My Heart (Part 2).

Today is the day we leave. It came so fast, it almost feels too soon. But, as we all know so well, all things must come to an end, good or bad. What we can do is reflect on what has happened, not in a regretful sense or trying to hold on too much to what was, but to learn more about ourselves and press on into the future.

As I spoke about in my previous blog we have been working on a Heart Project. We finished them and shared them this past week, so without any further introduction, here is mine.


I feel that this is going to be something very difficult to explain in a blog, so what I will do is just explain what the piece says about my heart and you should be able to look at it and figure out what means what.

This year has been a year of exploring freedom. Not just freedom from sin, but freedom of mind and heart. The freedom to love, to express, to trust, and to be loved. Part of my coming to Africa is was also a search to find out who Jesus really is. I know a lot of people who have had bouts with skepticism, trying to figure out whether or not God even exists, is Jesus really the Son of God, that sort of thing. I've never had a problem with the existence of God and Jesus, but more of a skepticism that questions what we believe about his nature, his purpose for us, his plan for creation, all those things. I've had lot's of good and bad experiences, but they all point me back to myself. If you can see the top part of Africa, it's a collage of paintings of God or Jesus. They are surrounded by mirror pieces and stained glass. They represent my attempts to find Jesus. Over every one of the faces I put clear glass. This represents my pathetic attempts to put up walls between myself and God, he can see right through them every time. Thinking back over this past year, a lot of my experience has helped my to look back at myself. It's said that community is like a mirror, so over South Africa I did a mosaic of mirror pieces that are coming together to help me see a better image of myself and my own heart. In the middle of Africa I painted a human heart, it is my heart. The metal bars are broken through over my heart, because my heart first needs to be free before I can figure out the rest.

So there is my "brief" explanation. I'd rather tell you more about it in person, it would be a lot easier.

In my last post I also promised a bit of a look into the future. I've applied for and was accepted to come back for an internship here in South Africa with Nieucommunities. There are a lot of details that are coming together, such as support needed, when I will be coming back, and what the long term implications of this will be. It is safe to say that I am looking to come back for a long term position here in South Africa and this is the next step in doing so. What I do know is that it will be focused on my vision statement for my life and ministry that I wrote here. I want to share that with you all who have not heard it in hopes that you'll be able to understand a little better what this internship will be all about.

This vision that God has given me is yet to be complete. As I grow in Him and imagine what could be He takes me to new places and reveals His plan and purpose to me. So today I see myself strengthening and starting new monastic communities all over the world. I want to build relationships that reciprocally challenge and encourage each other. In these communities I dream of the following:

• I will create places of peace and rest for myself and for others. There will be an openness and acceptance of others where they are at. We will have the freedom to ask questions, seek answers and work our true calling. Together we will work out a rhythm of life which will include prayer, worship and fun together. There will be values that the whole community agrees on that will be expressed in everything that we do.
• There will be room for self-expression and creativity. God created me and the world around me and His Spirit and image lives inside of me therefore I have the ability to be creative and innovative. My life and the communities I am a part of should express themselves uniquely according to their DNA.
• I will have passion for the Church, locally and internationally. In my life I want to be a leaf and God’s Spirit the wind. I want to go where He sends me and leave when He decides. In these communities I want there to be an outward focus to those in need, those who can’t help themselves. I want to see Jesus in every person I meet and treat them like royalty at my table. What I have is God’s therefore it belongs to everyone.
  
  
• In these communities we will care for the world around us. We are co-creators with Christ and His salvation is for the whole world, including us. We will teach others how to care for creation in ways that are specific to their context.
  
  

In the end, I hope to be a part of new expressions of love and worship towards God and mission inside and outside our walls.

All that being said, I can't wait to be home and share more of my heart with all of you. I'm so ready to see my friends and family again, to be in familiar places and eat great Mexican food! All of you have been a great encouragement to me on this journey, but it's not over, not by a long shot. There is so much more that God has in store for all of us and I'm excited to be a part of that with all of you.

So, soon we will see each other face to face! Much love to all of you!!!

My Heart.

Tomorrow begins the last week of my apprenticeship here in South Africa.

I want to say thank you to all who have journeyed with me, supported me with prayer and finances and in general loved and cared for my heart.

This last couple of weeks we've been talking about just that, our hearts and what it will look like to go back home. I'm dedicating two posts this week to that. This one will focus on saying goodbye to South Africa and a special project that we are doing to express what that means for us. The next post will focus on what I'm looking forward to in coming home and what's on my horizon.

We had a big bash to say goodbye to our friends that we've made here in South Africa. People we've ministered to, ministered with and everyone around and in between. There are pictures of some of our boys who showed up. Unfortunately I just realized that since I was the one taking the pictures there were none of me. Don't worry though, those of you back home will get to see plenty of me really soon!


At one point in the evening we gave the guests a chance to get up and tell stories about their experiences with us. It brought me to tears to hear how our community had impacted the lives of people in this country. I especially had to choke tears back when a couple of our friends from Zimbabwe and one of my friends from a local township spoke about how Jodys and my life had impacted theirs. Sometimes when you're really out in a different culture, especially one as foreign to my culture as South Africa, you feel like you can never make an impact. Sometimes you feel like you could spend 10 years in a place and not make the kind of impact you or others would expect. So it really means the world when you hear that you did make even the slightest impact in someones life.


So, like I said, this past few weeks have been really focused on our hearts, our re-entry into our home culture and all the emotions and realities we are going to face when we get home. One way in which we explore the impact this year has had on our lives is through the Heart Project. The Heart Project is just that, an expression of your heart specifically related to our year here in South Africa. In order to prep for that we spent two days with a local artist that runs a shop and has experience in the area of Art Therapy. She really helped us to learn to express ourselves using any medium we would choose and allowing the art to come intuitively. The reality is that not everyone is an artist in the way we were practicing it, but everyone can create from within themselves. God created us with the ability to create and this was just one way of expressing that.

My Heart Project is still underway and will be finished this week but I figured that I could show you what I created in those two days. Now I feel compelled to give a little disclaimer to the fact that this is not something I normally do. I had fun and in some of these I quite surprised myself while others might not exactly get the best review from an art critic. In the end these were all expressions of what was and is happening inside of me and around me at the moment. I'll give a bit of an explanation of each piece; what was the inspiration, what do the colours and shapes represent, etc. So, here we go.

Day One

This was the first piece. It's called Dawn Breaks Through. We were just given the assignment to paint something just to get into the mood and feel of doing art. I've always had this image in my mind when reading Psalm 57 where is says "I will awaken the dawn" of a beautiful sunny sky meeting and meshing with a starry night sky and so I kind of abstractly threw paint on the paper and this is what came out.



This second one is called This Town is Dead. It's based off of lyrics from a song called Phages from the band The Most Serene Republic. The specific line says "This town is dead from too much living/We'll make our endings from new beginnings". They repeat that multiple times in the song and it was stuck in my head that morning. The colours at the top represent life that seems to be hovering above this dead town.

This one is called Broken Heart (I Wish You Were Here). This one is a bit more personal. An instruction that was given to us before we came to the workshop was to bring an object that had some sort of meaning or value to us. I brought a journal that was given to me by a close friend. In this journal they went through and randomly wrote notes of encouragement, verses, funny quotes, story reminders and just all sorts of stuff that was collected from years of journeying together. I decided I needed some inspiration and just kind of opened it up to a random page and it said this "Tell your dad about what you're doing in South Africa...", and then when you turn the page you see "He is proud of you!". For those of you who don't know, my father passed away tragically when I was 15 and I'm sure you realize that changed my life forever. So I began to think about that and went to get another piece of paper. When I went to pull it out the paper tore a bit on the top. The teacher said not to worry and just grab another one. Still not knowing what I was going to paint I just decided to keep that one. I began with the different colours as a representation of the spirit of Africa, it's bright, vibrant, full of life. Then came the black marks representing the hard times, uncertainty, emotional trials, hard lessons and bad experiences. I wasn't sure where to go from there and I painted the heart in the middle and I realized something. I don't want to just speak into the air to my dad, I want to tell him face to face. I want him to be here. I realized that I will always want that and I will never have that in this life. That's when I finished the rip and it went straight through my heart.


This was my last piece for the first day. It's simply titled Desire. It's a little bit of mixed media (really just a couple of pieces of paper pasted on with some writing on them, the rest is paint). We were asked to think about a question, idea, or anything that we were struggling with or trying to work out and then create something about that with any medium of our choice. I had recently read the book Journey of Desire by John Eldridge and had been struggling with the idea of desire. We get taught so many things in the church about desire that span the whole spectrum, from the idea that all our desires our evil to the thought that God grants all our desires. Those are two extremes, I know, but sometimes it's hard to find where to land. I have so many desires that I'm so afraid to express because I don't know that it's ok to do so. I'm beginning to learn how to dream again, how to imagine. So my desire is in the center here, surrounded by this dark blue that to me represents the unknown. Then there are all these compartments that represent a desire. Somehow they are all being held back by there barriers and I know that only God can help me to really understand and express them.

Day Two

We started the day with a little check-in, the idea being to use any medium to express how you were feeling at the beginning of the day. I'll be honest, I was feeling a little blank and distracted, so when she began to talk about this assignment the first thing that cam to my mind was this green dinosaur. I don't know why, I still can't explain it, but I couldn't get rid of it. So I had to make him. I felt a little silly and then decided to make him a little friend, that's how the little blue guy came about (He was later attacked by a three year old and made into a little ball. Luckily he was saved and I revived him, though you can tell he's still a little mangled!). Then I had some sort of realization. When we wake up, for the most part, we are an emotional blank slate. The first thing that happens to us, be it a memory from the day before, the first greeting from a spouse, whoever (or whatever) lives in your house, or the song on the alarm clock that wakes you up. Sometimes, however, nothing significant happens and you get the rare chance to make a choice about what you get to feel. That day was one of those days for me. So that day, I chose to feel dinosaur. My hope was that focusing on something fun and a little silly would cause me to feel joy. It worked.

Our final assignment was focused on the heart project. At that time I really had no idea what I wanted to do for mine. So I sat for a while and though, and then the last stanza of the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken came to mind. It says this:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

So that was the inspiration of this painting. I know that there are lots of places I could be right now, other countries, states, communities, but I chose this one. The same will be for my heart project. I can choose any medium, any style, any experience to pull from, but I will choose one, and that will make all the difference.



I hope you enjoyed those and they helped you to understand just a bit of what this year has meant for me. In my next blog, as I said, I will be looking forward to what it will mean to be home and what the future holds for me.

Zim Refugees

So this post is just a series of pictures that I took while visiting with the Zimbabwe refugees. As a community we've been really taking a focus on the situation here in South Africa. With all of the Xenophobic attacks and personal interaction with Zimbabweans it has touched each of our hearts in a different way. In spending time with the people and hearing their stories I get to witness an opportunity. An opportunity we have and an opportunity to see God work in an amazing way. I hope these pictures and stories give you a window into that.

Kids playing amongst the rubble, somewhat ignorant of their situation they still have smiles on their face.

This is one of the areas that people sleep in. It's coming on winter here in South Africa which means really cold nights, so this is the best refuge they have.

This day the local Muslim community came out to provide a meal. They've been extremely helpful and have given a lot of time and energy to the crisis.

This was a choir from a local church that showed up to sing for the refugees. It was a beautiful time of song and dance. Once I figure out how to compress videos I'll throw a few up here!

These are just some of the children living in the shelter. The bottom one is named Prince and when I was holding him he was very insistent about kissing me on the nose!

A favorite pastime here at the shelter, checkers! There are a few rules that are indigenous to South Africa that I'm not to sure of yet, but I think I'll get the hang of it some day. Jody bought them this set when we saw they were playing with bottle caps on a drawn out board. They are also amazing at chess!

These are just pictures that take a look around where they are living. They are trying to make the best of it, cleaning up areas and setting up "rooms" with tires and large pieces of trash.

One of my friends, Andrew, took a trip to Zimbabwe not to long ago and put together a field report (this is a link to a blog which has a link to the report) which I think that everyone should read. It is showing the violence that is happening to the people of Zimbabwe as well as the hope that people still have for this once great nation. There is a warning on the other blog, but I'll just tell you that the pictures there are not easy to look at. This is the reality of what evil can do.

Community Fun!

So we had this really good conversation on community and expectations today so I figured I'd share it with you. It's cleverly titled "Myths of Community ". Also I'm on my fourth cup of coffee today so I have a lot of energy.

We started out the conversation with a clip from the movie "The Beach". In a nutshell, the movie is about a world traveler named Richard who stumbles onto a map to a Utopian community living on an island. The rest of the film finds him and a few friends finding this beach and living there for sometime, only to find that their expectations of community life fall apart. It's an ok movie if your interested in sketchy dialog but a pretty intriguing plot.

But, I digress...

The whole point of that was watching the end of the movie, seeing their expectations not being met, and then seeing "utopia" fall apart. In that we looked at an illustration of the flow of community life. I even took a picture for you!


In this illustration we look at five different aspects of community life:
Casual, Pseudo-Community, Chaos, Catharsis, and Deep Community.

Casual - 1: subject to, resulting from, or occurring by chance casual meeting>2 a: occurring without regularity : occasional <casual employment> b: employed for irregular periods casual worker> c: met with on occasion and known only superficially casual friend>

In the casual stage, it's exactly what is sounds like. In a sense everyone is putting on their best show and conversation is limited to neutral topics like the weather or something. Every community/friendship/small group starts here.

Pseudo - 1 : false : spurious <pseudoclassic>
Community - 1: a unified body of individuals b: the people with common interests living in a particular area
When you hit pseudo-community, you start going a little deeper. You can talk about yourself to a degree, letting people in to more personal aspects of your life but still keeping them at an arms length. Conversation about deeper spirituality can be found here, but very little real personal investment needs to be made. The reality is that most small groups/bible studies/communities never make it past this, mainly because of the limited amount of face time/personal time spent with each other. They are happy with this place because the masks can still be on if you want them to be.

Chaos - 3 a: a state of utter confusion
This is where things get interesting: chaos. In the illustration this is where we go into the dark tunnel. This is where there has been a significant amount of personal investment but all the expectations you've brought haven't exactly been met. This can manifest itself in many ways, but can also be ignored. A lot of people think that chaos is a problem and try to ignore it.We believe that chaos has no place in christian community. We avoid it and never want to move past pseudo-community. The reality is that this is a healthy progression in community life. There are a lot of expectations about community that most of us deal with and will just fester in our hearts unless they are brought to light through chaos. You NEED to allow chaos to move forward. There is reality that not everyone is perfect, therefore you won't love everyones little quirks, or some of the big quirks. The best part is that you, yes YOU, have issues. And eventually those issues are going to bother someone. At some point that someone won't be able to take it anymore and that will create chaos. How you deal with it is what decides whether or not you can move on. I think I've stressed this point quite enough.

Catharsis - 2 a: purification or purgation of the emotions (as pity and fear) primarily through art b: a purification or purgation that brings about spiritual renewal or release from tension 3: elimination of a complex by bringing it to consciousness and affording it expression
This, my friends, is the next step: catharsis. I love the definition, because there is this idea that when your emotions come to bear there is some sort of purification and spiritual renewal. Now we are again coming from the realization that we aren't perfect and this process may have a few flaws, so keep that in mind. This really is kind of coupled with chaos because it's part of the release that chaos needs. It's like hot lava in a volcano that needs to force it's way out, or, like the illustration, a coming from darkness into light (a slightly less violent way than the volcano, but you get the point). At this point in the community we begin to try and work with chaos, finding a way to make relationships right, learning to love in spite of faults, or just letting your emotions out for everyone to know how you feel. Now this is something that needs to be done with a bit of discretion depending on your audience. Not that honesty is a bad thing, but sometimes sharing how angry you are with so-and-so in the group in front of the whole group doesn't do anyone any good. Since we are thinking of this in terms of healthy community (basically that healthy communities go through this cycle) we are assuming that God is in this equation. Asking for guidance in this process is key. Community will never make it without serious reliance on Him. Through this process beautiful and painful things can happen all at the same time. When you share your heart in the hard times there is a purging that happens, a release in your spirit. You begin to walk in the truth of who you are and who the community is. Only then can you move to the next phase.

Deeper - 1: extending far from some surface or area: as a: extending far downward deep well> b (1): extending well inward from an outer surface
The last part of this cycle is deeper community. This is where a synthesis of chaos and catharsis creates an openness and a trust in which you don't move past someones faults but you learn to love them with their faults. You begin to recognize the Christ in others as they see the Christ in you. Now instead of the word deep we use the word deeper in it's place because there is this idea of constantly moving forward in this. The reality is that this cycle repeats itself. Not the whole cycle, but I think the last three are in constant motion. There are always new things to learn about yourself and others, so chaos and catharsis with be revisited. This, however, is coupled with the promise that when dealt with deeper community will follow each time. There is no end to the depth that you can reach with God and community, so there is always a need for love and grace.

As an aside, I think the opposite can be true in thought, that healthy communities don't go through this cycle and that God isn't in this. I think you can be absolutely focused on God as a community, seeking Him in all things and go through chaos/catharsis. I'll even go as far as to say you have to go through these to experience deep community. I know this idea is repeated throughout this entire blog, but on the other hand I don't think I can stress this point enough. God will allow you to feel pain, rejection, anger, frustration, etc. to help you a) realize you are human, broken, and in need of Him and b) so everyone else can see that about you and it can cause you to humble yourself to the community. Everyone needs a little humility now and again...

Now that's a lot to think about and even in writing this blog my head is spinning and I think I need a nap. So for anyone who has braved it this far into this entry, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. This is a conversation that didn't start with me and won't end with me. It's a conversation that we will be having in faith communities for years to come and I'm glad that I can take part. So if there is anything you would like to agree with, challenge, add, or just vent about, let me know and we can keep going. There are lot's of different types of communities and people so I can't imagine that this model is the model to define all models. That's why God made us creative. So about that nap...

Pangani Blog

I just wanted to let you all know our Pangani blog is up and running. It's a continuous blog from the previous years of Nieucommunities up to today, where staff and apprentices will take turns writing entries. I think if would be really cool if you all checked that out periodically as well (it's listed in my blogs to check out section on the left) so you can see what life here is like from the perspectives of the rest of my community!

Settling in for the year

So it seems that things are starting to move towards normalcy here (as normal as it can feel to live halfway across the world). Though I'm still dealing with bouts of homesickness and such I'm coming through with a sense of clarity and purpose. It seemed funny to me that we didn't start the year off hitting the ground running, but with Nieucommunities everything and every time has a purpose, even free time. A lot of what we've been doing here in the last week has been very team oriented. The pictures you are about to see (and the one from the top) are from Kwalata Game Ranch where we spent the day doing some team building activities. It was hard to take pictures while being involved, but I had one of the guys there take pictures of what was my favorite activity. We had to take a rope make it form a perfect square with 90 degree angles. The trick is we had to do it blindfolded. You can see how well it turned out.








As you can see, it actually worked. The exercise taught us a lot about listening to each other and leadership. You can probably see at one point there were only four of us holding the rope in the middle. We had to figure out the corners while everyone else waited for further instruction. Then when we sorted everything out the rest of the team had to come in and build from there. It showed that there are sometimes where we need to wait and be quiet and other times where we need to get up and go while the ones who were leading had to be quiet. In the end it took all of us to complete the square, so we couldn't have done it without the team. It was a lot of fun but also a very important lesson.

On the way out we spotted some local wildlife. These guys are called Springbok and were nice enough to hang out while I snapped some photos.



Another cultural activity we got to participate in during this past week was playing/watching some cricket. As an intro to the game we played some garden cricket which we pretty funny to watch and play as you'll see. Then this weekend we got a chance to go to a 50 over match (meaning an 8 hour match) which was surprisingly engaging and fun to watch. This match also had some serious cultural relevance because it was Shaun Pollocks last match. Shaun Pollock was one of the best cricketers in the game and his retirement brought out a large and overwhelmingly emotional response from South Africans and some of our staff members alike.

At the match

A couple pictures of Shaun Pollock if anyone is curious

So while in Johannesburg we got a chance to check out some very culturally relevant sites. Below is a picture of the Nelson Mandela statue in none other than Nelson Mandela Square. It was erected on March 31, 2004 to honor the famous South African statesman. It stands 6 meters tall and is quite impressive in person


We then got a chance to go to the Apartheid Museum. It was a hard museum to walk through, to see what people were subjected to due to years of fear that then turned to hatred. It was very sobering to see what can happen when power is taken too far. We weren't permitted to take any pictures in the museum, but I got the chance to take a couple at the end as we walked out. They are just words that represent ideals that South Africa is now rebuilding a nation on.




Last week got a chance to go out and see some of the local ministries and hear the stories of the people who started them. One place we went was to an orphanage called House of Joy and ate lunch with it's founder Thobile. When she was a school teacher she began to have children show up to class who hadn't eaten in days and had nothing to eat for lunch. Then as she began to investigate she found that some of these children had lost their parents to AIDS and had grandparents who couldn't support them. So she started providing for them, feeding them, and helping their grandparents support them. Eventually she left school teaching, even though she had her own family to support, and started caring for these children full time. Now she houses 8 orphans full time and hosts a daycare/school for those who can't afford it for around 95 students up to age 5. They also run an after school computer program for high school students who want to learn because the schools don't have computers. They rely completely on the support of churches and government organizations, truly believing that God can sustain all their needs. These are some pictures of our lunch together with her and her staff.








So this week was also a chance to take a look at what the rest of the year will look like for us as apprentices. With this week ending our orientation we will be moving into our postures. One definition of posture is a mental or spiritual attitude. For us they will look something like this:

Listening: Learning to listen to God, to our hearts, and to the culture around us.

Submerging: Being the hands and feet of Jesus in the neighborhoods we live in.

Inviting: Becoming fragrant followers of Jesus who gather people around a compelling story.

Contending: Fighting well for the lives and faith of those God has brought into our lives.

Imagining: Seeing and embracing what God has created for us and preparing to engage the next leg of our mission.

Entrusting: Preparing those we have served to go on with God and encouraging them to pass on what they've received.


That picture at the end just represents the idea that this is a cycle of living. Each one of these postures builds upon the next, so it's not like when we enter the submerging posture we stop listening to God and so forth. Like I've said in previous posts, this will be an opportunity for us to explore ministries and opportunities for ministry in the surrounding communities and really hear from God about what he would have us do this year. The postures will also be supplemented by books we will be reading and also specific parts of scripture that we will implement in our times together as well as times of solitude.

Another cool thing we are going to be doing as a community is that starting this Wednesday we will be participating in lent. It sometimes seems like an old boring tradition, but God can sometimes be found in tradition. It's amazing to know that when we are participating in daily readings and prayers for that we will be joining in with a global community of believers that will be preparing to celebrate Easter and learn what it means to share in the death and resurrection of our Lord and Saviour. This is definitely new ground for me but I am excited to see how God is going to shape and transform our community through this time.

So that's what's been going on in the last week or so. It's been busy but good. I hope to hear back from everyone so I can hear some news from home. I love you all and have a great week!