See Something More

"How have you seen Jesus today?"  This has been our question of the day with our group of interns that have been with us the past six weeks. It makes for good conversation, but more importantly, it opens up our eyes to look for the presence of Jesus in the activities of every day.  When I woke up Tuesday morning, it was a dreary rainy day. Welcome to the rainy season, where water falls from the sky slowly and continuously all day long. Monday had been the same exact way, except just worse enough that we had to postpone our weekly village trip to Bisserke. Getting out to the village on muddy roads on a rainy day can not only be treacherous but also dangerous.  So here we were on Tuesday morning, trying again to make it out to the village a day late. Everything at the medical clinic in Bisserke happens in the morning, so I desperately tried to get us out of the house and on the road in time. But it was a rainy morning, and we kept running into problems, and we kept getting ...

I ran into town really quickly to make a few copies before kids' club started that afternoon. We were going to teach them the story of the prodigal son, and so we had created a coloring sheet that was a maze, connecting the lost son to the loving father. While waiting for my 80 copies to come off the press, I noticed a little boy around the age of 2 waiting with his mother. He stared at me curiously (probably because I'm white), slightly hiding behind the leg of his mother, who was laughing at him. When the copy lady handed me the hot copies, I took the top sheet and handed it to him. His mother, now being the more curious one, held it for him and read the verse printed below the maze.  John 3:16.  "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life."  "I want one!" the copy lady said. So I handed her another hot copy and then hustled back to kids' club because it h...

I will never read the story of the Good Samaritan the same ever again. Because now I have lived it.  Just as we were loading up the car to head back home after an overnight stay in  the village, Daniel asked if we could take his brother, Dabiyo, back in the car with us while he and his wife, Valerie, went ahead on their moto. "Not a problem!" I replied. Daniel is the nurse practitioner who serves as the major of the CSPS (medical clinic) of the village. The interns and I have been going out to work alongside Daniel once a week, learning about nursing practices and medical care at the village level here in Burkina Faso. Dabiyo is his younger brother, who is also studying to be a nurse. He is at the top of his class.  Bouncing down red dirt roads on the way back home, the interns and I talked about how we had seen Jesus in the past dew days during our stay. We saw him in the miracle of new life when we experienced the delivery of Ezekiel (http://www.seesomething...

Before leaving for our overnight trip to the village, we prayed and asked God for a big request. Our purpose in going to the village was  to work side by side with Daniel, a member of our national team who is also a nurse practitioner and runs a medical clinic in the village. He delivers many babies a month, and so our interns and I asked God for one thing: to  see a delivery. Or in my case, I wanted to actually do the delivery.  "God has answered our prayers!" I said when Daniel told me a woman had arrived to the clinic who was in labor and 2 centimeters dilated.   One and a half hours later, I performed a second examination to find that she was nine centimeters with membranes still intact. I glanced at my watch. 3:39 PM. "Call everyone in here!" I told one of our interns, and she hurriedly found the other interns and brought them in the room.  As they filed in, I opened my mouth to explain that when her water broke, her baby would come quickly, s...

We call it kids' club. It starts at 3:00 pm every Thursday afternoon and takes place on the property right next to ours where there is a a big open space, a hangar for shade, and some chalkboards. Think VBS. Africa style. Three weeks ago, the day before our first planned kids' club, I drove my car around town with our interns, and we invited our neighbors and friends to come to our property for an activity for children. I honestly didn't know how to advertise and how effective it would be to just try to spread the invitation by word of mouth. That's why I was so excited when 31 kids showed up the next day for the first Thursday kids' club.  We started with a game to help everyone learn each other's names. The children stood in a circle and threw the ball to one other. Each time someone caught the ball, they had to say their name. After a few minutes, we switched the rules so that when someone caught the ball, everyone else had to call out their name. I ...

With the Lion King theme song playing through the car's stereo, we headed off down the red African dirt road leaving a cloud of dust behind us. It put us in the mood for what we were about to do: a  safari trip in  Nazinga wildlife reserve, home of the famous  African elephants. Burkina has the highest wild elephant population density of all of West Africa, and I figured it was high time that I saw one. Naturally, we have seats that mount to the roof of the car, so we all climbed up for the adventure of a lifetime.  Bumping along tiny two-track roads through the bush, hanging on for dear life, ducking from sudden  tree branches, and then brushing off bizarre insects that fell in your lap are only a few of the reasons that we could hardly keep quiet while sitting atop our vehicle. It was amazing we saw any wildlife at all, unless they were all coming out to get a glimpse of the six headed metal elephant who couldn't be quiet. The animals probably couldn't decide ...

What is a letter of recommendation? I found myself asking. And why do you need one?  A letter of recommendation gets you into college with the scholarship you worked so hard to receive . A letter of recommendation helps you get that position for the job that you love. A letter of recommendation is something that testifies to your character. Something that shows you are worthy of what you are seeking. The report of someone else that allows you entrance into something you want.  At the beginning of  2 Corinthians 3, Paul uses the analogy of a letter of recommendation to teach us something about our identity and mission in life.  "You are a letter of recommendation," he says.   A letter of recommendation that is written by God on our hearts to be delivered to a hurting, broken, and condemned world.  Our hearts are like a letter that recommends the gospel to the world. When people read the lines of our lives, they see that the gospel is believable, true, and li...