your household is your Africa

I knew a man of God named Tom who a number of years ago lost a courageous battle to pancreatic cancer. Friends would take turns riding the train into New York City with him to the cancer center and sit with him during his chemotherapy treatment.  I made the trip with him one day;

"I wish I had my Africa, he said to me." He was trusting in God but had come to grips with the fact that even if he were healed of this disease one day he die would like us all.

He was looking for a bucket to pour all of the love he had been given in Jesus Christ. He was looking for a place to valiantly and boldly live out his Hope.

"Tom" I said to him, "you are your Africa. How you face your disease and how we all face our inevitable deaths are the greatest witness we can ever give. Our mission field is our family. They are watching us in times of great joy and times of great tragedy. Our families are our tribes, our nations."

I was reminded of Tom this morning when a friend of many years asked me how to help her friend. He has cancer and has undergone two transplants both of which had failed. He "was" Jewish and had denied all faith in God. His wife was a Christian but gave up her God and converted to Judaism. Both of their children were atheists. "What can I say to them" she asked me. "They have no hope."

It was very sad. His Africa had withered under the heat and the land was so parched a seed of Hope scattered was burned up and could not take root.

My friend (who is Jewish) knows about Jesus. She was very scattered today and I couldn't explain deep Hope. She simply wanted to dump.

It is not uncommon to have doubts and fears in the midst of sickness and death, even for those who have lived a life of great devotion, but when we, like the friends of Daniel are confronted with fiery ordeals and death should not waiver. Our prayers should echo theirs;

"Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered King Nebuchadnezzar, "Your threat means nothing to us. If you throw us in the fire, the God we serve can rescue us from your roaring furnace and anything else you might cook up, O king. But even if he doesn't, it wouldn't make a bit of difference, O king. We still wouldn't serve your gods or worship the gold statue you set up."

We are our own Africa in which our faith and love will grow or perish. 

When Tom claimed his reward, we needed to ask another church to borrow their sanctuary because ours only sat a few hundred and his Africa Nation would not fit.