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| Matema, Lake Nyasa (aka Lake Malawi) on a recent break |
To a
passing observer it may look like an exciting adventure to work in ‘exotic’
Africa, but while Tanzania is indeed a beautiful place, with delicious tropical
fruits, exotic birds and lots of sunshine, the reality of living and working here
is often challenging. Leaving behind family and friends that I love and living
in a culture that is so different from my own can be very hard. So why do I do
it?
Though
the sun is shining and the birds are singing as I write, I know that out there
the world is a mess. Just over the wall are people living in poverty, sometimes
wondering where their next meal will come from or how they will pay their
children’s school fees. Read the news and there are people living in fear of
their lives, thousands trying to escape their homes and others suffering from
natural disasters. And in my own family loved ones are suffering, I myself
often have health issues and I know that happiness is fragile.
I
can’t make sense of all this. Sometimes I find the hopelessness of life
overwhelming, except that I believe that there is hope. This world has a lot of beauty, ingenuity and love in it,
enough to point me to the fact that there must be a master designer behind it –
I cannot conceive that it just came to be. But if all that there is to life now
is what I see around me and on the news, then I am not sure what the point of
living is. My own life might be
pretty comfortable and nice, but what about all those others who are suffering?
Is it fair?
When I
wonder about all this (which I do frequently), again and again I am pointed towards
the only thing, or One, that I believe makes sense of it. This world is messed
up, mostly by humanity’s own actions, but there is hope. God made this world to
be a beautiful place where we can live in love and harmony with Him and one
another. But people have chosen to ignore God and follow their own ideas and
the world we now live in is the result of that. But the reason I have hope to
carry on and the reason I live in Tanzania, is because I believe God hasn’t
abandoned us. I believe that if we choose to acknowledge God to be God and to
love and follow Him, we can look forward to a day when this world will be
totally restored, the mess done away with, and we will live in peace with man
and God. This hope for the future gives me the strength to live for today. It
gives me the motivation to live in Tanzania, to work with the church here to
help people to know God better, through the Bible, that they might share in
that hope that I have. I have been privileged with good education and Bible
teaching, unlike so many of my Christian family in Tanzania, so this is why I
have come to teach in Bible colleges and churches here that they also might
understand the Bible and know God better and the hope He offers. It is why I am
part of an organisation trying to make the Bible available in every language of
the world that needs one.
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| Students at a Bible college that I teach at occasionally |
If you
have questions about anything I have written, if you disagree or want to know
more, please write and tell me!
"The fundamental fact of
existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under
everything that makes life worth living." The Bible (Hebrews 11:1, The Message
translation)
