Life Lessons from Rwanda
On Wednesday mornings I
meet with a group of guys. It’s a Bible study but we spend as much time talking
about life, family, and living in Africa, and encouraging each other to live as
godly men. Recently, one of our number who’s moving back to the U.S. challenged
each of us to come up with 3 life lessons that have shaped or impacted us. It’s
a challenging exercise, but worth the effort – I encourage you to try it. Here was the first one I shared.
Lesson #1 - When circumstances are out of your control, you
are forced to decide for yourself whether or not God is trustworthy.
I am an American lawyer. For years I have taken
great comfort in the fact that I have the ability to know and apply the law. I
am good at it. I like it. Because I can know the law, and the law is
predictable, knowable and the final word, I feel a semblance of control and
comfort. It’s my happy place, if you will. I am a lawyer – this makes sense. However,
of late I have had a great sense of being out of control here because the law
(a) is not as knowable and (b) does not always mean what it says. This is
hugely unsettling for me. This makes me nervous, anxious, and panicky at times.
It is a desperate place where I lack control or even any understanding of where
to find that familiar control. It’s been interesting to see my almost
involuntary response to this “out-of-control-ness”: losing my cool with
authorities (not a good idea), pressing small issues of legal interpretation to
an unnecessary degree and with too much vigor, difficulty sleeping and an
inability to leave work at work. What’s hit me lately is that where I am is
very much where God would want to have me: in a place where I can no longer
trust in my abilities but where I am forced to wrestle with whether or not I
trust Him in the midst of my circumstances. This is not a fun place to be
but it can be a place of tremendous growth in faith. In the Gospel of Mark
chapter 4, Jesus and his disciples were on a boat in a storm on Lake Galilee.
Jesus slept; his disciples panicked. They asked Jesus if he cared if they
drowned in the storm (translation: we’re out of control, we’re dead, you’re
sleeping and you don’t care). Jesus responded by calming the storm with a word
and saying: “You of little faith. Why were you so afraid?” (translation: I’ve
had the power to save you the whole time and I would never have let the storm
consume you; why did you not believe?). It is hard to be in the storm, totally
out of control, and to trust in God whom you cannot see. But that is the
essence of faith: to trust in God’s power and goodness when you are forced to
make that decision. I am not there yet, but this season is one where I am
growing in faith, whether I wanted the test or not.
