Over our Christmas break this year, we spent five days on a trip to Nakivale Refugee Settlement in western Uganda. Needless to say, it was an incredible experience that I believe has deeply impacted both Isaac and myself. I'm sure I will write more about that experience in the future.
While not everything was planned ahead of time, it became clear in advance that we would be expected to speak to some church leaders to give an encouraging word and to clarify our connection to them as fellow Christians. ("Many Africans think whites don't believe in God," we were told. Wonder why???) I was also told that I may be asked to share some encouragement with Christian women specifically, knowing that many of the women and girls in the camp had been victims of sexual violence.
In the weeks leading up to the trip, I was anxious about these possibilities. Teaching English? Yes, I can do that. But giving a spiritual word of encouragement to a group I don't know, across cultural and language barriers? I kept saying, "Well, I'm not a pastor..."
Deep down, there was an added layer to my insecurity. How can I stand before a group of refugees, people who fled from their homes and in many cases have lost everything? What would they think of this little white girl, so oblivious to true suffering, giving them an encouraging pat on the back? How could they hear the Gospel as they sit in difficult situations that may not change?
In Western culture, one of the greatest arguments against the Gospel is suffering. It's become a trump card in the argument against the existence of a loving God. In the West, a single encounter with loss can shatter a person's faith and send them teetering right off the fence and away from God.
And there in Nakivale ... that whole group would be a testament to the suffering and evil in this world.
It wasn't a conscious thought, but it was an undercurrent in my mind. Hmm... how do we flex the Gospel to fit this group? How do we face those difficult questions? What angle do you take with such a group?
It sounds a bit silly when I type it out, but the thoughts were there. And those thoughts, I realized, are so misplaced. The Gospel was made for people in suffering.
Yesterday I was flipping through the Bible and landed in the latter part of the Psalms. Not psalms of David, but psalms penned by Jews finding themselves in Babylon. Away from their home countries. No hope of return. They'd lost everything. And then I found another bookmark in Isaiah. Passages about a God who is fiercely angry on behalf of the oppressed, who sides with the suffering and sets himself against the unjust. And then there was another bookmark, a wrinkled church bulletin shoved in the New Testament. Letters from Paul. The author, a persecuted man who eventually lost his head for the sake of the Gospel. The audience, a church well-acquainted with violence and loss of freedom.
And then there's Christmas. The story of a God so grieved by the brokenness, the sin produced by the will of fallen humanity. A God so moved by our suffering that He stepped into it, taking on flesh and knowing poverty and pain and death for our sake, that we might be joined with Him when He returns to make all things right.
The number of people in the Bible who experienced pain, poverty and loss far outweigh those who lived a smooth life, especially in the New Testament. If anything, as someone who has had very few storms in life thus far, I am the outsider. I am the one who doesn't entirely "get it." As a member of a privileged part of the Body of Christ, yes -- we have a responsibility to help in practical ways and to "spend ourselves on behalf of the hungry and oppressed" (Isaiah 58:10). But we do not need to be ashamed to present the Gospel, even if on that day that's all we have with us to give.
This Christmas my sister's church had the congregation sit in darkness, and then as reader after reader read a different verse about light, a lamp was turned on. Eventually, the room was filled with light. Light shines best in darkness.
Christianity is not a religion of the prosperous, the privileged. God has been a shield and source to the oppressed for thousands of years. Christ himself is no stranger to suffering. We don't have to twist the Gospel or wonder how it will be received by those in difficult situations -- it was meant for them! Our hope is not fragile, it is not breakable, it is not stumped by the darkness in this world .... It shines fiercely in the midst of it. It cannot be put out.
