Six years ago we began this adventure. Six years ago today I wrote about waking up under African skies and what that felt like. I wrote about it feeling like home in a way that both surprised me and that I'd expected.  We feel at home when we are where we are supposed to be.


One of the hardest things about being here is the leaving that happens. Expats are always coming and going and despite what they say, you never really know when someone will just pack it up and decide that this place for them, is no longer home.


It messes with you a bit. It raises the question of 'Do I still feel at home?' 'Is my time here up?' and then the host of practical questions that go with that. 'Is this best for my kids?' and 'What about my family back in the states?' and 'What about my career? and my (lacking) retirement account?'  and all the second guessing and re-questioning your 'call' here happens. It's exhausting. It makes the loss greater because now your friend is gone and you're left with the snow globe of your life shaken again.


I read yesterday that Tim Keller says your 'call' is a combination of your: Affinity, Ability and Opportunity. It's similar to one of my favorite Buechner quotes,  


"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."


Deep gladness. That is what I felt waking up 6 years ago here. An unexplainable affinity. An opportunity. Ability? That's the interesting part. I had some obvious abilities. Doctoring. Teaching. But what I didn't know then was that I lacked some pretty important ones.


Did I have the ability to totally and completely rely on Jesus for everything? Did I have the ability to trust Him when the hot dry season felt too hot and family felt too far and the funds were low? When loneliness hit? When my abilities didn't feel used? Did I have the understanding of what 'deep gladness' really is? That it's not the same thing as happiness? That it's not things making sense perfectly? That it's not a neatly packaged life with a bow?


It has taken me a while and some dark seasons to learn that my most important ability is to be teachable not a teacher and to allow myself to be healed not to be the healer.


Deep gladness is usually not neat and often doesn't make any sense and neither does the world's deep hunger. That is where the beauty comes in. Deep meets deep. Only with God can we hold both. Can we find deep gladness in the face of a hungering world. Deep gladness instead of being swallowed by it.  Deep gladness by entering in to it even if we can't fix it.


A few months ago someone sent me a puzzle. I used to hate puzzles. I assumed they were boring because I couldn't imagine sitting still for long periods of time looking at so many small pieces that look almost the same and 'wasting my time' trying to figure out how they go together. But when I got the package, I decided to give it a try and to my surprise I loved it. I found it completely satisfying and obsessively not boring. I sat for hours at its disposal until it came together into a finished picture.


In a world where so many things don't fit together, a puzzle eventually does. A piece that alone makes absolutely no sense, has a place in the big picture. But you do need to know what the big picture is. Imagine how hard it would be to do a puzzle if you didn't know what it was supposed to look like in the end?


Deep gladness is like this.  It's enjoying the process itself. Appreciating the pieces. Attending to the details on their edges and the shade of their blue. It's going back and forth between the individual and whole. It's letting go when you are stuck on a section and doing another part. It's taking a complete break and coming back with fresh eyes when you are able to see more clearly. After a while it becomes a zen thing. Mediation and intuition. You become one with it, seeing a piece and feeling where about it belongs.


This is like our process of finding and growing in God in a world that is deeply hungry. Deep gladness I've found, deepens. I had an affinity for East Africa, and I've been given the opportunity. My abilities now include my dependency. Instead of referencing my happiness as a gauge for my continued calling, I'm allowing this place, this process, this shared hungering, to deepen my gladness.

What a joy!

The story with the Luweero village doesn't end there.  The people we had helped care for with HIV were now connected with a clinic that had them on ARVs (see Village Care part one), but the people were still poor and longing to improve their economic situation. And we were still longing to help.

This is a farming community and some of their strengths and assets are land and labor.  It's always good to start with strengths.  How could we assist in improving their farming yield to feed themselves better, improve nutrition and generate income with the surplus?  We knew of an organization called Farming God's Way that helps people with limited resources improve their farming yields by teaching effective farming practices. It uses basic principles that improve soil quality, planting techniques to maximize growth, planning and attention to weather and weeds and wise use of resources like composting and mulching.  Educating someone in the community this way could benefit everyone, so we sent a key community member to a year-long Farming God's Way farming school. After his training and internship he returned and taught what he'd learned. The community gained knowledge they could apply to the resources they already had- no capital was needed. Some people were able to increase farming yields and the diversity of crops, and improve their diet and their health.  Some people began farming things for commercial sales, raising their income and enabling them to send some of their children to school.  His education had impact. How much impact? I'd love to say  an entire village, but that wouldn't be true, at least not yet.

This work takes time. The list of issues is long.

In many ways it would have been more satisfying to build a beautiful clinic or buy a new tractor, but then what? We all like nice neat outcomes. We like tangible results. We like before and after pictures. It's the way we are programed - to value product over process. 

But isn't our life about the process?

Life is the journey to  become our true selves and grow closer to God. We do this over time and through experience and along the way we help each other.  Often our paths lead us into dark seasons, hard places. People in the villages know this vividly as they face frequent loss and work hard for little pay-off . But it's in the process of life that we can find our commonality, our shared humanity. Our stories  and our days wear different clothing, but love and suffering and grace are universal.  We can't forget this because remembering makes us more likely to  "do with" and not "do for", to resist actions that send the subliminal message of "i can" and "you can't".  Remembering this costs. It takes time. It can bring disappointment. Doing things together across cultures takes longer  and there are more bumps on the road but it builds unity and understanding.

Of course outcomes are important. We want to have an impact. We want to see whether what we are doing is making a difference.  But we can't forget about the benefit and role of qualitative research.  Sometimes I wonder if we get so attached to our quantitative methods that we lose what can be learned from story.

Perhaps even in our own lives we should live into the process of our journey and be gentle. Look to what we are learning not merely what we are producing. And perhaps what we ought to want more than outcomes is story.

That is what will be here. I will be sharing the stories. The process. Because we believe that is where the truth is, where the fullness is and where real and lasting change happens both for ourselves and in our work.