Rwanda Reflections

I don’t sit back and think about our life as often as I did when we first moved to Rwanda 18 months ago. Yet, an email I received this week from a dear friend back home did cause me to think about our lives here, esp as compared to our lives back in the usa.   

My friend mentioned that she has been doing some needed repairs and renovations on her house, due to some water damage.  She, a very generous person, who gives monthly to numerous mission projects, her church and to other charities, explained that she felt awkward spending so much money on her home “when so many others, including you, get by on so much less”. 

I wanted to wrap my arms around her and tell her not to worry herself with this – that I was SURE she wasn’t wasting a dime and that she had her priorities in line.  I was sure that if the same had happened to me, I would have spent more than she was spending on her renovations.  She is very conscientious and thoughtful about stuff like that, and doesn’t get swayed by what “the Joneses’ have” nearly as much as most do.

Her email caused me to stop and consider.  I rarely ever feel like I’m suffering or having to live with less while I’m here.  Yet, with her comment, I tried to think, “Am I getting by with less?”  It dawned on me that I am – I just hadn’t really noticed.  But, why hadn’t I?

I think it is because I am like most humans, affected much by my surroundings.  True, my lifestyle, my house – electricity, hot water, water pressure, bed & mattress, “décor” – is way less than what I enjoyed back home, BUT, compared to all around me, I live in a palace here.  In fact, I often feel guilty, embarrassed and ashamed at the size and luxury of our home as compared to everyone else’s homes in our village or even, to some degree, within our compound.  It never occurs to me to think, “Wow, I have to get by on so much less than what I’m accustomed to…”, instead I sometimes feel like the obnoxious, rich Muzungu who has waaaaay more than I need, because this is what I see each day when I step outside my door:  

Women my age carrying more, for miles, than I could lift for 10 seconds.

People sharing rides in cars (when they do get to ride) that are WAY more crowded
than our car was on this day. 

More people than you would think possible sharing a church building in DRC

Outside of the new school some friends funded for some kids in DRC.

Inside the same school.  I'm serious.  This is how they sit in school.  

Lining up to receive blankets. 

So excited to see a "muzungu". 

Just Hangin' Around. 

I loved this smile. 

When there's this much rain,
it's hard not to get a little muddy. 

One of Julie's teeny patients. 

A sweet little kid, with scars from falling in
his family cook-fire.  

A concerned mama with her sick child. 

  

However, if I was to magically transport this house and all its trappings, and put it in my old neighborhood, my, oh my, wouldn’t the neighborhood association have a fit!  And I wouldn’t be too happy, either.  I’d be asking Tim, “When can we buy a new stove, where all 4 burners (instead of one) actually work?”  And, “Can I please have a refrigerator that doesn’t constantly leak water all over the floor, and one that can fit more than a day’s worth of food inside?” And, I might think, “Is it too much to ask that the tile in the bathroom actually match – what’s up with three different patterns lined up in the same bathroom?”

I don’t think about these things here, because in Rwanda, we live in an environment that says, “If you have running water in your home, you are blessed.  If you to have two temperatures of water in your house (hot and cold), you are crazy-blessed.  And if you have two indoor toilets?  You must be filthy stinkin’ rich.”  In that kind of environment, how hard is it to adjust to non-matching patterns of tile in a bathroom? You’re right:  it’s not that hard.  In fact, you just don’t even notice.

But, let’s just say you live in the good old US of A. 

And let’s just say your husband is a handsome, successful surgeon.  (Not that I know anyone like this, of course!)

Would it seem out of the ordinary to you then if your bathroom water pressure sometimes, unpredictably, was only a trickle, or if you often ran out of hot water before lathering up your hair, or if your refrigerator leaked every day, or if the kitchen and dining room flooded every time it rained hard, or if the electricity went out four times while trying to watch a movie with your family (and no one even noticed, but just kept eating the popcorn silently, waiting to see if it would come back on?), or if you couldn’t drink a cup of coffee while driving because all the potholes and bounces made it absolutely impossible (I’ve tried and it is impossible), or if the toilets rarely, rarely, rarely flushed and daily became clogged and backed up (okay, I do notice this, and yes, it drives me bananas!!)?  You bet it would!  You’d be down at Home Depot faster than you could say “fix my house!” and you’d be getting results – right away, never-mind the cost!  And until it was fixed – all of it – you wouldn’t be having people over for coffee. 

Yet at our house here, all the above are true, yet our house is pretty much “entertainment central”.  No one who visits thinks a thing about any of it, except maybe the toilets.  In fact, even that, everyone accepts and understands.  The only comments we ever receive on our home here are how completely and absolutely lovely it is, and that is true.  It is lovely.  It is so comfortable and so far beyond anything we expected before arriving in Rwanda, and beyond what we actually need.  We scored the largest home on the compound because we have 4 children (thanks for existing, kids!), complete with a homemade, beautiful cherry-wood dining room table, made by a former missionary, complete with funky inserting leaves which extend to seat 14 people – so guess who always gets to host holiday meals, weekly Bible studies, mission birthday parties, holiday parties, weekly English church, team meetings, movie nights and whatever else?  We do!  Good thing I’m an extrovert.  Hosting these things is exactly what I LOVE to do, so I’m very glad we have this particular house.  We are way more social here than we ever were back home!  Go figure!

By now, I’m sure you see my point.  We humans, except maybe a few very special saints, are so much more influenced by our surroundings than we imagine ourselves to be.

We tell youth, “Don’t give in to peer pressure!” yet we as adults do it all the time.

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Romans 12:2 

We set our expectations for our homes, for our cars, for our kids’ clothes, for our clothes, for everything based on what we see around us.  So, when I’m in the USA, I think I need that cup of Starbucks coffee, and have to remind myself that, no, I really don’t. (I only listen to myself half the time, by the way.)  When I’m here, I would think it horrible to waste $2.62 on one measly cup of java, when most people around me earn $1 a day and use that to house, clothe and feed an average of 5 children plus themselves and their spouse. 

I hate to sound like one of those moral relativism people, because I do believe in absolute Truth.  But, I also believe in Grace.  And I believe that God understands us, he knows we are frail, he knows how we are made.  He knows we are so influenced by our surroundings.  And I do think He gives extra grace to people living in the land of plenty – He knows we forget, we become desensitized to situations half-way around the world, and we begin to think we need that which we really don’t.  I believe He is patient, forgiving and kind to us in this, but He also is still always lovingly calling us out of our comfortable milieu, and into one that will give us so much more joy than striving to keep up with our surrounding culture ever could. 

As we choose Him above having the latest whatever, and choose to spend money on what HE says matters instead of what we fearfully think matters, we will experience more of Him, and therefore experience more happiness than that “thing” could have ever provided.  Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said it is “more blessed to give than to receive”. 

Many folks write to say how much they admire us for living way out here – for all we’ve given up, for all we go without, for the hard work we are doing.  I feel uncomfortable when I read this because I feel like a fraud.  Living here is hard, it is.  And sometimes I feel like I’ll just die if I can’t go somewhere where I won’t see one more hungry or hurting person, or at least to go somewhere with air conditioning, Baskin Robbins ice cream and/or a Chick Fil A sandwich. 

Yet, living here, I feel so much joy so very often – so much more joy than I ever felt back home on a regular basis.  It is almost an addicting joy.  Living here is just plain fun a lot of times.  And when I’m having a GREAT day, playing with little hospital patients, passing out toy cars to kids who have no other toys at all, and watching the joy on their faces as they “race” each other by pushing those cars along the cement, and then come home to read an email saying how much I’m admired for giving up so much, I feel pretty guilty.

I think back to the USA, to endless carpool lines, to racing to drop one child off at tennis practice and getting back to drop another at violin lessons or piano, and then frantically racing through the grocery store in order to have something to cook that night for dinner – to putting clothes through the dryer again because I didn’t have time to fold them the first time (due to the above carpool line) and now they’re all wrinkled…….I think back to those days and I wonder......

 “Have I really given up that much? The answer?  I don’t think so!” 

True ~ I miss my family and friends.  Leaving them behind is the one real sacrifice I feel I've made.  But the comforts of home?  As much as I love those things, I think they may be more of a trap for me than a blessing, as far as my ability to rely on Jesus is concerned.

Many of my daily decisions of life are gone here – there is only one brand of toilet paper to buy – so I don’t have to feel guilty if I waste money by succumbing to my desire for luxury and buy the Charmin one day at the grocery store.  I can’t.  There is only one type of lightbulb, only four colors of paint at the “hardware” store (I use that term loosely), only one or two tile choices (and you have to go to Kigali to get those).  The choices are just so much narrower.  And less choices = less stress, at least in my book. 

Does it mean I am somehow more holy because I use a rough toilet paper these days?  Nope.  It just means there was rough or nothing.  Simple.  Does it mean I have my priorities straighter that my bathroom has non-matching tile, and I don’t care?  Nope.  It just means our “home depot” didn’t have enough of any one type. 

If I was in the USA, I would care about these things.  And I would do something about them.  I’m a big, big advocate of soft toilet paper! J

Jesus said a few things about all this. 

First, he mentioned how tough it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven – harder than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.  While the rest of the world thought the rich had it made, and still does, He had major pity on the financially rich, because he seemed to understand how very hard they had it in terms of truly seeing what was really true and important in life. 

Lastly, he mentioned that “to whom much is given, much is required.”  I think maybe part of the “much” to which he referred, was the “much” of self-discipline, self-control, and the rich man’s need to deliberately and willfully force his soul to not trust in all the abundance around him, right in front of his eyes, and instead to trust in the One True God, invisible to his eye. 

It is so easy to rely on God when He is all you have.  So very easy to sense His presence, to know His comfort, to know, if you have anything, or receive anything, that it came from Him. 

Yet when surrounding by earthly goods, and with other people who have a bunch of earthly goods, seeing Him amidst that clutter is oh-so-much-harder.  It is so hard to trust alone in HIM when you can trust in your computer, in your car, in your medicine, in your diploma, in your next vacation, in your job, in your employer, in your well structured and built home, in your bank account, in your rich parents, in your ….. fill in your own blank. 

We rich American Christians really aren’t rich in what matters; we are poor. Yet, at the same time, we are honored and we are entrusted with a RICHNESS OF CHOICE to love God most, even when we have other options of lesser (but still wonderful) things to love (like sports, material stuff or comfort).

We should feel honored – yet also awed and a bit trembly – by the fact that God trusted us with such material riches. 

We are asked much by our Lord, because He has entrusted us with MUCH of the worlds’ goods.  He trusted us to not be swayed and hypnotized by all we had, nor to become hoarders of all we have.  He told us to share what He has given, to keep trusting HIM so we CAN let go of it, to use what we have to advance HIS Kingdome instead of our own little kingdoms, and to remember that He is King of All, that He is our all in all, that He is what really matters. 

It is harder, so much harder, to put him first when there are other things in line.  

 When nothing else is there, of course He is first!  This is why the poor are blessed.  It is why powerless little children are blessed, and why He encouraged us to believe as they believe.  They just believe.  They know that Jesus is their best thing.  They aren’t distracted by lesser things.  They have Jesus, and that is all they have.  Literally. 

I guess the point here is, while a few of you “over there” sit and think, “Wow, they are doing great things, I admire them….”, I am sitting here thinking the same about you.  You who are continuing to give to God’s work even though it means you can’t buy all your neighbors have, you are doing a great thing. You who find a way to work at the neighborhood food bank, to volunteer at the crisis pregnancy center, to teach Sunday School every week, to do outreach at your local high school or junior high, to visit sick veterans, to donate clothing to women’s shelters, to visit with rape victims or with dying AIDS patients, to visit nursing homes and prisons, to pare down your budget so you have something to share with the poor among you and to support that kid in Brazil or wherever or to gather cool clothes for kids in your child’s school who don’t have anything cool to wear, you who could buy this year’s model car but decide to wait so you can give more at church instead, you have my undying admiration.  You are doing great things for the Kingdom.  You are swimming upstream, in a society where people get trampled on Black Friday as they rush to buy the new big-screen t.v., or where a woman stabs someone in a store sale for an x-box.   You are saying that God’s will matters more than your own,  God’s kingdom matters more than yours, that you want to follow Him more than the crowd.  I admire that so much. 

You have the much, much tougher job of seeing Jesus and seeing your place in His work in this world while living a much more cluttered life, in which it is easy to lose sight of what matters most.  In the American busy-ness, in the constant soak of everyone you know having the newest and best cars, clothes, homes, schools, etc., it is so hard to keep your eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of your faith.  It is just so much harder! 

Here in Rwanda, the goal is simple and clear – often, living simply isn’t a choice, it’s just what you do. 

The true test of a dieter isn’t how well she eats at the weight loss camp where she is given the salad at every meal and has no access to the snickers bar – it is how she does when she goes home and doesn’t buy that snickers bar when it calls her name in the check-out line at the grocery store.  The true test of the Christian who wants to use her all to glorify God isn’t when she doesn’t have much anyway besides God, it is when she has a nice home, a big paycheck, and friends who have more discretionary spending money every month because they skip giving to their church or charity and wonder why she can’t go with them on that nice ski trip this winter. 

That’s the true test.  That is when you know who is really following Jesus – when someone has more, so much more, than Just Jesus, and yet still knows and ACTS and SPENDS like JESUS is what he wants most of all.  In short, when his life shows that Jesus is his real treasure.   

So, next time you feel bad because you have it so easy, remember, this is one missionary who says you have it way harder than she does.  I’ve lived both lives, and I think I’ve earned the right to say it – following Jesus in America is way tougher than following Him in Rwanda.  But, tough or not, following Jesus is always the right decision, and it yields so much more joy than following anyone or anything else. 

Thanks for praying for us out here, and please know, we pray for you, too. 

 Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?"

John 11:25-26

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.

Colossians 3:1-2