An Inch Deep

I remember the first time I heard the sound.  I was walking down a Rwandan country lane between IWE and our hotel.

The sound of a machete striking plants, as people worked in the fields to raise crops to feed their families.

To many people, the sound might not fill your gut with emotion, with hurt, with confusion.  I used to be one of those folks.

Until I began to learn about Rwanda as I prepared for our ministry trip there in October.  I read about Rwanda, to prepare myself, to begin to try to understand what happened there in 1994, when nearly one million people were killed due to tribal tensions in approximately thirty days.  The books I read (I recommend Left to Tell and My Father, Maker of the Trees) began to explain the horrors that so many Rwandans experienced while the world stood aside and watched. 

Parts of both accounts were graphic, although I am sure not as graphic, horrific, and inexplicably violent as what the Rwandan people experienced in that month.  I was touched and challenged reading these books.  I didn't expect to be so physically nauseated hearing a machete, once a preferred weapon of genocide in murder, violence, and intimidation being used so commonly in the hills for peaceful agricultural work.

I still do not, cannot understand what happened in Rwanda, in a nation full of people so kind, loving, and relational.  At the end of our week, we visited a genocide memorial in Kigali - it was more awful and sad than I can still understand or write.  And per many statistics, at least 90% of Rwandans considered themselves Christian at the time of the genocide.  The more I think about it, the more realize how hard at work Satan is, trying to drive a divide between us, to play to our weaknesses, to keep us from going deep in God, from having deep roots, from being strong in our faith and strong when faced with temptation.

How does Satan keep us only an inch deep?  By keeping us prideful, busy, away from community.  By filling our minds with lies and crowding out the part of us that seeks to spend time studying the Word.  Away from people who preach the Bible in truth and love.  Filling our hearts with false self-righteousness.  I could keep writing, but you get the picture.

It seems to me that many Rwandans, at the time of the genocide, were only an inch deep in their faith.  Being home, I realize that is also the case for most American Christians.  How far are we from a similar event, from turning away again from the genocides currently happening in the Sudan and other places in our world?

I believe as short term missionaries, we have a huge responsibility to live different lives when we return based on who we meet and what we experience but also to be agents of change in those who stayed home and supported us in prayer, friendship, and financially.  The great difficulty, to me at least, is discerning HOW I am to live differently, why my heart is burdened, hurting, changing and growing.  The more I process my adventure, the more I realize how incredibly important and valuable is my current mission field of Charlotte, NC.  So many people I know are shallow in their faith, without strong roots, without knowing how to live Kingdom kind of lives. 

One of my favorite prayers in the Bible, prayers for myself, and prayers for so many people in my life:

"...so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith - that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God." 
---Ephesians 3: 17 - 20




I think I'm supposed to help others live this prayer, to be more than an inch deep in their faith, to change our world on both sides of the Atlantic.  Let's just see how now!