I received an email from an old friend today, like I always do every 2 months or so, with updates about his life faraway and what he has been doing.
You see he's a Christian missionary in Africa. I won't say exactly which country because there are not many missionaries from our part of the world there and I know he doesn't want to be identified somehow or another. Lets just say he's in some god-forsaken place, miles away from modern civilisation and proper sanitation. A Chinese man in the middle of a sea of Black African tribesmen.
Trust me, its no enjoyable Safari in the park.
He's not a young man. And back when I was a teenager still in church, he was my Sunday School teacher. I still remember dumbfounding the entire class one balmy Sunday afternoon with my proclaimation that in this day and age of scientific logic, there was little place for touchy-feely things such as Faith in the things we cannot see or touch. And I continued to be one of his more 'challenging' students, bringing in a more or less secular and scientific perspective to alot of the doctrines and concepts that often go unquestioned in Sunday School.
Yes I was an opinionated 'heretic'. But we still joke about this till today. He never held it against me. For that I respect him. And as I grew up to be an adult, he became like an elder brother I never had.
Well, for the past 6 years or so, a group of us have been receiving emails from him about the situation with the ministry there and how we can provide prayer support. I know he doesn't expect me to be much of a Prayer Warrior nowadays, having left Church a good decade ago. The emails are more of a way of keeping in touch I guess. And when I receive one of those electronic missives, I know he had to drive a couple of hundred miles into the nearest town just to type out a 3 paragraph update. Well he says he drives, it could have been a 3-day ride on a bullock cart for all I know =))
We share a peer to peer relationship now, not one of teacher and student. But I have never asked him why he puts himself through all this, the extreme poverty, the mini-famines, the droughts, the corruption, the threat to life and limb, the disgusting diet, the lack of a blardy decent toilet and shower, the chicken-and-duck talk with the 'savage' natives
et cetera. The cynical atheist in me asks if its all just a form of escapism from the sad reality that he couldn't cut it in the real world here.
I want to believe its his Calling. I think I owe him that much.
He used to tell me that God's love knows no borders. But sometimes when you look around you in the world today, you can't help but wonder if there are borderlines of divine blessing.
Still pondering.