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Lord where are you, where have you been? Do you not hear my cry for you? Can you not sense my pleading for you and for your presence? Darkness ensnares and sin rages within me and all the while I call on you for salvation and aid but you remain silent. How long Oh lord will I have to put on this charade of being ok on the outside all the while knowing that death is merely inches away from my door? How long oh lord will you wait and sit idly by while I am ravaged by the cares of this world? Will you not come down and rescue? Could you not simply pluck me from travesty? Just a simple dose of your presence would be enough to satisfy my aching heart and revive it to what it once was. You alone oh Lord can save me and you alone oh Lord can set me free. I call on you asking that you save and set free, that you do what only you can do. It is only in your presence where I am made whole and it is only in your presence where sin becomes void. For you alone oh Father are the maker and lover of all and you alone oh Lord can set me free.

Less Christianity, More Christ

      When you look around at the church in America what do you see? Do you see a vibrant, joyful, peace and loved filled people who are completely sold out for what they believe or a people that go to church on Sunday and then abstain from His presence the rest of the week? Do you see a people living in true indescribable freedom not just from sin but from everything including the appearance box that we so often find ourselves or a people caught up in having to be seen as good and righteous all the time hiding that secret sin that eats away at their life destroying everything righteous within them? Do you see a people that are going out and giving all they have to spread the gospel and going out of their way to love and aid those in need not because of how it makes them look but because they see that person or group as truly loved and valued by God or a people who sees the homeless man and thinks "they got their because their lazy and if I give them aid all they're going to do is buy drugs"? Do you see a people who are willing to overlook the transgressions of the non-believer and pray for their enemies both personally and culturally (ISIS, Boston Bomber, Homosexuals, Abortion Doctors) or a people who hate and spit fire when they discuss such people and say things such as "I hope God punishes them, they deserve to burn" (Heads up: SO DO YOU and you would if not for the saving grace of God in your life). If you are being honest with yourself my guess would be that much of the time you would see the latter rather than the former. Now I am not saying that their are not those people out there who are the former but the American church in general is the latter.
     Now don't get me wrong I'm not saying I am perfect and if I am being transparent and open I would be inclined to say that more often then not I find myself in the second categories and much of the time I hate myself for it. I, like the American church, have made Christianity about me. How do I come across to people? Do I look spiritual enough, do I pray well enough, if asked could I quote enough scripture? Does my past achievements sell me as "holy and righteous" enough and all the while my heart is dying. I have taken God's precious gift and son and made Him an ACCESSORY to my life rather than a lover. I feel that when I accepted Christianity I just traded one set of shackles for another or better yet simply just ADDED chains to my already heavy burden. The chains of LAW, LEGALISM, APPERANCE, and OUTWARD RIGHTEOUESNESS were ADDED to the chains of SIN, GUILT, and SHAME and if that is what true Christianity is then I would have been better off without it. No wonder so many Christians lay down at night dissatisfied with their life, lacking the joy and peace that Christ talked about. No wonder we look up at the stars knowing deep down their has to be more. There has to be something deeper and more intimate; Something REAL.
     I am here to tell you that there is more and we can go deeper and are in fact encouraged to but many of us fear what it costs. I am finally to the point where I find myself willing to pay that cost, willing to give what needs to be given to gain the greatest thing my heart could ever seek and that is His presence and anointing. I am to the point where my heart screams "IM DONE WITH ALL THIS CRAP" and by crap I mean trying to always be and do what everyone wants me to. I am done with man's version of Christianity, done with outward righteousness and done with trying to keep my heart shackled under legalism. I am to the point where I am about to sell everything I have and just leave, travel Africa, and spread the Gospel through love. When Jesus sent out the disciples he told them to just go with what they had on their backs and nothing else; To eat what the people gave them and to stay with them, sleeping in the bed provided without complaint. Where are the people in todays church who are willing to just go without knowing exactly how they will get food or shelter??? You may think that's fanatical and crazy but did Christ ask for anything else? I am to the point where I am ready to go all out in worship not caring whether anyone thinks. I am ready to let go of my heart and let the heart that God has changed lead me.
     Maybe you are like me and are ready for something more, something real and intimate but you can't seem to find out how to get there. All I can tell you is that I don't have all the answers but I do know the first step is simple and is simply this: Go to God and let Him love you. Something He has been teaching me is that I can't fix myself which is a good thing because He never asked me to. All He asks is that I put myself in the best position to be loved by Him and to experience His love on a daily basis. Now that may mean getting rid of some things in my life that seem to hinder me from Him such as a relationship, alcohol, drugs, porn, or something as simple as a meal and He is not asking us to get rid of them simply because they are bad (which two of those are), but simply because they keep you from Him. He can not entertain sin and if we have blatant sin in our lives and heart then He may not able to fully fill us. He cannot fill what is already full but luckily for us its not entirely our obligation to empty ourselves. HE empties us. When we allow ourselves to be loved by Him and daily sit in His presence fellowshipping with Him not for what He gives but rather for who He is then and only then do we start to find that deeper intimacy we so desperately long for. All it takes is saying Jesus I am willing to surrender and let you love me and not just for a couple minutes out of the day but rather the entire day. Let that become your hearts cry and trust me the more time you spend in fellowship with Him the more that will be your hearts cry. So not it comes down to this: Are you willing?

Hope

"Hope is a good thing and no good thing ever dies"- Shawshank Redemption

         Hope. Such a simple word with not so simple meaning. Hope is what drives us during the rainy seasons. Its what makes the dark times bearable and the hard times beatable. Hope that with every dusk there will be a dawn. Hope that no matter the situation, no matter the pain, there is always a reason, always a lesson. Hope that even when we feel as if we cannot go on any longer and everything in life seems to have crumbled around us, we know that there is still a better tomorrow whether in this life or the next. As i have struggled and battled these past couple months I have held on to my hope. The hope that He is doing something wonderful. The hope that when this is all said and done I will look more like Him. The hope that when I finally see Him it will all be worth it. That's what I hope for. What is it you hope for? When you go outside and look up at the stars what do you find yourself wishing for? Maybe you are in a good place and you seem to have every thing you had ever hoped for and to you I say hold on to these moments, because if life has shown us anything it is that things change quickly and life never seems to stay perfect for long. So remember these times when life gets rough so you will have a tangible memory to hold on to. Maybe you are in a rough place like I am and life seems to be the exact opposite of what you had hoped for. To you I say hold on. Hold on to Him and the hope that He gives each and every one who calls on His name and know that no matter what happens you are loved and cared for; you are held close and treasured by the creator of the universe...what more could one hope for 

     

Timing is Everything

          30 years He waited. 30 years He lived as if He was just merely a man, a perfect man who loved and helped those around them but still just a man. For 30 years He followed the will of God for His life knowing that when the time was right God would release Him to do the job that He came here to do. 30 years of waiting and listening for 3 years of ministry that would change everything. Christ waited for God’s perfect timing because He knew that God’s timing is everything.

           

            The past couple of months I have struggled with this concept; struggled with not knowing what God had next or when He was going to place me back in Africa or if He would place me there at all and to be brutally honest I have struggled with the waiting period. I am a man of action. I have to be doing something; have to be moving forward and yet I found myself stagnant and stalled out wondering what  was going on. For many of us with the desire to do ministry the waiting period can be one of the hardest and most difficult because our hearts yearn to serve as well as be used in great and mighty ways and find ourselves being asked to sit still and wait. I have a preaching degree and have been out of college for 3 months now and have absolutely no idea what I am to do or what God’s will is for me in this moment. Two months ago I thought I had it all planned out but a lot can change in two months and everything that I had planned seems to have fallen apart right in front of me. So I sat there asking God why? Why did He break the plans that Him and I had discussed? Why did He allow everything to fall? These plans were the one’s that we had come to accept and were moving forward with. Today while mowing my yard I got my answer to those questions. I was again asking God “why did the plans that we discussed and chose fall threw?” to which he replied “we never discussed or chose any plans…You discussed and chose those plans. I never agreed to those for those were not my plans.” It would seem that I had become so impatient waiting on God that I jumped at the first opportunity for ministry, a ministry that would send me back to Africa and in doing so I set myself up for heartbreak and failure. I was so afraid that if I sat waiting I would miss out on God’s call for my life which in all reality shows a lack of trust and faith. Maybe you can relate with this. Maybe there is a dream that God has placed in your heart and you find yourself in a holding pattern questioning if that dream was even from God in the first place. You find yourself asking where you went wrong or what you may have missed. Did you miss the open door? But to those questions God is answering one word. Wait. Wait on Him trusting that His timing is perfect. The dreams that He placed in your heart were placed there for a reason and if they are truly from Him then the realization of those dreams will fully depend on Him. Is He not God? Can He not work out everything to bring about the fulfillment of His purpose and will? Will He not make the open door clear to you when the time is right?  Did He not show you the open door in the past; The doors that got you where you are today? If He was faithful to place you where He wanted you in the past rest assured that He will do so in the future. Jesus had to wait 30 years before He began His ministry, a ministry that would only last 3 years but look what happened in those years. Whether you are young or old know that when God calls you to something or places a dream in your heart He will make the way so that you see the fulfillment of that calling or dream. Jesus gave God 30 years of just living and waiting and God gave Him 3 years that rocked this world and changed everything. How much time will you give God? How long will you wait? I would be willing to bet that if we could see the full plan God has for us and what will come of our waiting we would be more than willing to wait, but where is the faith in that? God’s timing was perfect in the life of Christ and it is still perfect in our lives. So if you find yourself in the waiting period just be still and wait knowing He is God and that His timing is everything.

Change of Plans

          In life things do not always go as planned, in fact it is a rarity when they do. Many times we will make plans for our future; what job we will have, who we will marry, how many kids, only to have those plans changed if not crushed outright by the circumstances of life. It is during those times in life where we find ourselves at a crossroads. We can either get mad at God, blame Him for ruining our plans, and walk away because who wants to serve a God who changes His mind all time or we can trust that He knows what He is doing, that he has a plan, and that He truly is who He says He is. You see I write this now because I have come to this crossroads and yet again I am left here scratching my head wondering what happened? How did everything change so quickly and why did it change in the first place? The plans changed so rapidly that it took my breath away...literally. The change was a blind side hit and as I sit here I am left with the pain that comes with that kind of destructive fallout. Anger for allowing myself to be vulnerable enough to be hurt, confused as to why, when everything seemed to be going so, did it blow up, but most of all hurt...hurt because I thought I had finally found the one...hurt because I had finally gotten the strength to put my heart out there 100% only to have it smashed.
          So where do I go from here? I find myself at the crossroads with one part of me wanting to be angry at God  and the other knowing that God is bigger than my circumstances and that He is working everything out for His glory. I have been here before and I have taken the angry route and although it did bring me to peace in God eventually it was a very long road to do so. I know that my God is bigger than my problems and that He sees my pain. I know that He loves me and that He will not forsake those that He loves and I know that ultimately His plan will come to fulfillment if only I will trust Him. Even when I am left asking why I know that He is still God and he is still worthy of my praise. I will not allow this change of plans to break me nor will I allow it to destroy all that He built last year. Even when the plans of life change He remains the same.

Bringing It Home

       I know I haven't posted in awhile and part of that was due to the fact that I didn't really know what to write about, or how to put what I felt down on paper, the other part was due to me not wanting to. I don't really know what I feel or how to process being home and getting back into the flow of the American lifestyle. My mind and emotions seem somewhat scrambled and more than likely that is how this blog will be so if you are looking for a nice fluent read then I apologize because you won't find it here, but if you are looking for a read that is raw and real and allows you to see the situation I now face and my new reality that I must adapt to then keep reading.

     I have been home a week and have seen and talked to a lot of people, both family and friends. I find myself telling the same stories over and over and as I have told them I have started to notice something happening mentally and emotionally. I do not notice a sensation to cry at the fact that I have left Rwanda, although there have been tears shed, nor do I have a desire to laugh and play with my friends that I have not seen in 5 months. I don't really feel anything. I am emotionless. If anything I feel withdrawn, disconnected, absent. I feel like an empty shell, lost of meaning and placed in an environment that isn't my own. I look at my pictures and have even watched a few movies about Rwanda, and I see places I have been almost as if I had been there in a dream once. When I speak of the events of Rwanda, I speak as if I am telling not my story, but the story of a friend, or a story out of a book I once read. Mentally, I cannot comprehend the change and seem to be hitting a wall. I would say that is the best way to describe what has happened to me. My mental subconscious has built a wall around my emotions to keep the pain and loss of coming home take hold. It is what has happened in the past and it is my go-to defense mechanism.

     I do find myself at times stopping and looking at my surroundings, wondering where the woman in brightly clad dresses are, where are the little ones running around yelling "muzungu, Muzungu" alerting the entire village to the arrival of white people? Where are the lush green forests and rolling hills and mountains that I have so come to love? Where are the moto taxies that come to whisk me away into town? Where is my home? It's in these moments of clarification when tears start to fall and memories rush to fill my heart and mind. It's in these moments when loss becomes reality. I look outside and I am reminded of my heart and the condition it seems to be in. Cold, gray, bitter, dead. The weather seems fitting, just like the day I left Rwanda. Rain was falling as I boarded the plane. The clouds had rolled in, covering the blue sky and shinning sun with a gray and black, rain promised storm. The land around seemed to mirror what was taking place in my own heart. As I walked to the plane, taking the same path I had when I had arrived, I was thankful for the rain, because it covered up the tears that were had joined in. Then, like now, the weather was a indicator of where I was emotionally. I find myself in a bitter cold, having just come from a warm and life-giving summer, waiting for the Spring that will come with life bringing warmth. I know it will come and I wait for it, knowing that even in the midst of my winter, He is still with me, strengthening me, and preparing me for what is to come.

Face-to-Face with Genocide

                How do you put into words something you do not fully understand or comprehend yourself? What I am about to write is an experience that I don’t know if I will be able to ever fully grasp and therefore the words that I use will never be able to fully capture the reality and emotional stirring that this experience caused. I write this partially for you to read but also in an attempt to unravel the many thoughts and feelings that are swimming inside my soul. I pray that through reading this you come to catch a glimpse of the evil that is within every human heart and the capacity and capability we have for violence as well as our desperate need for a transformative power to work in our hearts to subdue and rid us of said darkness. I ask that you read this with an open heart and allow the words and pictures to move you and pierce you and allow God to open your eyes to the truth of what really happened in Rwanda in 1994.

                Very early in my time here I have had the opportunity to go to the memorial in Kigali, Rwanda that memorialized and discussed the Genocide of 94. It was a beautiful building and the memorial was very informative but it was nothing compared to what I was to see in a place called Nyamaba. I had heard about a memorial that housed the skulls of the victims and had heard my mentor Pastor Bohanon talk about taking people there quite frequently. I called him up this morning and asked him if He would take me and he agreed. So we start heading out of the city. We drive for about 40 minutes through a beautiful country and as we drive he tells me some of the things that happened in the village where we were headed. We come to a huge opening in between the hills that cover Rwanda. It’s a swamp but not like the swamp’s we think of, rather it is just wetlands with tall grass and a few trees scattered throughout. Pastor Bohanon tells me that during the Genocide the Tutsi population would hide out within the swamp as Hutu soldiers would shoot down on them from the hills surrounding. He also told me that the village we were going to had been a somewhat of a banishment zone for the Tutsi population during the 1960’s. This land was supposed to be the worst land covered with flies and venomous snakes and the Hutu government concluded that if the Tutsis were sent there the environment would kill them. The opposite happened. The Tutsis thrived and made the ground fertile. When the genocide began Hutu’s immediately started heading for Nyamaba knowing the vast number of Tutsis they would find.

                As we continue driving Pastor Bohanon turns off onto a small dirt road and up to a church. From the outside there would be nothing to really identify this building as different from those surrounding it. It was a beautiful building with a nicely kept landscape around it but as we walked the path up to the entrance a different site started to emerge. The iron gate door that was used as to keep thieves out at night had a hole blown into it and as soon as we walked into the church horror and reality sank in. The church seemed to be just one big sanctuary and filling it were stacks upon stacks of clothes. Clothes of the deceased, those who had been killed by their fellow countrymen. Thousands and thousands of clothes placed upon benches. It is something that must be seen to truly believe. Knowing that every piece of clothing belonged to a son, daughter, mother, brother, father, sister, people whose only crime was being Tutsi. People who were shot, hacked, stabbed, clubbed, mutilated, raped, tortured, and ultimately killed. The walls and pillars were riddled with holes from the machine guns. The tin roof has speckled light coming through it from where grenade shrapnel and bullet fragment had gone through. And there in the middle of the room sat a casket housing the bones of three people. One 15, one 12, and the third 2. Underneath the church was a glass case with around 50 skulls and femur bones and another casket. The story behind the woman lying under my feet was brutal. She was a Tutsi woman who had rejected the advances of a Hutu man and instead married a Tutsi. They had 3 children, one of which was a newborn at the time of the genocide. The mass killing started and the rejected Hutu found this woman and drove a stake through her vagina and exiting through her mouth, impaling her. He then took the woman’s baby, placed it on her chest and drove a spear through them both, forever joining the two together.

                At this point tears are already rolling down my face and I am having to conjure up everything within me to stay composed. We exit the building and I think that the tour is done but there was an even greater horror waiting for me in the back. Pastor Bohanon leads me to the back area and there, beneath a tin overhand sit two mass grave sites. Now Kigali had mass graves as well but the difference between Kigali and this one was that in Nyamaba, one is able to go down into them. Pastor Bohanon instructed me to go down into them while he waited outside (he has been there many times already, leading groups that come to Rwanda). I slowly and hesitantly walked down the concrete steps. Already I could see a few caskets on shelves directly in front of me but that was just the beginning. As my foot touched the final step I had a choice to either go left or right but it did not matter which way I chose for on both sides of me were walkways that extended 15-20 feet and were only about 3 foot wide with a ceiling height of about 10 feet. On both sides of the walkway were shelves, not filled with caskets as the ones that had greeted me, but rather skulls and femur bones. There were three compartments, one every 5-7 feet down the walkway and each compartment had 5 shelves, one for every two feet and they were FILLED. The shelves extended so far back that it took a flashlight to see the end. I counted one shelf and found that the skulls went 10 deep and 12 across…..120 skulls per shelf and over half of the 60 shelves were skulls. An estimated 3600 skulls of the dead and they were not behind glass cases but rather right there, no barrier, nothing between the skull and me. It felt like the air had been sucked out of the room as I fought to keep it together… That is until I saw the small one. Right there in front of my face was a skull no bigger than my fist, smaller than the size of my 2 ½ year old nephews head. Tears started falling as reality set in. These were no longer statistics, no longer just numerical figures in a book, they were real human beings, people. People who had hopes, dreams, aspirations. People who had loved and lost, who had emotions and experienced life. People who had for years prior walked and lived beside their would-be killers. Now that I think about it I realize that what I saw was only 3600, 3600 of 800,000. So many in fact that people are still uncovering mass graves 19 years later. The number cannot be fathomed nor imagined and for good reason. I suspect that if the mind could bring that many skulls together in one thought, the magnitude would be over-bearing and would break the sub-conscious by mere horror alone.

                I sit here now, a mere 3 hours removed from seeing something that will have forever changed my life. Many of my blogs have meanings, morals to the story, but this one is different. I do not find myself resolved, having finally answered one of life’s big questions, having learned some life-lesson, but instead find myself with more questions. How could human beings commit such crimes? What would cause a man to go out and kill his neighbor, someone he would have lived next to for as long as he could remember, someone who he very likely played with as a boy? How could the world community sit by and watch for THREE MONTHS, 100 days as a country descended into the very depths of hell and chaos and destroy itself? There is a quote that says “the only thing necessary for the perpetration of evil is for good men to sit back and do nothing.” I believe that the U.S. is just at fault for the atrocities committed in Rwanda between April and July 1994, as is the international community at large. The theme here in Rwanda ever since the genocide has been Never Again, and I think it is time for the International community to echo that sentiment. We failed in Rwanda, we failed in Darfur, and now we are again failing in Syria. I do not have the answer but I do know that the killing must end. So I honestly am at a loss about how to end this so in the words of Forrest Gump “I guess that’s all I got to say about that”.

PS most of the pictures are not from me but rather off google images. I was not able to take pictures within the grounds.  

The Swamp

 

 The Mass Graves

 

This one was no bigger than my fist