The Isolation Tank

“He loves Thee too little who loves anything together with Thee which he loves not for Thy sake.” St. Augustine

You may be wondering about the title…I’ll come back to that. Let me just start by saying that things are going very well here. Between work and friendships and washing clothes by hand, I keep pretty busy and have a lot of fun while I’m doing it. Sometimes though, difficulties come along even while times are good and the circumstances we find ourselves in can either push us closer to God or distract us from Him.

Question for you—is there such a thing as a forced fast? I’m not talking about someone depriving you of food or a situation like famine or poverty preventing you from eating. A fast is not only from food, and if you look at the purpose behind Christian fasting, you realize that there are many things other than food which should be fasted from. According to John Piper in A Hunger for God, “If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.” (Emphasis mine) Recently I started to see something going on in my own life that I feel relates to this question. For the past few weeks, I’ve felt in some ways isolated from certain people that I know. People who are normally very good about keeping in touch suddenly seem nowhere to be found. E-mails, phone calls and text messages go apparently unacknowledged and no response is sent. Usually, this situation would really get under my skin—why aren’t they replying? Can’t they at least let me know that they received the text/email/phone call? But this time around I started to wonder whether this was a great opportunity to rely on God more than I do on people for companionship, friendship, fellowship whatever you want to call it. I could see from my dependence on people responding to my messages that my soul has been stuffed—so to speak—with human relationships and communion, when I should be turning to God more. Just as I was beginning to consider this, I was praying with one of the school leaders on the YWAM base here, and he started to talk about times of isolation from family and friends, and how they’re times we can use for building our relationships with God. Needless to say, I was surprised, here I was just thinking about this and he was speaking my thoughts right out to me (although with more and better counsel to go along with them than I could have come up with), and I found myself once again wondering at God’s provision and guidance when we ask for it. So, back to the earlier question—is there such a thing as a forced fast? I think that sometimes we find ourselves in situations which can be amazing opportunities for us to learn and grow in our relationships with God, if only we’ll turn our attention away from what we lack and focus on Him. For me I can see that human relationship can be a huge distraction from my relationship with God. Unfortunately, I think most of the time, we’re not paying enough attention to see the dry times in our lies for what they are—chances to deepen our faith. We notice that people don’t respond to us in the same way they normally do, and instead of turning to God we rather push harder to get a response from our friends. We’re experiencing a dry spell financially, but instead of turning to God for his provision, we pick up extra hours to scrape together enough money. Time that we normally devote to other things suddenly becomes free, but instead of using that time for fellowship with God, we just look for something else to fill the minutes and hours.

I don’t want this to seem like a rant against the people who weren’t returning phone calls, etc. That is not my intention at all, I realize that life and circumstances prevent us from responding at times. But life and circumstances aside, if anything I should be thanking them for their role in one more lesson that God is teaching me. So if you haven’t been able to reply, Thank you! I appreciate it :)

At the same time, don’t feel like you shouldn’t talk/email/text me just because I’m trying to draw closer to God, I still want to hear from you too!

More later

~R~

P.S. I've added more pictures to my photobucket account, you can see them by following the link to the right.

"Here Comes the Sun..."

Greetings once again in another long-awaited post to add to all my previous meandering babble. I hope that as you read this you are doing well and that you are getting some enjoyment out of what probably is for you a higher speed internet connection than I have access to : )

Continuing to enjoy my time here in Ghana—the sun, the rain, the work and the emotional ups and downs that come with life in general. Lately I’ve really been noticing how if we’re not careful, if the foundation of our faith isn’t firm, the things that life throws at us can tear away at our confidence in Christ little by little. How do we square up our faith in a loving, caring God with constant reminders of the pain that goes on all around us? I’m not going to go into a long discussion of the problems of pain in the world, deeper and better thinkers than me have done a very good job of that and if you want to read some of their works, I recommend Ravi Zacharias and C.S. Lewis for a start. I only bring this topic up because of recent events that I’ve been confronted with. For a couple of weeks now, it seems as if every other day I’ve been hearing bad news whether from home or from friends here. Friends experiencing real money problems, illnesses and deaths in people’s families have all come up more than a couple times. For me personally, the challenging thing of hearing these reports has been that my immediate reaction is to do something to help. When I find myself in a situation that prevents me from doing anything (such as bake cookies, because I think that even though they don’t solve the problem, chocolate chips are a great comfort), I usually get frustrated at my smallness. Recently however, I’ve discovered something incredibly liberating—the only thing that I can do is pray. Somehow, by truly realizing just how incapable I am, I’ve felt a weight lift off my shoulders. I think this is because at the same time that I know that I’m utterly powerless, I also know that my God is bigger than every situation and that by pouring out to Him all the cares and concerns I have, I’m freed from the thought that I have to fix this. I know that God is able and so long as I’m turning to Him and joining in with His plans, I can also be free from worry. This just throws into focus why Paul is so adamant when he writes “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:6-7)

I went on some sight-seeing last week and saw a real contrast in the two places we visited. The first was Kakum National Park, and the second was Elmina Castle. At the park we went on a Canopy walk—rope bridges are strung high in the trees and you walk above the foliage in a small piece of rainforest that once covered a large part of West Africa. I was struck, as I usually am, by the beauty of God’s creation. The intricacy and creativity He employed when designing this world we live in never cease to amaze me. However, the second site was less awe-inspiring. Elmina Castle is one of many former slave castles that are scattered along the coast of West Africa from Sierra Leone to Nigeria and more. Seeing yet another example of the depths of cruelty man can sink to left me pretty much speechless. Even now, getting close to a week later, it’s hard to find words to respond. I worry about talking lightly about something that was so utterly wrong and destroyed so many lives and has probably been the single largest factor in the racial conflicts in the last 500 years, so I end up rather not saying anything. I think there are some topics that you just can’t talk about freely because of the pain associated with them. To me, the worst part of it all is that the Portuguese who built the castle originally came with the mindset to spread the Gospel of Christ, but over time the use for the castle changed to the “trade” of human beings. I hope that I’ll be able to write a better response to it at some point than I’m doing now, but I just wanted to get something down to start. If there’s one thing that that trip helped me to see more clearly the problems standing in the way of racial reconciliation today. I’m not saying that reconciliation can’t come, just that it is going to take the Grace of God (as in so many areas of life) to bring it about. Definitely a topic I encourage you to be praying into, and keeping your eyes open for the opportunities that God is giving you to join with Him in what He’s doing in that area.

I have some pictures of these sites, but they’re on someone else’s camera, so it may take a little bit before I can add them to this post. Don’t worry, I’ll get them up here, or at very least onto my Photobucket account (there’s a link to that on the right side of this page).

One last note before I close…I just want to say how thankful I am for the technology we have available to us in this world. I’ve been listening to some sermons from home that I was able to download from the internet, and it has been very encouraging and challenging. I really recommend them to you, the series I just finished listening to is called the Summer of Discovery done mostly by Jesse Wilson, head pastor at the Milan Vineyard (It’s a church, not a winery, don’t worry). It’s all about discovering what the Father is doing and joining in…really good stuff :-) You can download them yourself at the church website: go to www.milanvineyard.org then click on the link for sermons on the left hand side of the page. (Jesse if you’re reading this I really enjoyed the sermon from September 9^th and I look forward to hearing more of that series! Also, I hope it’s okay that I just did a plug for the church on here…)

God Bless!

~R~

P.S.—wish I had some great, deep explanation behind the title today, but really it was just the song that I had playing when I started typing, and it felt like a good tag on the post.