Someone once wrote upon leaving the Congo, “Oh Congo, what a wreck. It’s hard to look and listen. It’s hard to turn away.” I can’t tell you how truly that resonates.
These last two months I have spent being touched by the lives and stories of children living in a nation the UN recognises as the least developing in all the world. The statistics are bleak; home to 4 and a half million orphans, host to a dozen international wars in only the last two decades, consequentially making it the world capital of rape, torture and war crimes. But statistics offer a distant and disaffected view of a situation that can only hope to be understood at a closer look; like standing back to view a whole work of art while missing the brushstrokes that make up its beauty. No matter how long I’ve been in Africa now, seeking His heart with everything I have and am, I never cease to be reminded that His heart is only found when you stand close enough to be caught by the story, and the face, of just one child.
Statistics will never show you what is going on beneath the surface. You have to come and see for yourself. You have to allow yourself the courage to see with the eyes of Jesus. He sees the depths of poverty and pain, as no one has ever seen or felt them before. But he sees, more deeply written into the lives of “the least of these” even than their pain and poverty, a true and a lasting hope. The Scriptures say, “Hope that is seen is no hope at all.” If that’s true, then God’s eyes are most attentively fixed upon the places in which nothing will change unless He is the One to change it. Sometimes it’s a whole region, like Goma in the eastern Congo; sometimes it’s just one person, like my friend Dancel dying alone, leprous and arthritic, in his sweltering and smelly mud hut. Encountering such people and places, it would be easy to give up hope, as do so many. It is their greatest loss, this dying hope. The human heart seems able to endure just about anything but that. Because the strength to endure is in knowing that there is yet a more beautiful future, so it is when that future is crushed beneath a numbed heart and a beat spirit that a life born of hope is lost. But we stand on a promise, written upon the heart of the nation and all the hearts of all God’s children in it;
...hope that is seen is no hope at all...
And there is hope. Of that I’m convinced.
As for me, I think I’ve been caught in the spell that the Congo casts over most people who visit it. It caught me before I ever stepped foot here, and has only gotten stronger the longer I’ve stayed. Only now it has a face. Actually lots of faces; kids who it’ll be tough to leave behind, some just because they’re great kids, others because I’ll leave them in just the same state in which I first met them. It’s hard to look and listen; it’s hard to turn away. Hard to turn away from people in whose stories I have had the honour of sharing; people with whom I’ve discovered a relationship strong enough to penetrate language, culture and background. It feels like I’m standing on an axis moment upon which my life is going to turn, one of those “there’s no going back after this” moments. I’ve seen and heard things that God won’t soon allow me to forget. Because Dancel is still laid up on the floor of his mud hut, dying and alone, and the thousand other faces burnt onto my heart are still bearing the same broken expressions, betraying the deep and lasting wounds they hold. It’s hard to turn away, even impossible, because to do that would be to miss not only the honour of sharing in the life of such as these, but the inexpressible privilege of playing a part in changing it.
...to make the hope that is unseen visible
...to afford freedom to those from whom it has been taken
...to reawaken life where it has been lost, more and better life than we ever dreamed of.
To let that pass me by would be to miss the gift for which God put me here. But I won’t let it pass. No way.
