanda and those scarred by the genocide, please remember the orphans here and lift them up so they can hear the applause of heaven.

It would have been much more exciting.  It would have also been a justified and understandable wait for our children.  “Sorry, son, no, that’s all the clothes we have right now, the rest are with the pirates.”  I would say.  They would have dreams at night of Captain Hook riding around on Tanner’s bicycle on the poop deck (why is it called a poop deck anyway?).  They could be jealous of the Somalis getting to play X-box Battlefront II.

But, no, instead all of our things are in a warehouse that we pass the neighborhood of almost every day.  Our teammate Murphy has worked nonstop in negotiations to free our goods, but there is always one more document needed (for four weeks or so).  The worst thing is that we actually touched and saw every piece of it.  Yes, it was almost more than we could bear.  We had to verify its contents when it was unloaded by customs and placed in the warehouse.  You could smell Togo when the container was opened and there was even a wisp of Togo air and warmth that wafted from the interior as the doors swung wide to reveal our stuff, that we could touch but not have.

The boys, though, have done very well.  This has definitely helped them to pray more.  They have even begun to use phrases such as ‘not what I want, but what You (God) want is more important.’  Yesterday, there was a glimmer of hope in the morning that it would be released and we gathered for prayer.  They were more thankful to God for all the things he has provided in the interim than woeful for the stuff so close and yet so far away.  Good stuff for mom and dad who are more frustrated from the lack of closure and beginning to sweat the storage we will have to pay the government.

But, we are hopeful.  I mean how many more documents can they possibly ask for?  The dossier is getting rather full as it is.  It has also been an invaluable lesson for our family of how our lives don’t consist in the abundance of our possessions (especially when our abundance lies in the hands of others).  We have all grown to enjoy the simplicity of the banana leaf chairs for our living room, the patio furniture for our dining room and the mattresses being on the floor which has ushered in some phenomenal pillow fights and wrestling.

I believe, though, that we would all trade the simplicity for the ecstasy of getting our stuff.  This of course would all be followed by the guilt of having so much and then giving some of it away to ease our consciences.

Until then, I’ll just watch Pirates of the Caribbean a few more times and imagine Captain Jack Sparrow cranking up my table saw to repair the deck.

As you enter the church compound. You gaze upon a well manicured lawn and a rustic brick building. Things change immediately as you reach the porch of the entrance. You enter through the original gate that had to be pried open by the militia to reach the thousands of people huddled inside this small church. You immediately notice the clothes piled on the benches. At first I was amazed by how tattered and dirty they were. Then upon thinking about it, realized that these people had died in these clothes and the stains I was seeing were from the dried blood that was shed as they were massacred. All of the childrens’ clothes are piled at the front of the building. Most of them were killed by being swung against the walls. You then notice the discoloration on the interior of the ceiling and the various holes surrounding it. These splatterings were the result of grenades tossed in among the people there. On the table used for communion lie various weapons used by the killers. Ironic, huh? At this point I was overwhelmed to the point of despair at what I had already seen. Then we descended a set of stairs to go into the first of three crypts containing the bodies of many. One of these is that of a woman who died holding her baby. Her killers were suitors that she had rejected. It was personal. They impaled her and her baby. I stopped there and wept. Ironically I was being comforted by one with us who had lost his entire family. He stood there patting me on the back telling me that it was going to be alright. I responded with telling him how thankful I was that he had made it. We excited the building and then visited the other two crypts that resembled underground cellars. The first one contained the bodies of those they could identify. The second one contained the thousands of those that were never identified potentially because they contained entire families who had been wiped out. I stood there with Charles among the skulls and other bones and told him thank you for running away. He said, how could he not. Bizarrely, we laughed an uncomfortable but legitimate laugh originating from our thanksgiving for life.

After we walked out of the crypt for the unknowns, Charles turned to me and said, “If we will only remember what happened here, we will not continue on in hatred.” Oh that we can replace that hatred with the love of Christ!

John 13:34 says: “A new command I give you. Love one another. As I have loved you , so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples if you love one another.

Today we went to the village of Nyamata. There we met with around fifty young men and women who, because of the genocide were the only surviving members of their various families. Many are without aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, and especially parents.

Xtra Mile purposes to teach these young men and women how to be a supportive unit to each other along with encouraging them to take part in God’s offer to accept their place in the family of Jesus.

In today’s Mobile Family outing we handed out gifts to many as encouragement for having done well in school, held a time of counseling and sharing, enjoyed a meal together, heard God’s word, and listened to the testimony of an orphan that had survived having his legs crushed by the militias of 1994 and has now graduated from the national university. The “we” I am talking about was myself along with Charles Kabesa (founder of Xtra Mile) and older genocide orphans that accompanied us from the capital.

After we ended our scheduled program we loaded up to head for, I thought, the capital and home, but we had one more stop to make. Charles announced that we needed to visit the genocide memorial there in Nyamata. April, you see, is the month of remembrance for Rwanda and this year marks the fifteenth anniversary of that horrid event. The last thing that I wanted to do, today, was to go to that memorial. It is a catholic church positioned at the southern end of town. Over ten thousand had fled to it hoping to find a safe haven, but after a few days there this refuge became a cemetery. So, we went to the Nyamata Memorial, myself along with twelve others who had all been orphaned by and survived the genocide of Rwanda.

You can see pictures of this memorial at the following website: www.museum.gov.rw/2_museums/kigali/nyamata/pages/nyamata.htm.

I was overwhelmed to be there with those who had made it as we gazed upon the remains of those who didn’t. I can’t explain the experience as a whole, some of us, especially myself, cried quietly and I kept asking God for mercy and grace.

Afterwards when we got back to Kigali, Charles came up to me thanked me for the day and said, “Welcome to Xtra Mile.”

I guess my initiation is over.

Please pray for healing for Rwanda.