It's Time for Africa

Please Lord, grant me patience, joy and love to fight for something noble and right!

Missions, it is the root of Orthodoxy. Missions is love. Unconditional love. It allows you to see people as human beings, as images of Christ. When I looked at myself in the mirror today, I could finally see me. Through the spiritual warfare and the growth that comes from it, I am able to finally see Christ in me. The way he made me and why my life has unraveled in such a way. Granted there are still a plethora of struggles and many veils I have yet to lift, areas of my spiritual life I have never "tapped into" but the one thing about myself I know to be true is that God has placed me in the field of missions. Into the line of fire. My heart is full of a fire like passion and joy. Other times it is filled with massive amounts of pain as if, like the Virgin Mary (or Panagia in Greek), a sword has also peirced my heart when I see how disturbed, broken and fragmented the world and the peoples in it have become. I heal though through the prayers of the heart: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me a sinner. 

The mind tries to escape when it gets hard in order to get out of suffering. We try to find Kansas by clicking our heals together saying that there is no place like home. But I have no ruby slippers, no Wizard of Oz and no Todo. It is just me, God and my team. I think about the suffering, which compared to what the indigenous peoples of Turkana, Kenya go through is nothing. I think about how soon this trip will be all but a distant memory calling me back. Calling ever so persistently beckoning me back here to the bush, back to Lodwar, back to the land of Kenya.