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Do you ever have trouble praying? Is it ever a struggle to use a journal or a silent prayer to focus your mind on a conversation with God? Many times when I sit down alone and in silence to have a conversation with God, I feel like a failure. Plenty of times I’ll find myself wondering about my schedule for the day or planning dinner, or wandering around doing some task I don’t remember starting because my mind unintentionally went somewhere besides prayer.
Prayer is a spiritual discipline, so the more we do it the deeper our relationship with God becomes because we’re training our mind and heart to lean in to time with him. Spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, sabbath, and more should give us life.
So why are the spiritual disciplines so hard for some of us? Many of us want to grow in our relationship with God, so why can it feel so unnatural to stare at a blank prayer journal page or have a private “quiet time” to read God’s word, or to memorize Bible verses by ourselves?
I don’t think it’s only a handful of us who struggle this way. The spiritual disciplines do still require discipline, but God created us to love him and worship him in these ways, so they shouldn’t feel so unnatural to us. I think part of the problem may be that we think spiritual disciplines have to be tied to books and solitary silent meditation, because that’s what works for some people.
But other people, who are neurodivergent with ADHD or learning differences, or people who learn better from a person than from a book and from practice better than from a lecture—for us, the spiritual disciplines may need to look different. Maybe we need to do them in groups, or out loud, or use our bodies as much or more than we use our minds. That may seem incompatible with the spiritual disciplines to you, but hear me out. There is a rich tradition of spiritual practices for people like us to harness our wandering minds and prompt our memories with all five senses instead of just pages in a book.
God first gave the Israelites instructions for spiritual disciplines or practices through Moses, and what he said sounds a lot like the practices I crave. Right before they crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land for the first time, Moses gathers the Israelites and speaks most of Deuteronomy to them. Here are a few pieces of what he said:
So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul— then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and olive oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord’s anger will burn against you, and he will shut up the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you. Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land the Lord swore to give your ancestors…
Dt 11:13-21, NIV
These people waiting to enter their new home would have been both physically and spiritually transformed by their journey to get to this point. Their desert wanderings defined their calf muscles, softened their leather sandals that never wore out, tarnished their tools, stained their tents, and sanded down their heirlooms brought from Egypt. And Moses encourages them to continue these physical and sensory reminders of discipleship. The feel of rain and smell of harvest, grass thick in the field beneath their toes, the rich tastes of new wine and olive oil, symbols that caught their eyes on doorframes and gates, a brush against their skin from reminders they wore, and words echoing through bedrooms and main streets—all were to call them to remember God and his works. These could all be reminders to love and obey him so they could experience his blessing and abundant life.
These are the types of full-bodied spiritual practices that mark up our shoes, ring in our ears, make our muscles sore, blur our vision with tears, and leave sweet tastes in our mouths. They use the five senses God created in us to help us meditate on him with our whole being. Prayer like this wouldn’t just contemplate God’s omnipotence and sovereignty. It watches and hears roaring rapids in awe of their Creator who has unimaginably more power. Scripture meditation like this would feel like Jesus’ teachings that use drama and situation and relationships to brand God’s words into our memory.
These spiritual practices do exist, but if you’re like me, you didn’t necessarily grow up familiar with them. They can be church celebrations every year like Advent and Lent before Christmas and Easter. They can be Stations of the Cross, physical postures of prayer that involve our bodies, unison group prayers or liturgies, or a written calendar of prayers that we pray like generations before us. They can be bells or cell phone alarms to remind us to pray throughout the day or at meals. They can be prayer labyrinths, or memorials, or images of heroes of the faith or scripture passages. They can be ceremonies or relationships or habits—a ring we twist when we pray, a person who hears our confessed sin and keeps us accountable, an exercise routine paired with a habit of praying through our week or awe at God’s creation. Dance or baking or knitting or gardening can be just as reverent a way to enter into the Lord’s presence.
Two of my favorite of these new-to-me spiritual disciplines are lectio divina and visio divina. The first means “divine reading” or “sacred reading” and it’s a way to meditate on scripture in a group or alone. It guides your meditation like tree blazes on a hike or traffic signals so you don’t get lost in other thoughts. Visio divina is divine or sacred “seeing” and it uses God’s creation or art in the same way to guide a conversation with God, to give us space to admire him with awe.
Learning these new ways to practice spiritual disciplines sparked my own creativity too. Many people pray while washing dishes or changing diapers or taking walks because mundane activities can help our bodies go on autopilot and leave our minds free for things like prayer. But for me sometimes, creative activities can feel the most prayerful. I recently taught about lament, which is a special type of prayer you can find in Psalms and Lamentations. It brings our emotions of grief and loss to God and asks for his help or comfort. Often lament ends by clinging to our faith in God in the hard times, even when our emotions may not feel that faith very strongly.
I taught a group how to lament and gave them the option of writing or speaking a prayer, or creating a poem or song or artwork to express their lament to God. Later, I considered that baking is my favorite form of art and wondered if I could use some time baking to express a lament. The result was an incredibly moving prayer time that brought me to tears and helped me work out a lament with my hands when I hadn’t been able to with only my mind.
Visio divina and lectio divina both use components of observation, meditative listening, prayerful response, and silence to guide our thoughts in conversation with God. This “donut lament” wasn’t exactly either of them, but it did use a similar process to focus my mind in prayer. So perhaps I’ll call it creatio divina, or sacred making. May you all try out creative or new-to-you spiritual discipline practices and grow deeper in your relationship with God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
A Donut Lament
The sparse palmful of yeast released like tears into the waiting bowl. Quickly hidden in the flour, it became undetectable until it combined with the warm milk and butter and its tang suffused the kitchen. Like grief, the yeast multiplied unseen, its only evidence pungent byproducts and the ballooning space they occupied. A cascading reaction proved the potency of that first transformative ingredient: one traumatic event can reshape the course of a life. Prayerfully, meditatively, the yeast was mixed with the other ingredients until it incorporated into every part of the dough. Ingredients began to react and what once were separate components fused and changed on molecular and cellular levels as something new was created.
In the dark of early morning, the ragged dough was poured out and it collapsed against the countertop. Two hands tenderly scooped it back together and, with the insistence of lament, began to knead. Frustration and force went into the pushing and pulling motions, spinning the dough in circles by stops and starts with each repetition. A heavy heart and heavy hands imprinted sorrow and loss into the dough. Scattered proteins linked together under the influence of shaping repetition, and strands of gluten—like faith—began to grow. They lengthened and wrapped throughout the dough, slowly binding it together with their strength and resilient elasticity. And then, the shaping work done, the dough was left to rest, in the dark.
With time, the sun rose. Hands that had shaped the ball of dough in hope returned to find it grown and mature. It was ready to be shaped and cooked, then shared as a sweet gift to sustain others. The dough was a prayer, and the process a lament. The making was meditative, contemplative, and repetitive in ways that allowed the soul to rest in God and express sorrow seasoned in faith with hope.
Psalm 91 is all marked up in my Bible. It is a prayer song about God’s protection, and it was a particularly sweet reminder of God’s character in a season when I needed to remember God’s ‘feminine’ side—that God gathers us under wings to protect and shield us like a mother bird.
But I never really thought Ps 91 was a promise for me. After all, it was probably written by David, and we all know David was a man after God’s own heart. He sinned and made mistakes, sure, but I still don’t presume to walk as closely with God or have as much faith as David did. And for crying out loud, Satan quotes this psalm to JESUS when he’s being tempted in the wilderness. In Caroline paraphrase, he says “Jump off this roof and God will catch you, because the Psalm says God will command his angels to catch you and hold you up so you won’t even brush your foot on those rocks below.”
Read Psalm 91 for yourself. It makes these beautiful promises about God’s protection, about how he is our refuge from disease and terrors and violence and other dangers. But the promises are always for whoever lives in God’s shelter or whoever professes God to be their refuge: “Because he loves me, says the Lord, I will rescue him…” That’s all well and good, and of course I would say that God is the one who protects me, but do I really believe and live that with 100% of me? I don’t think I can claim to—I have doubts, and I trust in insurance or people or other things for protection more than I’d like to admit. So I didn’t think these promises would literally apply to my life.
Without putting it into these words, I believed, “If I trust and love God enough, then I earn the kind of loving loyalty he promises in that psalm. And there’s no way I love and trust God enough. So those promises can’t be for me.”
I didn’t think Psalm 91 was useless, I just thought it showed God’s character and the kind of love he shows to people who fully depend on him. I didn’t think I belonged in that category. I belong in the category with the disciples, “You of little faith,” or even, a little more kindly, with the man who comes asking Jesus for a miracle and says, “I do believe! Help me overcome my unbelief!”
But that’s just what I learned recently. Nowhere does Psalm 91 say we earn God’s kindness with our faith. In fact, that’s contrary to everything the New Testament teaches about how God saves us. I believe that God saved me out of his grace and kindness, but somehow along the line I lost the thread and believed that certain other blessings or kindnesses from the Lord had to be earned by my faith and obedience. And that’s simply not the equation the Bible uses. God is the Father of all good gifts, not all good merited-awards. And when Jesus teaches about prayer, to illustrate the point he asks, ‘if you earthly fathers know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more does your heavenly father?”
God’s protection from the dangers of this world is a gift we do not earn. Like Job says, we know that that sometimes he gives and sometimes he takes away (that protection), but it is not on the basis of how strong our faith in him is. In fact, God’s unearned protection in the midst of those dangers is the very thing that often grows our faith. And God chose to teach me that by way of a very memorable object lesson recently.
On the first Friday of September I was taking a recovery day at home after a week of all-day teaching. I was bouncing back and forth between work on the computer and work around the house and checking in on the repairmen who could finally come by now that I was home for the day. A little after 3:20 I decided to pop my head through the attic access to see if I could find any evidence of termites or some other pests causing the problems with my electrical wiring. I tugged on the ladder the electrician had been using to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere, and then started up. Just after I poked my head through the ceiling 11’ up, I felt the ladder twitch underneath me. I bent my head back down below the level of the ceiling and saw the ladder start slowly making skid marks down the wall, and that’s the last thing I remember.
The ladder fell all the way to the floor, taking me with it, and I must’ve lost consciousness on impact. I bruised several bones and sprained an ankle, and smashed my face diagonally on the ladder rail. I fractured my lower jaw and three teeth, and shattered my upper jaw and chipped, shattered, or dislodged 5 teeth on the top. I sustained a concussion, and may also have caused hairline fractures in my foot and below my left eye.
About 30 or 40 minutes after I climbed the ladder, my memory clicked back on, and I was sitting on my couch next to a friend, with a hand full of blood and some teeth or bone chips. Somehow in my daze after consciousness returned, I called a nurse friend to come and help me. I still have no memory of that call, or her arriving as quickly as she could. She got me to the hospital nearby, and scans confirmed no brain bleeds or skull or spinal fractures. I was transferred to a different hospital for more thorough scans where everything was confirmed a second time, and I had surgery to remove three teeth that were lost causes and stitch up my gums. I was hospitalized just shy of a week, and then came home to recover from a concussion that’s lingered for more than a month and the ongoing dental work that’ll take several months to complete, including time for my broken jaws to heal.
Sometime in Admitting at the hospital, while I was still spitting blood into a cup and we hadn’t done any imaging of my head or moved me to a room yet, it started to dawn on me how much worse the fall could’ve been. Yes, I had several goose-eggs and an impressive set of Gollum teeth, but I hadn’t directly hit my forehead or gashed open any part of my face. My alertness had quickly returned, and my relatively low pain level we knew even then meant it unlikely I had fractured my spine or skull or caused any brain bleeds, which could lead to more permanent neurological damage. And the next day after I transferred hospitals the doctor’s mouth literally dropped open after I was able to explain the fall and injuries in detail, and get up and walk around: “You shouldn’t be able to walk after a fall like that.”
It was then that God reminded me of Psalm 911, and I began to process God’s incredible protection. I remember silently weeping once in the hospital after the lights turned out and I knew I could rest peacefully for the night. “Those who live in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.” Surgery on my mouth took a few days longer to schedule than I had hoped, but my fear of infection or worse proved groundless. “Do not dread the disease that stalks in darkness…” And repeat scans of my brain showed nothing worse than a concussion, even though I had been at home alone with no one to anticipate or help immediately after the accident. “Nor the disaster that strikes at midday.” Eventually I connected the dots and realized that a fall like that could have killed me under different circumstances. “Though a thousand fall at your side, thought ten thousand are dying around you, these evils will not touch you.” And on the third day after the fall, with many of you praying for me, my sprained ankle that should have taken enough force to shatter it could suddenly and miraculously bear weight and I could walk without support. “If you make the LORD your refuge, if you make the Most High your shelter, no evil will conquer you; no plague will come near your home. For he will order his angels to protect you wherever you go. They will hold you up with their hands so you won’t even hurt your foot on a stone.”
Even now as I write I still tear up, overwhelmed by the Lord’s gracious protection that I did not deserve. God took care of me in the initial accident, with the healthcare I could access afterward, and through so many of you far and near. I have been surrounded by love and people checking in. I still smile with gratitude for all of you when I use the body soap someone brought me in the hospital. And I have been dependent on the kindness of strangers and friends who have given me medical care, visited me at home or in the hospital, helped me with errands, and borne with me as I dealt with the ongoing effects of the concussion.
Humor and humility have been the most gracious and necessary ways to accept my limitations as I’ve healed. I’ve joked many times about how I only damaged the breakaway portion of my face, or the dentures and cane I earned myself. I’ve matched my bruises to purple clothes and joked about being Gollum from Lord of the Rings or Toothless from How to Train your Dragon. I had to have patience with a brain that processed emotions like a toddler and couldn’t remember how to handle social interactions. I had to let being a single independent woman go more times than I wanted and ask for help with simple tasks like cleaning my house or preparing food or picking up groceries. I had to humbly accept the massive privilege I have to complain about oatmeal and soup when many of my friends would go hungry if they had to have a special diet, or the privilege I have to immediately access health care many of my friends cannot even consider, without worrying about the price tag. Many times the jokes come easily and the humility has taken more work.
But there again God has shown kindness I did not deserve, and answered my prayers with the humility and strength and endurance I needed. Not long after I returned home from the hospital, I found myself crying again over a minor inconvenience because my concussion hampered me from letting it roll off like I normally would. I sat down at the piano to see if music would come back easier than other things. Soon I found myself playing and singing, lisping praise through broken teeth, and weeping from blackened eyes. Moments like that have only grown my faith—moments when God met me in my brokenness and was sufficient to calm my mind or quiet my heart. God deserves praise in our brokenness because of his unsurpassed kindness, and that same posture of praise can grow our hearts along a trellis of gratitude instead of bitterness.
Say what you want about coincidence or spiritual forces we cannot see, but the teaching I finished just before I fell with the ladder was a Bible-story based mental trauma healing program with Sudanese church leaders here. They were reminded in fresh ways that God cares about their immense suffering and is with them in it. They learned how to support the many freshly traumatized refugees in their communities and their churches who have recently arrived fleeing the war in Sudan. And many of them tearfully praised God for the encouragement and healing they found in his Word. Our first story began with God’s perfect unspoiled creation in the Garden, and our last story finished with the hope that all will be perfected and healed once again in the heavenly garden after Jesus returns. I had been meditating on a beautiful lament song, Garden Hope,2 that reminds us of God’s good plan while we wait here in-between the gardens.
My fall reminded me afresh of those realities. And as long as my body and mind are still bruised, I carry with me physical reminders that though we suffer now, one day we will be healed. I was also reminded afresh to practice what I teach when my injuries forced me into a vulnerability that tied me closer to my community here. When my tribe of Sudanese sisters here finally worked out of me how badly I had been injured, they insisted on visiting me like a shut-in. I cried again because I couldn’t remember much Arabic and didn’t know how mentally stable I would be. But those women, who have been through persecution and famine and war and worse aren’t fazed by much, and they wept over me. They prayed and encouraged and looked me in the eyes to tell me they knew exactly why I fell—because our Enemy was not happy with the life-changing hope they had been reminded of and equipped to share that week. They reminded me that as refugees they know what it feels like to be far from family when you need or miss them most, and repeatedly told me that I am their sister and they are ready to help at a moment’s notice when I need anything. When I mentioned Psalm 91, they smiled and said, “That’s our psalm,” and quoted their favorite parts of it from memory. It sounded even sweeter in Sudanese Arabic from the mouths of friends who have personally known God as their refuge and protection in many hardships through the years.
I’ll be recovering from that kind of love for quite a while too. In the meantime, my concussion seems to be mostly cleared except for the lingering slowness with decisions, communication, and emotional processing. I still have a minor limp that will heal with time, along with the other broken bones in my face. I got some temporary teeth to last me until I can get permanent implants around the end of the year. And I’m still managing some minor pain and fatigue while God continues to heal my body. But God has tattooed Psalm 91 on my heart and I can’t help but praise him for his rescue and protection.
The LORD says, “I will rescue those who love me. I will protect those who trust in my name. When they call on me, I will answer; I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue and honor them. I will reward them with a long life and give them my salvation.”
Ps 91:14-16
All Psalm 91 quotations here are taken from the NLT. ↩︎
Stories have always helped to give me a picture of something I can’t otherwise understand. A story takes something abstract like a war, and gives it faces, places, names, and feelings. When the people in the stories feel real to you, you can’t help but feel what they feel as your mind’s eye sees what they see. Stories teach our hearts empathy and can shape our emotions into actions—whether they be prayer, lament, protest, or giving.
I’ll continue sharing Sudanese stories with you in this post to let you meet them in their experiences so you can better understand the war they’re living through. The following stories are difficult. They deal with genocide, rape, war violence, and other traumas. Each section has a heading so you can avoid topics that might be too difficult for you, but know that I never give graphic details. My goal is to walk with you as a guide, not to leave you feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. So, like in the last post I’ll share scripture and prayer points that have helped me respond to each story.
My hope is that these stories will help you to remember the Sudanese—with prayer, with visits, with kindness, in whatever ways the Lord prompts. One of the most common fears I’ve encountered with any refugee friends is the fear of being forgotten and left alone. Too often in their times of deepest need they have been met with indifference and neglect, if not cruelty. By the very nature of their situations, they have lost so many relationships through war or displacement that the thought of being ignored or left alone deeply grieves them. They can carry a deep sorrow that people may shrink away from them in their need, or forget them because it’s uncomfortable to face their situations. Of course they need material help, but the emotional gift of sharing in their grief or offering a prayer is also important, and it often lasts longer. So for this reason I share their stories with you, so they will not be forgotten.
Trauma: The Reporters
I met both women over a year apart, but they were alike in many ways. Both were capable women who seemed to be the keystone of their families. And both had to flee Sudan for their lives and to protect their families from further threat. One woman was a highly educated reporter, and her commitment to exposing injustices in a country destabilized by the brewing war landed her in the crosshairs of powerful people. She showed me pictures of her acid burns the first time we met, almost proudly. Her reporting was helping to spread her people’s stories so the world could see and respond with help.
She was now in her second country since she fled, and she left family members behind she hoped no one would targeted now that she was out of the way. She and one of her daughters with her still lived like they were hunted, careful of how loudly they spoke certain things, and fleeing people who still threatened them for what they believed and shared even two countries away.
The other woman had lived in an internally displaced people’s camp within Sudan before she fled years ago. She reported serial rape in the camps to authorities, hoping someone with the power to stop it would intervene. But through corruption, her reports were leaked, and the very people raping to control women and frighten them into silence targeted her and her family. Her story of a chance warning and her harrowing escape even while she could hear her children crying and her husband being beaten was horrific. But she knew that leaving would spare them further abuse. So now she had lived for years separated from her children, the youngest of whom was an infant when she had to flee alone.
Both of these women have been blacklisted, and cannot return to their homes for the foreseeable future for the safety of their families. Both are among the strongest and most resilient women I know, but the human mind and body have their limits. Mental trauma of this magnitude is debilitating, especially if you experience it in a foreign country without a support system or access to counseling. The second woman was finally reunited with her children who fled the most recent wave of violence. But she suffered from memory loss, crippling anxiety, and debilitating chronic physical issues that were the product of years of extreme cumulative stress from the mental trauma she had endured.
I recently spoke with a South African eye surgeon after she served for two weeks giving vision-restoring cataract surgery to Sudanese. She was confused at how little response they gave when suddenly they could see again, especially compared to some of her regular patients who would dance or sing. We discussed their mental trauma, and the self-preservation of low expectations and not daring to believe change for good can really last. But many Sudanese I know also carry with them a “sideways hope.” Outwardly they expect the worst case scenarios, but inwardly they bravely keep hope kindled in their heart. As a favorite writer of mine so well described it, “For people habitually up against it… hope is something too sacred to be spoken. It belongs in the heart, not in the mouth.”[1] The mental trauma Sudanese carry may be disabling, but many still cherish hope when they have every reason not to. They may try to hide the effects of their trauma because they have a distorted sense of what every person should be able to carry without complaining, but hidden or not, their resilience is radiant.
Genesis 16; 21:1-21
Hagar’s story of trauma, abuse, and shame can feel too heavy for the cursory treatment the Bible seems to give it. But what Scripture doesn’t do is hide the shameful treatment she received at the hands of Abraham and Sarah. The account of her story does not excuse those parents of our faith of their behavior or explain it away. As Muslims, many of the Sudanese are Hagar’s spiritual descendants. Like her, their very presence is too often considered a shameful testament to someone else’s sin we would rather forget. They are often expected to cover or hide themselves to protect their communities from the shame of exposure—of domestic abuse their bodies would show, of the brutal control their female genital cutting testifies to, of the rape cowardly men forced on them and shameful men ignored. But the Bible does not ignore Hagar’s story. In fact, it takes care not to hide the sin of powerful men like Bathsheba’s king, and the dynasty-founding families of Dinah and both Tamars. Genesis takes care to call Hagar Abraham’s wife, to show in even more disgraceful detail the treatment she deserved but was denied. And at the climax of Hagar’s reprehensibly traumatic story, when Abraham and Sarah send her away rather than face their sin and its consequences, God SEES her. And HEARS her child’s suffering. God drew near to the broken-hearted Hagar just like he does to traumatized Sudanese women whose depth of pain no one else truly sees or hears.
Pray for Sudanese dealing with mental trauma.
Pray for God to provide families and communities they can safely share their experiences with so they can be comforted.
Pray for mental health professionals and therapy options to help Sudanese process their traumatic experiences.
Ask God to comfort them with his love and be near them with his Spirit so they do not feel alone or abandoned in their suffering and its aftermath.
Pray that Sudanese men and women would not carry the shame of what has been done to them and would be able to clearly see that their value is not diminished by the cruelty they have been shown.
Pray that like the Biblical authors, we who are not Sudanese would not cover or ignore their suffering, but instead would respond with respect and compassion.
War: The Village School
We drove three hours from the nearest hub town across sometimes indiscernible roads to reach their village. “Out in the middle of nowhere” was an understatement. We traveled with friends of ours as they were returning home. Their grins in the back of the car were the biggest I’ve ever seen them, as they chatted with excitement for us to meet their people and see their home.
We shared their excitement to get to see their homeplace, but that wasn’t the only reason we were going. This village, out in the middle of nowhere, with no military base anywhere nearby, had recently been bombed from the air. One bomb fell harmlessly up in the mountains where no one lived. Another fell down a well and only property was damaged. But the third was dropped on a school while it was in session. Around fifteen children and teachers died on site, and dozens more were injured. We were traveling out with our friends to offer our condolences and sit with the village in its grief.
I experienced a disorienting emotional whiplash as we finally rounded the last bend and caught our first glimpse of the village through the scraggly bushland surrounding it. The lively chatter in the car fell deadly silent as we caught sight of the school partially in rubble. A subdued voice asked if we wanted to stop there first and see it, but someone told the driver to go ahead and take us to the gathering point where we planned to meet everyone. I tried not to think of the sound of the plane overhead, or the chaos that would have ensued as this peaceful village frantically rushed to dig children out of the rubble.
We sat with the village leaders and some of the fathers who had lost family members. They showed us kind hospitality and eagerly welcomed us. We offered prayers and some encouragement from God’s Word. But our words and presence with their grief felt so small in the shadow of that school, under the gaze of those fathers’ hollow eyes. There were not strategic resources the military could have gained here. This village and its people weren’t even active in the war that was taking place farther north. The bombing was completely senseless, and could have no other purpose than fear and destruction. But in every story I’ve heard, that’s how this war is. It’s senseless violence that will consume you if you try to understand the why behind it.
As we left I experienced that emotional whiplash again. I was still mulling over the experience when my friend stood on tiptoe to poke his grizzled head through the car window and talk to me as I was climbing in. “You didn’t have time to come to my house this time!” he said. The engine was turning over and we were seconds from pulling out. “Next time you come you are welcome! You’ll have to meet my son! He’s the one your age, and he could use another wife!” he joked, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. As we pulled out past the school that I barely even noticed after that proposal, I realized that was how they did it. This village lived under the looming war balancing sorrow when it struck with laughter and kindness when they could find it.
Job
The book of Job isn’t a comfortable one. The conversations between Job and his ‘friends’ seems like a maze of the accepted wisdom of his age and ours, which God discounts by the end anyway. We can be tempted to see the final point of Job as, “Suffering doesn’t make sense. Period.” But in the end of the book, what Job learns when God speaks is that we may not understand God’s long-term plans or the big picture or how he enacts justice. But suffering isn’t senseless. Even if we don’t understand, God sees and plans so much more than we can. And not only that, God heard Job every step of the way. God knew Job’s suffering and grief, his faithfulness and his despair. God knew Job and honored him—both when he proudly pointed Job’s faithfulness out to Satan and when he blessed Job after the suffering passed.
We cannot understand the senseless suffering in Sudan, but by wisdom so much higher than ours, God does. He knows and feels each broken heart and cherishes each soul that faithfully clings to him in the suffering as Job did. But Job saw God’s plan only imperfectly. When he begged for a helper, someone to take the suffering in his place and advocate for him to God, it was the wish of a broken man who thought it impossible. But after Jesus, we and the Sudanese who suffer can see that wish realized. The Holy Spirit is our advocate to God and can bring us near to him. And Jesus not only took God’s punishment in our place, but physically shared in the same kinds of suffering we may face and empathizes with us as we endure.
Pray for Sudanese impacted by the war and its violence.
Pray for those who have lost loved ones, that God would be near to them in their grief.
Pray for Sudanese who believe God only expects them to endure suffering. Ask that they would understand our God is a suffering servant who can join them in their pain and sorrow.
Pray that through this war, God would draw many Sudanese to himself as they search for someone to save and protect them.
And pray for Sudanese to come to know Jesus personally as the same redeemer and helper Job hoped for.
Image generated by Gencraft LLC. Text from the NLT.
Genocide: The College Student
I sat across the supper table from him after a discussion about his potential. He had just finished high school—late because of the years of interruption from the war—and he was considering where he might be able to get an IT degree. He was by most measures a fairly normal college-aged guy. He held his smartphone and his attention drifted to it during lulls in the conversation. He had just teased me like my own brother his age about how much shorter I was than him. But in a few important ways, he wasn’t any normal college guy. He is part of the Masalit tribe, a target of the quickly spreading genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region and of what was widely known as “the first genocide of the 21st century.” That first genocide began in 2003, just in time for the circumstances of his birth to be wrapped up in its horror. He had been displaced from his home for years and I’d never heard him talk about his family before, if they were even still living.
After a break in conversation I broached the subject of the current genocide happening under the cover of the war, and asked him if other Darfurian tribes besides his were targeted as well. Contrary to the hesitance I expected, his eyes lit up. “That’s actually a very good question,” he said, eager to explain to someone who cared to know. He launched into a welcome history lesson, quick to share about his people’s dignity and strength and their difficult past. “My country,” he would say, as he proudly showed pictures of the flag, or political borders, or the beautiful landscape. He radiated a fierce sense of national identity and autonomy as he shared about the many and complicated reasons others are willing to commit genocide and martial rape. Many want control of his people’s land and its bountiful resources, and there are generations of tensions between Arabized tribes who consider the Masalit and other Darfurians inferior and want to rid the world of them. Some in Darfur want to split from Sudan entirely to be their own nation. But as things are now, many Masalit like my friend are displaced in many different countries, and some even as far as Europe.
I mentioned the international news coverage, and how more people around the world are starting to hear about his people and what they’re suffering. He said, “What you see in the news is not real. What I have seen with my own eyes, the killing and the raping, you cannot understand that from the news.” He sat quietly for a while, leaving unsaid many more atrocities than any 23-year-old should have to experience.
And then just like that, he flipped his phone around again to show me a picture of two hyena cubs he had caught and raised. He explained how abundant they were in Masalit land and how people caught or raised them for meat. But with a crooked grin he told me how he’d managed far from his homeland to catch and raise these two—Biter and Scratcher in his language—like security dogs, and later sold them to help support his schooling. He was carrying on as normal a life as any 23-year-old could despite the genocide: trying to make ends meet, enjoying a thrill of danger and the shock value of his adventures, wanting to travel the world and get an IT degree to get a stable job and have a future.
Habakkuk
On the year anniversary of the coup, I sat with three Sudanese pastors around a table and they shared what they thought about the war and the future of Sudan. They lamented how many were suffering without cause. Some said they thought God was using the war to root out wicked men in power. They discussed how the instability exposed false gods or faith in the wrong deity and gave people maybe their first real prospect of turning to God. They agreed that only God could deliver the people of Sudan from this war and save them. One said, “God is still doing his work in the middle of this war.”
These observations are exactly the same as Habakkuk’s in his small book. He considers the wickedness of his own people, and then regards God’s plan first with horror when he hears that a nation will bring war to them. Like Habakkuk’s people in his time, the Sudanese face unimaginable cruelty and violence. But also like Habakkuk’s people, they are having a chance to see God’s work that is hard to believe without seeing it for yourself. Muslims from tribes that cannot remember a time before Islam are uprooted and questioning for the first time if their faith is true, and if it can sustain them. At the end of his book, Habakkuk comes to an acceptance born only of his faith in a powerful but loving and merciful God. Though devastation surrounds him, Habakkuk chooses to depend on the Lord to be his strength. Even in famine, violence, and disaster, the God who saves him inspires joy in Habakkuk’s spirit. This same God calls to the Sudanese and offers them the same hope.
Pray for the Sudanese facing genocide.
Pray that God would provide a way for them to get to safety.
Pray that their homes and cultures and livelihoods would be preserved through the upheaval as they flee.
Pray for God to protect especially the defenseless among the targeted Darfurian tribes.
Pray for those committing the genocide—that God would help them to see clearly through their generations of hatred and the battle fever so that they cannot murder another man, woman, or child without feeling the eternal weight of their actions.
Ask God for the justice only he can give, and for ultimate reconciliation and peace.
Go read Benjamin Myers’ post, “Advent in Oklahoma,” on the Front Porch Republic site. He wrote a beautifully expressive reflection of a waiting hope particular to Oklahoma Plains people. As an Oklahoman myself working with Sudanese, I found a sort of kinship in the way we both persistently, stubbornly wait and silently hope. https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/12/advent-in-oklahoma/↩︎
Sudan has been at war for over a year. Many still have not recovered and returned ‘home’ from the last waves of violence, and the country was just finally beginning to let out its breath and hope for a time of peace. But instead, the peaceful civilian government they hoped for a year ago is only a broken dream now. The capital city of Khartoum is a smoking, shattered ruin. Much of the country has been ravaged by war as two military factions fight for control over the hollow husk of a country they have left in their wake.
Millions of people have been displaced from their homes and fled to different parts of the country or to other countries entirely. Again and again the mass casualties from these clashes are civilians caught in crossfire. People can’t access necessities like medicine, food, basic health care, or clean water because soldiers raid or destroy what little is available. Roads aren’t safe and gas and transportation prices are unthinkable because the military routinely seizes goods and demands bribes for passage along the normal supply routes.
Schools and orphanages have been bombed. City blocks and villages alike have been burned to the ground in places. People flee their homes when they are so desperate escaping on foot is their best option, only to lose family members along the way to military factions that bomb and burn civilian targets for no other reason than to spread fear and destroy resources.
Systematic rape is an expected weapon of war to control and terrorize both the men who can’t protect their families and the women who lose their social standing and the last scraps of morale they had to hold their broken families together. Sieges and road blocks create artificial famine to demoralize and destabilize any who would resist military forces. And under the cover of this horrific war, the sparks of genocide have already started to rage into wildfire. Whole swathes of the country are now depopulated of certain Darfurian tribes; they have fled because they’re convinced that life in a refugee camp is better than continuing to watch the military target and murder their people by the hundreds.
The Stories
These horrors—genocide, famine, inescapable trauma, displacement, and war—are so far outside our experience they’re hard to understand. Something that evil, that abominable, is hard enough to wrap our minds around, especially when we can’t put a face to it. So I want to give you stories. I want to give you some ‘faces’ to this war so that you can understand a small part of it.
I’m no reporter. I’m not writing to propose a solution or help you choose a side. I can’t give you the facts and figures of the war in Sudan. But I can share stories. Sudanese who have survived these atrocities are my friends. Their stories weigh heavy in my heart, because through their experiences I have begun to understand the war. I hope that by sharing some of their stories, you can begin to understand too.
May we together be driven to our knees in prayer.
I won’t share these friends’ names, but perhaps that’s just as well. Their stories mirror so many others I have heard that, without names, at least one of these stories could apply to almost any given person who has been uprooted in Sudan. Be warned, these stories are difficult. But they’re worth knowing. These people are worth knowing and caring about.
I’ll share one story in this post, and three others in the following one. Each story will illustrate some aspect of what Sudanese face: displacement, genocide, war, and trauma. To help as you hear these heavy stories, I’ll share some of the scripture and prayer points that have helped me process them with lament, hope, or truth that does not waver in the face of the suffering of this world.
Displacement: The Sisters
These two women had been like sisters since childhood. They called each other by childhood nicknames, teasing back and forth good-naturedly about being old or crying like a baby while cutting onions. They had fled from the war back to the small village where they had grown up. Their jobs in the city were gone, so they took whatever work they could to make ends meet and support their families. They rarely spoke of their husbands, who were dead or no longer took part in the family. The women worked long hours and never complained.
When I first met them they often talked about returning ‘home’ when the war settled down. They held out hope, and their contented joy came only from a deep faith that sustained them through their unimaginable losses of family members, future, and livelihood. They talked easily about crossing desert mountain ranges on foot as they fled. They shared grim jokes about the deadly scorpions and snakes they faced along the way. Their stories about bombed out buildings they took shelter in left a more haunted look behind their eyes. One of the few signs of trauma they couldn’t hold back betrayed the difficulties they had lived through: when you meet one of the women after a long time away, she breaks down into shaking sobs. For so many friends and family members, she never knew which goodbye would be the last one, and who wouldn’t survive until she could see them again.
These ‘sisters’ are in a multi-stage displacement. First fleeing their city home with their children, they came back to the place of their birth, or their tribal homeland. Here, they could find work, speak the language, and rely on a network of relatives to help cushion their displacement when they arrived with little more than the clothes on their back.
As the war dragged on though, they began to see that going back wouldn’t be an option anytime soon. In at least one of their cases, there was no ‘home’ to go back to. Their village home they were in now was never meant to be more than a stopover, and they were beginning to see they needed a better long-term option.
After the war passed the one-year mark, the women started to talk of traveling elsewhere. One’s daughter needed somewhere with a university so she could study and hope for a job to make her future. The whole family would have to move with her, so they could work better jobs to afford to put her through school. As the war further dried up resources in their village home, the other woman needed more stable work just to support her family, and she hoped for a more consistent school for her younger children. Both women are contemplating a move to different countries now—with unfamiliar languages and cultures—for a better life for their children. They live in the uncertainty of not knowing when or if things will change back ‘home.’ They have decided it’s less risky for their family to move somewhere completely foreign than to wait with hope for an increasingly hopeless war to resolve. So they wait and hope for money to travel. And I like many of their other friends don’t know when or if I’ll see them again after they move.
Jeremiah 29:1-14; Hebrews 11:13-16
We often forget the context of the famous verse, “For I know the plans I have for you… plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah wrote it in a prophetic letter to Israelites who were displaced from their homeland and had no idea when they’d return home or what to do in the meantime. God told the people to settle where they landed, to build and grow and marry and have families. If they worked to help the city flourish, they would flourish too—even as a displaced people inside the city. God promised the Israelites that one day he would bring them back home to their land. That same promise may not apply in the same way to displaced Sudanese, but we can hold to the promise that God plans to give them hope and a future. If Sudanese seek God like this passage promises, they will find him. And he may not bring them home in this lifetime, but they have a promise of a heavenly city that will be more a home to them than any place on earth could ever be.
Pray for those displaced within Sudan.
Pray for God to provide for their daily needs like food and medical attention.
Pray also for their temporary new homes to provide some respite from the terror of war.
Ask God to give them family or friends to support them and help them to adjust after all they have experienced.
Ask God to give them wisdom to decide how long and where they should stay.
Pray for those displaced outside of Sudan.
As they live among foreign cultures and different languages they can feel very isolated and alone. Pray for God to give them friends and neighbors who love them well and help them settle in their new homes.
Ask God to give them work that can support their families and build up their communities.
Pray for all of these displaced to know God’s peace, and to feel that he has been with them and guided their journeys to places of safety.
The uneasy, unsettled surface of relative peace in Sudan cracked to reveal unresolved conflict that may continue for a long time to come. After genocidal dictator Bashir was ousted in 2019, Sudan’s military leaders took temporary control of the country under internationally brokered plans to hand the country back to civilian rule according to a set timeline.
In the past weeks, deadlines were not met, and two military factions began all-out war to secure sole rule over the country. The fighting has been centered in Khartoum, the capital. And Sudanese there and around the world have watched in horror as the heart of their country and culture has spiraled into chaos. Infrastructure has broken down—water, food, and electricity are inconsistent at best, as well as phone and Wi-Fi communication networks and basic travel routes.
Hospitals were first overflowing, then running out of supplies because of looting or inability to restock, and many had to finally close their doors because staff and patients couldn’t get there through the crossfire in the streets. The international airport is bombed and smoldering. People are escaping on foot if they have to, across any borders they can access. Dead bodies lie decaying in the streets because there are no relatives left to bury them, or no way to retrieve them and find a place to put them to rest. As the war has dragged on, wartime atrocities have increased in the chaos, including armed robbery and rape even of young girls. Most Sudanese are in shock. The civilians want nothing to do with this war, and they feel powerless to protect their own families.
A few of my friends are there. Exponentially more of my friends’ families are there. My heart is heavy and I grieve with many of them as they deal with everything from survivor’s guilt to waiting interminably to hear from family members if they’ve survived the last few days. We’ve lamented and cried and prayed. But mostly, we wait. And we try to handle the worry and the fear the best we can from afar. I have turned to stories from the Exile in the Old Testament. They feel so very alive under the shadow of the war.
Studying scripture within a different culture gives different eyes to see it with. When I lived and worked with people who experienced oppression and racism because of their ethnicity, it highlighted new realities in the Bible for me. I personally knew teenaged boys who had both a secret name from their culture, and a separate name in the language and culture they interacted with at school and in daily life outside their homes. The stories about Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah took on a whole new meaning. As those young boys learned to operate in a culture that penalized them for being Hebrews, they had to take on the names and culture and learning of a different people to survive. They walked a difficult tightrope of preserving their culture and their faith in God, while still trying to build a life and a home in a foreign culture. They became Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Living myself in a few different places over the past years, the opening stories in the book of Ezekiel gained fresh life for me as well. God appears to his people exiled to a foreign land in the bizarre shape of a holy throne room that roves the earth attended by angels with many faces, and wheels that can travel vast distances in any direction. Feeling country-less and uprooted myself, I felt with fresh warmth the love of a God whose presence is everywhere with his people, not limited by the geography of a church or a tabernacle. He is not constrained by borders on a map or languages, or even a particular culture’s understanding of what God should look or be like. He can be both foreign and familiar to me when I feel both my new home and my own heart to be a shifting mixture of foreign and familiar. When I feel like I have many different faces in the cultures I travel between, God shows himself and his servants to be all things to all people as well, and to carry many faces looking in many different directions too.
And now that I live in Uganda and rub shoulders with people who daily live the realities of refugees exiled unwillingly from their homeland, the stories from Israel’s exile come alive in whole new ways as well. I returned to Ezekiel again, as I told a friend, “like snuggling into warm blankets.” This book was written by someone freshly grappling with living the rest of his life in a land that felt unfamiliar and hostile. And though he speaks difficult truths to his own people about the depth of their sin and the extent God would go to in order to break them from their self-destructive habits, Ezekiel also shared perfect jewels of hope specifically tailored to comfort these same people. As I watched Sudanese friends here begin to grapple with the effects of the war, I knew I needed to dig deep into these exile stories to better understand their experiences. And I hoped to find answers for my own aching spirit about what possible good the Lord could bring to Sudan and her people out of such abominations.
Many verses and themes in Ezekiel have felt particularly “present” in connection to the war. The vision of God’s four-faced cherubim and the wheels covered in eyes the roam the earth has been a comfort again. It’s a reminder that God is never far from his people, and that his eyes see all the atrocities and his justice will not ignore them. It has been a comfort too, to know that just as God called Ezekiel to be a prophet to his people, so God continues to raise up believing Sudanese to share his Word and his message of salvation with their own people.
It is also a bitter truth that Ezekiel saw God’s Glory, or presence, leaving the temple. He ‘left’ the people of Israel after they repeatedly ignored and disobeyed the very God who had protected them. But even this was a mercy, to show the people that without him, they can only be lost and scattered—fearful, unprotected, unable to fend for themselves. An overwhelming majority of Sudanese are Muslims. One of my recurring prayers has been for this war to help them see their need for God, and to drive them into his embrace where they will experience his sufficiency to meet their needs, peace that passes understanding, and personal, motherly love.
But some of Ezekiel has read like looking in a mirror. As he taught about the siege of Jerusalem, he ate small, measured amounts of food, and sipped his allotment of water anxiously to show the desperation people would feel when they would not be able to find enough food and water to live on. He also graphically demonstrated the fear of violence the people would live under, the city streets scattered with bodies, and the overwhelming amount of death from starvation, disease, and brutality. I’ve heard those same feelings of desperation almost every time someone shares an update from relatives still in Sudan, and some of the exact Biblical words and phrases in the mouths of my friends have sent a chill down my spine.
Those in Jerusalem couldn’t believe Ezekiel when he told them war would come to their city, that their pride and joy, the heart of their country, would be under attack. I have heard that same shock as people here have talked about the war, about the smoke rising and the rockets exploding in their capital. One friend turned to me spoke like an Old Testament prophet herself when she said, “In Khartoum people closed their eyes to the war in Darfur [the genocide in western Sudan for nearly the past twenty years]. They said, ‘nothing will happen to us. We are safe here.’ Khartoum slept and now the war has come for them.”
Like Ezekiel when he fell down and cried out to the Lord to ask if he would destroy the entire remnant of his people, my friends and I have wondered and asked God what will be left of Khartoum, of Sudan when or if this fighting finally stops. The second time Ezekiel falls on his face and asks this question (11:13), the Lord’s answer froze me, and I held my breath as I read:
“… the people of Jerusalem have said of your fellow exiles and all the other Israelites, ‘They are far away from the Lord; this land was given to us as our possession.’
Therefore say: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Although I sent them far away among the nations and scattered them among the countries, yet for a little while I have been a sanctuary for them in the countries where they have gone.’
Therefore say: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will gather you from the nations and bring you back from the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you back the land of Israel again.’
They will return to it and remove all its vile images and detestable idols. I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people, and I will be their God. But as for those whose hearts are devoted to their vile images and detestable idols, I will bring down on their own heads what they have done, declares the Sovereign Lord.”
Then the cherubim, with the wheels beside them, spread their wings, and the glory of the God of Israel was above them. The glory of the Lord went up from within the city and stopped above the mountain east of it. The Spirit lifted me up and brought me to the exiles in Babylonia in the vision given by the Spirit of God.”
Ezekiel 11:15-24
Wow. The Sudanese refugees mourn their land. It is their family heritage, their possession. I have seen the extra grief of loved ones buried in Ugandan soil, and the burden of knowing they will be left behind if their family can ever return to Sudan. Their ‘exile’ as refugees feels like a punishment, like a sign that God is far from them. But God says otherwise.
The Sudanese are not the same as the Israelites, and they don’t have the same promises and covenant that God gave to them. But God is the same God. And his heart toward his children holds the same loving care and desire to heal and reconcile them to himself. So, like the Israelites, God has sent many Sudanese away from their homeland. And as they have been scattered in Egypt and South Sudan and Uganda and Chad and elsewhere, he has been a sanctuary for them.
God has protected many Sudanese displaced from their homes over these long years of war. He has been a place of comfort and safety for them even if, like the Israelites Ezekiel spoke to, they did not even acknowledge him as their God. But we hope and pray that, like God has done for many of the Jews, he will gently gather back the Sudanese and give them back their homeland.
As I lament and pray, will you pray with me? Will you pray that through this painful and horrific process, when the Sudanese do return home, it will not be with worship and devotion to ancestors or evil spirits or any other false gods in their hearts—that they will return with an undivided heart and a new spirit.
Just as God has done throughout all history for those who have believed and followed him, he can take away the Sudanese’s hearts of stone that are dead and numb and enslaved to sin. And he can give them soft hearts that turn toward him. We pray it may be so, Holy Spirit. May the Sudanese be your people, and you their God. Let those who have begun this war, who continue to hunger for violence, bring down their own punishment on their heads.
Lord, may your glory and your presence still hover near to the Sudanese, and may those still waiting in exile find comfort in your words and in your heart for restoration.
Content warning: This post addresses endemic sexual and spiritual abuse within Southern Baptist churches. No graphic descriptions are given, but please care for yourself if this content could be triggering.
Many of you have at least seen this week’s headlines about the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Southern Baptist churches are loosely autonomous, but united under the SBC and the same understanding of doctrine. The SBC and its organizations range from church planters in the States (North American Mission Board—NAMB), to missionaries and church planters overseas (the International Mission Board—IMB) to the Southern Baptist Seminaries and State conventions of cooperating churches in most of the 50 States.
If you have read the news this week, you have learned of the horrific extent to which spiritual leaders have abused those under their care. Those who were meant to be shepherds, instead of caring for their people have directly abused them or covered up for those who did. Not every pastor or every church has been implicated, but the shocking numbers from a third party report indicate that many more of us have been touched by this egregious sin that we would like to believe. If you would like to read the full report, you can find it here, as well as the actions proposed by the investigation team.
My Experience
I have a particular stake in this endemic abuse. While I have not been sexually assaulted by a Baptist leader, I have been in the petri dish that provides a nurturing environment for abusers. I have both experienced great abuse and brokenness within the SBC, and great healing and care. If you are tempted to breeze past these headlines, to wonder why they’re important to you beyond this week, I want to tell you. If you have experienced abuse and lived in the dark with it, I am so very sorry. I want to speak up with you and stand by your side when you cannot speak.
Too often, to our shame, abuse survivors are pushed to the side. Their stories are silenced or muffled, or worse, discredited and ignored because their words are ‘divisive’ or ‘hyperbole,’ or perhaps because they’re seen as a radical whose beliefs do not align with most Baptists. If my experiences and my history mean anything to you, if they help you sympathize with abuse survivors or recognize the lifelong consequences of abuse, I will share them. If the platform I stand on helps you listen or understand, I will use it.
I was born to Southern Baptist parents, and even after multiple moves I have only ever been a member of Southern Baptist churches. SBC summer mission camps led me to follow the Lord to the mission field overseas and in the States. I have faithfully attended, volunteered at, spoken, and taught in these churches, and worked for nearly 6 years overseas with the IMB. But more than those facts can show, Baptists have been home for me. They have prayed for me, fed me, paid my salary, and been my family. They have discipled me and held me while I healed. I have come to know the Lord and follow him in obedience through a Southern Baptist lens.
But I have experienced sexual harassment and mild assault while performing my job with the SBC, and many of my claims were ignored or handled poorly. I was asked not to speak openly about these experiences for a variety of reasons. I have experienced specific instances of discrimination from IMB leadership, both as a woman and as an unmarried person. I suffered sustained emotional and spiritual abuse from IMB leadership, and experienced retaliation and reprisal as a result of reporting this abuse. And while some of my concerns were heard and responded to in the end, the hurt and trauma are not erased.
I bear these emotional scars, and they run deep enough to affect the rest of my life. Like Paul when he ‘foolishly boasted’ to the Corinthians, I share these facts not out of pride or desire for respect or notoriety. I foolishly speak of these things to this end: I wish for you who read this to understand that my words are written here not out of a spirit of malice or a desire to sow disunity. I want you to know that my eyes see the decaying roots in the SBC, my experiences help me to understand it, and my memories still feel the rot.
I still have tremors in my hands when I walk into a church. The part of me before who could speak freely and movingly to a congregation has been quieted and replaced by a dry-mouthed and fumbling speaker, unsure and shrunken under the gaze of men and women whom my mind will no longer allow me to instinctually trust. I have questioned many times whether I should leave my work in the hands of others and abandon what feels like a sinking ship. I have fought with my conscience time and again over the ethics of my paycheck. And I have stood my ground with the support of other Southern Baptists to leverage my experiences for the sake of repairing that sinking ship.
What This Means for Survivors
To any of you who have left the SBC denomination because it is no longer safe for you, to any who have stepped aside from churches at wide because they have not healed from damage and hurts, to any who see the apostasy, hypocrisy, or corruption of the SBC and their consciences will no longer allow them to stay: I understand and stand with you. I sympathize and empathize. The Lord will give us all convictions, and obedience and self-protection can look different for each of us.
But to those of you who stay, you need to understand what an abuse survivor may have experienced. Unfortunately, sexual abuse is part and parcel of power abuse at large. Believers still sin, and those far from the Lord and walking in sin can fall into patterns of abusing whatever influence or control they hold. This love for power is the same root underneath racism, sexism, discrimination, spiritual abuse, and emotional abuse in our churches. And if any of you are completely shocked that such abuse could happen here—in our fellowship halls or youth rooms—you have not been listening to the voices of your brothers and sisters with different shades of skin who have cried out about the mistreatment they’ve experienced from behind our pulpits. You’ve chosen to look aside from the smaller paycheck the women or divorcees on church staff receive compared to others. You’ve failed to recognize when singles are understood to be less spiritually mature than married individuals on principle.
If you have missed these signs of abuse or neglect, there is plenty of time to open your eyes to them and recognize that they are not accidental or isolated incidents. You have plenty of time to turn your eyes to your wounded brother on the side of the road instead of walking by. These reports show clear patterns of abuse across our denomination, and the safe assumption right now is that you know other church members who’ve been abused, and that your church could do better in preventing or caring for abuse victims.
To let these headlines pass you by without evaluating your actions is tantamount to what David did for Tamar. After David’s illicit sex with Bathsheba (arguably rape), it took him some time to see his sin. When he did, he repented and married her, but that was not enough to bring her husband back from the dead, or to save their baby from death. Later on in David’s life, his greater love for his sons, or his own hesitancy to hold others accountable for mistakes he felt capable of making himself, kept him from caring for his own daughter Tamar when she had been raped by his son. That sin festered all the days of their lives. Tamar lived alone and abandoned. Her rapist was murdered by a half-brother who’d fruitlessly urged David to take action. And the half-brother murderer soon claimed David’s throne for his own and exiled his father, before the son’s tragic death and David’s overwhelming grief. Abuse festers. When we are tempted to ignore it, only exponential hurt can come from that path.
Because of the manipulation inherent to abuse, many survivors like myself still struggle to tell their story without still wondering, in their heart of hearts, if it wasn’t their fault. And telling their story can be painful, often because in the SBC environment we live in, the risk of not being believed and the consequences that would follow are just too great. Will they be fired from their jobs? Lose their standing in the church or community? Will they be blamed for disrupting peace? Will they lose their church family altogether and be looked on with mistrust until they finally leave the church voluntarily?
Those are all fears and consequences we have in our hands to change. By denouncing abuse openly, we set minds at ease who fear revealing it. By aligning ourselves more with the kingdom of God than any political or administrative kingdom, gender or skin color here on earth, survivors can trust us more to treat them with the compassion and healing Jesus would. By openly expressing support for abuse survivors, over the SBC or a particular leader or ideology, we show our value for people made in the image of God. If we truly value each person made in the image of God the same, we owe abuse victims the dignity of valuing them with urgency when they have suffered so great a spiritual, physical, and psychological blow.
Many abuse victims, myself included, have been answered with the subtly destructive phrase, “let’s keep the main thing the main thing,” or its variation of “We need to put the gospel first.” But recognize with me, church, that the gospel is not just a message of Jesus on a cross and heaven eternal. The gospel message was embodied in Jesus, whose kingdom values compelled him to welcome women as well as men in his closest circle of followers. The gospel compelled Jesus to provide care for his marginalized mother even as he was dying on the cross. The gospel compelled Jesus to stop his teaching and welcome little children to him. The gospel compelled Jesus to stand between a woman accused of adultery and to take on her case and shame in the eyes of her accusers. Jesus himself said he came to call out good news to the poor, to release prisoners, give sight to the blind, and set free the oppressed. And those weren’t metaphors or solely spiritual realities. Who else are victims of abuse but the poor in spirit, those blinded in the dark by their isolation, prisoners of lies, oppressed by their abusers?
Church, the gospel IS the main thing, and it compels us with every fiber of our being to be a balm to the hurting. And that includes those abused in our church buildings and by our pastors and leaders.
Where I Stand
So how am I with all of this? This week has been a hard one. With every next piece of news, both my mind and body have to process through tension, grief, anger, humiliation, helplessness, devastation, and so many more emotions. The grief is so fresh and deep that some days I feel like I’m right back in the middle of what I experienced. Many others who have suffered church abuse are experiencing the same things. Plenty of you have reached out to listen and encourage, and I have been more than happy to talk with many of you as you process and understand what this means to and for you. I still have plenty to learn myself. But for now, I feel convicted to stay with the dumpster fire and help put out the flames. Having been burned a few times myself, maybe I’ve learned how to help suffocate the fire in the process.
This very Sunday as I stood trembling in church, praying for the Spirit to overpower my anxiety and help me to worship and learn, the congregation started to sing “He Leadeth me.” In the few churches or groups I’ve spoken to since I’ve been stateside, the ones who’ve reacted most powerfully to what they have heard were the ones I told my personal story to. When I revealed some of my deeper hurts and how the Lord sustained me, others connected to stories of their own and the Spirit connecting us was a strong encouragement. As I sang that song in church, I sank into my seat and fell into a silent prayer. I recognized that the Lord had led me to and through my experiences. He led me out the other side not quite the same Caroline who went in, but with a story to tell and a burning desire to see the church comfort her abused and broken brothers and sisters.
Later that same Sunday the news broke about the SBC investigation, and the Lord had already answered my questions for me. I will stay and be a safe person for others to come to. I will keep in dialogue with those with IMB and SBC already hard at work to help things change. For now and until I hear otherwise from the Spirit. I’ll be the man Jesus healed who was told to stay and tell his story to his village. I’ll be the woman at the well who took a risk and shared her shame so that others could come to know the Lord.
I do not believe that our southern Baptist theology and beliefs necessarily end in abuse. Many Baptists on my path toward healing have proved otherwise. But I do believe that our cultural identity at this point does lend itself to abuse. We have to roll up our sleeves and return to the Word to see how Jesus honors the dignity of the vulnerable and oppressed. We have to keep pressing our doctrines and theology until they meet our practice and show through in all the ways we interact with women, men, and sexuality in our churches; until the pages in our Bible reflect the pages of our lives as leaders humbly shepherd, and use their influence to protect and nurture instead of tear down or feed their own egos.
What this Means for You
Those are my convictions for now, and I plan to continue evaluating to make sure I obey the Lord. You might not land in the same place I do, and that’s okay. But for what it’s worth, my opinion is that further involvement with the SBC should be a choice instead of inaction. If you stay, if you move past this news, please do so with the knowledge of the hurting around you. Do not turn your eyes away from them. If you stay, stay with a task and a calling to learn, to rebuild, to comfort, and to change.
If you have caught yourself wondering if this affects you, it does. If your body is diseased, the whole system is compromised. Even a small infection can multiply and damage the whole body. In the same way, a disease in your church, however subtle, affects whether or not your body of believers worships in spirit and in truth. If your church’s handling of this causes even one of the little ones who would come to faith to stumble, it would be better for a millstone to be hung around your neck before you’re thrown into the ocean. Jesus is SERIOUS about protecting his sheep, and he is serious about those in power who could cause them to stumble, or mislead them, or even make the gospel unwelcoming and turn away those who could become little children in the faith.
If you believe this sin is only at higher levels in your church or organization, the same applies: a pattern of sin unchecked at any level is dangerous. As Paul says, an eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you,’ and the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you.’ God put the whole body together, and there should be no division within it. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it. If we Southern Baptists align ourselves together and understand each other to be a part of the same body of Christ, we cannot ignore a destructive habit in one part of the body and assume it has not manifested in the DNA or cellular level elsewhere.
If you don’t believe that you are contributing to these problematic abusive patterns, you are most certainly enabling them. I say that not to condemn, but to point out that these patterns that allow abuse are ingrained even at the smallest levels. If you are not knowingly and actively working against them, they will continue on, unchanged. If you are not advocating for transparency and safety in your church, if you aren’t praying for the integrity of your leaders, or advocating for their accountability, you are contributing to a pattern in the same way that the religious leaders left the wounded man on the side of the road because they assumed he wasn’t their problem and would be more trouble than he was worth.
If you are one who wants to give grace in situations like these, please recognize the nature of grace. In Ephesians 3 and 4, Paul writes about how we are all united by the same faith and the same baptism. If we believe that, we believe that any Christian is united with any other through the same Spirit of God who lives in them. Paul says that he became a servant of the gospel by God’s grace, so that he could make the gospel known to others and it would unite them. Grace unites and makes whole.
God’s grace isn’t something that spares us from judgment: our judgment still exists, and Jesus suffered it in our place. Grace from God is that Jesus suffered to redeem us to live rightly before God. Grace redeems and restores; it does not turn a blind eye to sin. Grace in the case of abuse holds an abuser accountable so that their sin has consequences and they can learn to live more fully like Christ. And grace for an abuse survivor restores them and treats them with the dignity they have as an eternal bearer of the image of God. As Paul says to the Ephesians, “Each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.” To truly show grace, we must speak truth both to abused and abuser. We must recognize that if sparing a legal consequence of pain for one member causes ungracious suffering for an another in the present or future, it is not grace we show.
The emotional scars that I bear most likely will not go away in this lifetime, before I see my redeemer face to face. Be mindful that there are similar scars in your congregation. Whatever his reason, the Lord has given me the privilege to see many of my own scars begin to heal. He has given me a community of faith that supports me and reminds me through their own actions how the Lord loves and restores. So as often as I can, I intend to wear my scars as a badge of honor to glorify the Lord. Jesus proudly showed his scars to his followers to testify to the Lord’s power over death. Let my own scars show that, as deeply as sin can wound, the Lord can heal even deeper. As much as my scars may ‘disfigure’ my experiences in church or with spiritual leaders, their dull ache will always remind me of the hope I have in a Lord who will heal all wounds and dry all tears.
If you have experienced sexual abuse, please reach out to safe people around you for help, or go to this website for resources or to file a report. You can also call the national sexual assault hotline 24/7 at 800.656.4673. If you have experienced abuse of any kind connected to the IMB, you can call the confidential hotline at 855.420.0003 or email advocate@imb.org .
Practical steps: A few simple actions to take in response
Talk with your church to clarify how to report abuse.
Confirm your church’s procedure on what to do in the instance of an abuse report.
Develop a plan or procedure if your church does not already have one.
If you work for a faith-based company, educate yourself on their HR procedures and policies.
Urge your church or workplace to develop a more formal HR department or procedure to ensure that complaints and accusations are taken seriously.
Encourage your church to vet ministers they hire by following up on their references.
Help your church plan a service where they address abuse and make their commitment to stand with survivors clear. Your congregation should hear loud and clear that your church is committed not to make it more painful for them to speak up than to stay silent.
If an abuse victim should speak with you about their ordeal, do not treat their confidence lightly. Believe, support, and report.
Give survivors safe time and spaces in which to process and to have holes in their faith.
Educate yourself on spiritual abuse so you can understand how an abuse survivor has been made to believe that God himself sees and treats them the way their abuser did.
If someone in your life has been vocal with his or her story of abuse, listen to them and hear their perspectives and experiences.
Verify that your faith-based workplace has HR policies for responding not just to sexual abuse, but also to spiritual, physical, and emotional abuse, and advocate for policies if there aren’t any.
As I worked through a trauma healing program recently, a partner and I talked about how our heart wounds can be healed, but how they sometimes still leave scars that misshape the tendencies of our hearts for our entire lives.
Later, in a time set aside for lamenting, my spirit was almost too heavy to connect to words. After a time of silence and of trying to pray, I was reminded of one of Job’s laments, and his expression of faith in the lament: “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth.”
Spiritual abuse is one of those heart wounds or mental/emotional traumas that leaves deep scars. Spiritual abuse is a type of control or manipulation carried out by a spiritual authority, often in the name of God. It ignores the dignity of a person created in the image of God, and abuses power to belittle their spiritual autonomy and control their choices and behaviors. When scriptures are misapplied, when someone claims the authority of God backing their decisions or actions, or when a moral code is enforced outside of what the Bible claims is God’s will and law—those actions, claims, and words slowly begin to reshape the spiritually abused person’s idea of who God is. God can become to them not who they read about in the Bible, but who their abuser claims God to be.
In cases of spiritual abuse, especially ongoing spiritual abuse, the face of God slowly changes into the face of the abuser. And that kind of damage is hard to shake. The best way to heal those wounds is for the abused person to re-learn God’s character for themselves by immersing themselves in scripture. But the nature of the harm done often makes it difficult, or impossible for a time, for the victim to read scripture because it has been abused to wound and control them.
For a very long time, and possibly for a lifetime after the spiritual abuse, the victim will struggle against the ‘character of God’ the abuser portrayed to them. The pull is like a gravity of sorts. In off-guard moments they will hear that ‘voice of God’ or see that ‘face’ as God’s rather than who he portrays himself to be to us in his Word. And that is what I mean by spiritual scars. Just as a child who has been abandoned by a father will often expect God to abandon them as well, a spiritual abuse victim struggles to separate their spiritual mentor’s portrayal of God from the real thing.
I have a poster in my room with an artistic portrayal of the Trinity. It is an absolutely beautiful work of art, and I can get lost in the details for hours. The Father stands above the Son, holding a richly embroidered cloak detailing images from the gospels to drape around his shoulders. And the Son hovers above the Spirit, holding what looks to be the source of a spring of water (welling up to eternal life) which pours out around and behind the Spirit’s head. All three persons have rich, brown skin, kind eyes, and welcoming expressions. But the Spirit is imagined in the art as female, just as the Father and Son are imagined as male.
Any portrayal of God assumes a gender the Bible doesn’t explicitly state. In the beginning, both man and woman were created in the image of God, and neither one is less or more a part of God’s image. God is spirit, and has no bodily gender. God’s character encompasses traits we consider both masculine and feminine. And while Jesus walked the earth in the body of a man, the Spirit of God is often described in feminine terms, with sheltering wings like a mother bird, like an eternal mother who gives us our second birth, like a dove, expectantly brooding over the earth charged with the promise of yet-unborn life. These images are not meant to be a literal description of God just as my poster is not meant to portray an actual form of God. But I found the feminine, nurturing, motherly portrayal of the Spirit to be just what I needed to help rewrite some of my spiritual scars that constantly tug at me to understand the character of God as something twistedly masculine.
Job also had spiritual scars from his ordeal of suffering. After his family died or left him, after he lost his worldly possessions and even the wholeness of his own mind and body, his ‘friends’ lectured him about how he must have wronged God to deserve such treatment. After listening to their interminable prattle, Job lashes out to God, perhaps because he has begun to believe what the friends said of him. In chapter 19, Job assumes God is against him, is waging war on him, and has humiliated, uprooted, and ignored him in his most desperate time of need.
But in the true nature of lament, Job pours out his heart to God and then expresses what he knows to be true even if he cannot feel the truth of it:
“I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I and not another. How my heart yearns within me!”
Even with the pull toward misunderstanding God’s love for him, Job knows that one day his redeemer will stand on the earth for him.
And the text is even more rich than that. The word ‘redeemer’ there is a beautiful tapestry of cultural meanings. It is the word used for someone who buys a person their freedom. It is used for a family member who avenges a death with the blood of another. It is used in Ruth to refer to Boaz—a close relative who chooses to save a family’s name and inheritance by taking a widow as his wife. And a textual variant of this verse in Job calls this redeemer a defender or vindicator. Job knows that one day someone will stand for him, pay for him, remember his story and honor his heritage, and vindicate him against false claims made against him.
Another possible reading of the text says that this redeemer will not stand upon the earth, but upon Job’s grave. Can you see the faith that Job expresses here? In the end, after he is dead and gone, someone will come to stand on his bones to redeem him. Job will not be forgotten or ignored even in death. And he proclaims this truth about a God he has, in the same breath, accused of ignoring and attacking him.
But Job goes on from here into even deeper faith. He says even after his body has decayed, he will see God with his own eyes—he himself, and no one else, will see God in the flesh. A variant of this phrase is “after I awake, though my body has been destroyed, then in my flesh I will see God.” Even when his life hangs in the balance and he does not know if he will live or die, Job knows that one day when he is raised again, he will see God for himself.
And Job is happy about that.
“Oh, how my heart yearns within me.” Goodness. Even when Job feels the Lord has viciously caused the unendurable suffering he has felt, even when he feels accused by God and by man, Job longs for the day when he will be redeemed, when someone will stand for him to remember him and tell his story. And he does not fear the face of an accusing and harmful God on that day. He longs with everything in him to see the face of a God who loves him and who sees only innocence and wholeness because Job has been redeemed from death and suffering.
My own heart brims over with joy at that. I may struggle through this life and its suffering. I may have a scarred understanding of God’s face when it turns toward me. But I know that one day, when I wake from my grave, Jesus my redeemer will stand on the earth. He will vindicate me from false accusations. He will look on me and see innocence and wholeness because he himself redeemed me and my sins with his blood and his life to make me a part of his family. And the face I see on that day will not be disfigured. It will not look like what I have been groomed to believe of the face of God. Oh how I ache for that day.
Some of our spiritual wounds won’t be healed until heaven, and some of our scars may plague us for the rest of our lives on this earth. But that’s okay because we KNOW they will be healed no matter how much we struggle with them now. One day our living Redeemer will stand in victory on our graves, and when we awake we will see him with our own eyes and not the eyes of another. We will be healed and our hearts will be whole.
Sometimes the words in our Bibles become stale. I don’t mean that the words lose any power; I mean that we become so familiar with the cadences and phrases they lose some of their freshness for us.
Recently as I was studying justice, lament, faith, and abiding in the presence of God through difficult circumstances, I landed in Habakkuk. This short Old Testament book deals deeply with each of those topics. To ‘freshen up’ the words for myself, I went through the book phrase by phrase to soak in the meaning and re-word the Scripture as if I were preparing to learn it well enough to share Habakkuk’s call and response with the Lord as it was meant to be heard and shared originally. Below you’ll find my manuscript for a ‘storied’ version of Habakkuk, with no content changed from the Biblical narrative and only small phrasal changes. I hope you enjoy a fresh look at this incredibly timely book of the Bible. Try reading it aloud to yourself to give the text some extra life.
The prophet Habakkuk received this burden:
Habakkuk: God, how long do I have to call for help and you refuse to listen?
I yell for help: “Violence!” but you don’t save?
Why do you turn my head and force me to watch injustice?
Why do you let sin pass?
Ruin and hurt are in my face: there is too much fighting and division.
Because of it, the law is impotent and frozen, and right never wins.
The evil rope up and surround the good so that right and fair become crooked.
God: Watch the world and be completely shocked.
I’ll do something in your time you wouldn’t believe if I told you.
I’m grooming the Babylonians — merciless, rude, and unpredictable —
to burn through the earth and make foreign homes their own.
They fill people with terror, make their own rules, and make a name for themselves.
Their horses are faster than cheetahs and more fearless than wolves at nightfall.
They come at top speeds from farther than the eye can see.
They swoop down like a hawk to the kill, focused only on death.
Their armies oppress like a desert wind, catching hostages like dust.
They lecture kings and humiliate leaders.
They laugh tat fortresses and move the earth itself to conquer them.
They barrel through like wind with no obstacles, convicted men who deify their own power.
Habakkuk: Lord, haven’t you been around forever?
My God, my perfect God, we can’t die.
You elected them to carry out retribution.
Steady and Unchanging One, you picked them to punish.
Your gaze is too pure to look on evil.
Why do you let them betray?
Why do you sit quietly by while evil people eat up others better than themselves?
You make people like fish in a barrel, like fish with no leader, no one in charge.
The evil enemy catches all of them in traps,
lures all of them in, nets them with ease.
So he is giddy with delight, and he worships his net.
He offers it food and rituals because his net lets him live like a king and feast like one too.
You’re going to let him keep pillaging the sea — wiping out empires ruthlessly?
I will be at my station on the watchtower of the defensive wall.
I’ll look for his answer, and for how I should reply to these concerns.
Then the Lord replied:
God: You’re going to want to write this down, plain for all to see and hear.
This message is ready for the right time — it’s about the End, and this one will prove true.
Even if it’s a long time coming, wait for it.
It is certain to be on time.
Look at him, all big-headed—he wants crooked things,
But a good man will live by faith—
Alcohol is a traitor to him. He is proud and never sits still.
He’s as hungry as the grave and like death, he’s a bottomless pit.
He gathers all the nations and steals from all the people to make prisoners of them.
Won’t all these people want retribution, and mock him with humiliating sarcasm:
“Look out, if you hoard loot and get rich manipulating people!
How long will you keep this up? Won’t the people—who you owe—rise up?
Won’t you shiver when they wake up?
Then it’ll be your turn to be the victim,
because you have looted many countries.
And the people you overlooked will loot you.
The blood you spilled was from people.
You have flattened fields and cities, along with their people.”
“Look out, if you build your kingdom on foundations of slavery and injustice,
To try and build it high out of reach,
so you can dodge the claws of destruction!
You planned to destroy many people,
so you shamed your home and gave up your right to life.
The stones in these walls will testify against you,
and the wooden beams will affirm them.”
“Look out, if spilled blood has built your city, and crime founds your town.
Hasn’t the Lord said peoples’ work just feeds the fire,
and the countries wear themselves out for nothing?
Regardless, the full earth will know the glory of the Lord,
like the oceans know water.”
“Look out, if you push drinks on your friends,
refilling till they’re drunk so you can feed your hungry eyes with their naked bodies.
You will be full of shame instead of triumph.
Take your turn! Drink and be naked!
The Lord’s strong hand brings the cup to you, and disgrace will cover up your power.
Your violence to Lebanon will sweep you away,
and your slaughter of animals will haunt you.
Because you have drained human blood—
you destroyed fields and cities still full of people.”
“What is an idol worth, since it is only carved by man?
What about a figurine that only reinforces lies?
Whoever makes them trusts the work of her own hands.
She makes mute godlets.
Look out, if you try to make wood come to life
Or to make stone wake up.
Can it lead you?
It’s covered in gold and silver—it doesn’t breathe!
But the Lord is alive and well in his holy temple.
Let the whole earth fall silent for him!”
The prophet Habakkuk’s prayer:
Habakkuk: Lord, I have heard the stories they tell about you.
Your work has me stock still with amazement.
Do these things again in our time!
Let people these days know your works!
Remember to show mercy in your retribution.
God comes in holiness from the south as of old.
His throne-glory spreads over the skies
and his court-fanfare sounds from all the earth.
His radiance like sunrise gleams from his hand where he hides his power.
Plague makes a way for him, and disease carries his train.
When he stands, he shakes the earth.
Under his gaze the nations tremble.
The time-strong mountains crumble,
and the time-worn hills fall in on themselves.
He has eternal work.
Ethiopia’s tents are disarrayed, and Midian’s homes are distressed.
Lord, were you angry at the rivers?
Did the streams provoke your rage?
Was your wrath toward the sea when you rode with triumphal horses and chariots?
You unwrap your bow and call for endless arrows.
You carve the earth with rivers and mountains writhe under your glance.
Rushing water roars by and raises waves high.
The sun and moon in the sky are paralyzed
as your arrows glint and fly, and as your spear flashes lightning.
You march through the earth with rage and your wrath culls the nations.
But you sought out your people to deliver them.
You rescued your chosen one.
You trampled the leader of the wicked land and stripped him of everything—head to toe.
You crushed his head with his spear when his warriors made their move to scatter us.
They gloated as they prepared to prey on the weak in hiding.
Your horses disturbed the sea and frothed the wide waters.
I heard the stories and my heart pounded.
The words made my lips tremble.
My bones rotted hollow and my legs quivered.
But I will patiently wait for the day of disaster to crash over our invaders.
If the fig tree doesn’t even bud, and the grape vines hang empty,
If the olive harvest fails and the farms lie bare,
If the barns shelter no sheep and the cow stalls are vacant,
STILL the Lord is my joy:
I rejoice in my Savior.
My strength comes from the powerfully ruling Lord.
“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.” — Isaiah 9:2
Christ followers around the world celebrate advent because it teaches us to wait. As we wait for Christmas and imagine what it must have been like to live before our savior was born, we understand that the Christian does not wait passively. We hope. We prepare. We lament. We pray. We continue in daily faithfulness.
And this waiting—this numbering our days—teaches us holy habits. This season of anticipation for our savior’s birth trains our spiritual muscle memory to wait for our savior’s second coming in the same way.
This Christmas season has been a different one for me. I’ve spent Christmas overseas before: once for a brief visit in Cambodia and twice while I lived in Bulgaria. But my hot-climate Christmas was quickly followed by a return to the States and a wintry celebration back home with family. And my Bulgarian Christmases still surrounded me with snow, Christmas trees, carols, hot cocoa, and sweaters.
Christmas this year is on the equator, and the thriving palm tree just outside the front door dwarfs the fake Christmas tree just inside it. The only Christmas carols I’ve heard are the ones I played myself on the piano or from Spotify. I knew properly celebrating Christmas would take an extra effort when things feel so different, so I over-decorated and picked advent Bible readings to add to my normal quiet times. Little did I know how much my African context and regular readings in Kings would prepare my heart for advent all on their own.
I interact with refugees every day. Their heartbreaking situations are often normalized and mundane for me, but the heaviness slowly wears on you. It bows your back and puts a damper on your spirit. We talk about the hope of Christmas. I’ve shared my favorite Christmas verse from Isaiah about how a people walking in darkness will see a great light. But the reality is that I live in a land of lament among a people greatly acquainted with suffering. They carry with them an infectious ache for healing and a world made new. Deep in their spirits they yearn for great tidings of comfort and joy, and peace on earth to all mankind. Their longing for advent—for the savior’s coming—is not artificial or put on in any way.
Early in December I read 2 Kings chapter 7, which is a story from the siege of Israel. With Syrians at the gate and the last of the food gone days ago, the people were desperate. They ate donkeys’ heads, doves’ dung, even their own children. In that hopeless hour, God gave the people a sign to remind them he was with them: the next morning not only would the city have food staples they hadn’t seen in days, this food would sell for fractions of its normal price.
Sure enough, two outcasts with nothing to lose left the city that night to seek out the enemy camp. What they found was a ghost town. Provisions scattered, tents left standing, not a soul to be found. The Lord had frightened off the enemies with sounds of heavenly chariots. The men who found the camp gorged themselves on food and hid valuables they found free for the taking. But in the midst of their delirious joy, one had the presence of mind to say to the other, “What we’re doing is not right. This is a day of good news and we are keeping it to ourselves. If we wait until daylight, punishment will overtake us. Let’s go at once and report this to the royal palace.”
Those lines hit me like sack of flour. I decorate and celebrate Christmas in the midst of great darkness. I have good news! Great news of a savior born and a lost world saved, of comfort and joy, of hope for all mankind. Am I keeping it to myself? When the sun dawns and our savior comes back the second time, will I have shared this life-saving hope with the same conviction and urgency the men from the story shared their happy news with a starving people?
The truth is, refugees understand the waiting of advent, just like the men from the story did. They know what it feels like to wait for hope to come, straining their eyes to see from when or where help will arrive. They feel the world-weariness of the Israelites waiting for their savior, the Messiah, the Son of God.
An Arabic Christmas song I learned this year is about Emmanuel, God with us. We know our slow and haunting song, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” and its words remind us of the pain and suffering God’s people endured while they waited, and the monumental task it was to keep their faith and hope alive in the prophecies God gave them to hold on to. But this Arabic song beautifully turns that idea to our African context.
Beautiful news on the earth,
It was the day He was born!
The Son of God, Emmanuel, the Lord’s redemption.
The sound of drums!
And angels cheering in the heavens!
And we below, full of need,
We wait for it…
The new covenant!
The song slowly builds and reminds us; now that our God has come, he will not leave us til the end. It expresses the ache with which we wait, the ache for the new covenant, for our God to be WITH us.
I have felt that ache this Christmas season. I’ve been reading 1 and 2 Kings, through seemingly endless cycles of kings who “did evil in the sight of the Lord” and “led Israel astray” or “caused Israel to sin.” As I read a collapsed version, generations of oppression, sin, and waiting pass in the turn of a page. The people dig themselves deeper and deeper into disobedience and suffering. As this horrible period spirals to its end, the people suffer each and every one of the covenant curses the Lord promised them should they stop following him and break his commands.
At the very end, a weary writer pens very matter-of-factly that the cities were captured. The people were carried off into exile away from their homeland. And all of this occurred because the people sinned against the Lord their God who had rescued them from Egypt. He had led them to the promised land and commanded them not to follow the religions of the people he drove out before them. But even so, the people built altars, temples, high places, and they worshipped the pagan gods and spirits. They broke the first covenant, turned away from God, and suffered their consequences.
I’ve simmered in these verses, these cycles of disobedience all December, just like a good Christmas apple cider simmers to take in all the flavors. I’ve felt the ache from the outside, the ache my refugee friends know so well. But I’ve also felt the ache from inside, from the inevitable brokenness sin leaves in its wake. Whether we live in exile or under oppression or just enslaved to sin in our lives, every human knows what it feels like to long for a new day, and new hope, a savior to swoop in out of nowhere to pull us out of the pit we’re in.
That is why we wait. Those are the emotions and the longing we feel leading up to Christmas as we wait not only to celebrate our savior’s birth, but for the righting of all wrongs that will happen when he comes a second time. As my heart yearned for a savior to lead us out of our mess, my advent readings led me to Luke 4:
[Jesus] went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Those words of hope must have echoed in the silence of years of aching and waiting. This was good news indeed.
We stepped out of the car onto dirt packed hard by thousands of feet that should never have been there in the first place. Refugees are driven here in endless lines by war, and this was one of the first places their feet rested after fleeing Sudan and South Sudan. I had gotten in the car with little-to-no idea of where we were going or how far away it would be. We followed a UN car and listened the whole way to stories about Mama Salome, a Ugandan woman in the car ahead who cared fiercely for the refugees and often spent her days working with them here. They loved her. They unburdened themselves of their stories to her. The people respected her.
I knew we had arrived by the blue and white UNHCR tarps covering mud and stick structures. Those tarps are recognizable from a mile away. We hopped out of the car, steeling ourselves for what we were about to experience. This was a place on the border of Uganda and South Sudan, a place where thousands of refugees have been first received, processed, given identification cards and basic medical treatments, clothed, and sent on their way to live in the refugee settlements. This site was relatively new. It had been moved there from a location closer to the border. Sometimes stray bullets from the fighting had whizzed overhead. It wasn’t safe. But that word was relative to all the people crowded into this place—over a thousand people today, we were told. They had moved to a location farther than a stone’s throw from the border. And now they were here. I didn’t even know if ‘here’ had a name.
In some ways this place was nicer than the refugee camps themselves. There was a kitchen, with wood-fed brick ovens and gigantic pots for cooking huge quantities of rice, posho, or beans, to feed hundreds of starved figures. The water pump never ran dry, and it was only a few yards at most from anywhere on the compound, not miles like some of the water wells in the camps. Everyone was seen at least once by the medical staff. They were given clothing. Conditions can be harder for some once they are transported to their plots of land in the settlements.
Next to the open-air industrial African kitchen, there was a protection house, completely walled up, floor to roof with sheet metal. That was odd for this area, where the roof usually sits a few inches above the walls to encourage a breeze to enter and bring some relief from the hot equator sun. Just recently, we were told, four Dinka women had to be hidden there. The Dinka are ethnically different from many of the other Sudanese refugees, and in their trauma and anger with no way to vent their emotions, the Dinka people can often become targets of aggression for the other Sudanese. The four Dinka women had to be locked into the protection house to keep them safe from the hundreds of new refugees who wanted to kill them. Police were called and they stood guard around the small building. But in calmer times, the protection house is a place for mothers to birth their babies. As if on cue a woman walked toward us from that direction, carefully holding a bundle of blankets. One of our people walked toward her with a smile, and at a returning smile from the mother, gently pulled back the bundle where a head should be. A days-old baby. The protection house had an apt name. It preserved life and brought it into the world, even here where lives had been treated so cheaply by the war that drove them away.
We walked deeper into the compound, toward a long, low building separated into three rooms. To enter the first, we squeezed past a line of people standing in the hot sun. They were all waiting to be sent inside, where they would receive small, yellow, crumpled pieces of paper. These papers were life and death. They had an identification number that registered a family and its members for basic human rights—healthcare, rations, water, a kit of items and tools to make a home in their new places at the camps.
We squeezed back out through the lines and this time I felt bold enough to look up at the faces around me. As I raised my head I noticed that my shoulders had unconsciously stooped in response to the sorrow of this place, and under the acknowledgement that the crowds parted for me without question because of the lack of color in my skin. But what really separated me from the people I brushed past? I had grown up in a different country, one not at war. It was the luck of the draw. These men, women, and children, they had lives before. Some had educations, they had homes and family traditions, they had all the members of their families at one time. And now here they were, with nothing to their name except the clothes on their backs. For some, even those clothes were alien. We knew that many times children who have been separated from their families would band together and come across the border in groups, naked and traumatized, after wandering through the bush. We’d brought two small bales of clothing with us today that we gathered in response to one such report of a thousand children coming across with no adult in sight. Today we learned that the men and the women would often come across naked too. Many had been forcibly stripped along the way, and they first came into Uganda without even the dignity of a shirt or a pair of pants.
Before I knew it, I’d followed our people into the second room. It had medical posters covering the walls, and the stench of illness in the air. Here everyone was checked for any records they may have of vaccinations and given what they lacked. They were tested for malnutrition or any other diseases they might be carrying and suffering under. Privacy screens hid the patients, and the room was quieter and felt more somber than any other we had been in. The next room in the row had only a waist-high wall on the side facing us. It was originally intended for a children’s play room, we were told. But because of the overflow of refugees, some slept in here. There were cartoonish posters on the wall, and bedrolls on the floor. My brain didn’t know what to make of what I was seeing, and at first impression the room reminded me of some bizarre, out-of-place church nursery.
After the last of the rooms in the low building bordering the lot, we came out not far from a large bus. It looked like a charter bus, out of place here. This was the bus that took new families to the camps when they had been processed, either to Imvepi or Omugo where the openings are at the moment. Families stay here at this way-station for anywhere from 3 days to two weeks before they take that bus out. Our guides pointed out a warehouse-like building diagonal from us and perpendicular to the building we had just left. This is where the women and children slept. The men slept separate, all males over the age of 15, at the far end of the lot. We had seen the UN tarps draped and stretched over what must have been their sleeping quarters on our way in.
We walked back toward the kitchen area and the water pump, at the opposite side of the rectangular compound. The shock was wearing off some, so we started to use our stumbling Arabic to speak to people and say anything we could—we are praying for you, God bless you, what is your name, I like your smile. The urge to say something, anything, to these people—to remind them that we saw them as humans with names and needs—was so strong. We were starting to feel so small in the face of such need.
We followed our bales of clothes over to a flat area. Some of the workers had already laid out plastic mats and started to unpack and sort the clothes. It looked like a big Goodwill bin from America. In fact, some of these clothes might just have come from somewhere like that. We ooh-ed and ahh-ed over a tiny lavender dress with a sparkly tutu attached at the waist. We laughed as the workers raised a little boy’s costume shirt—soft green back, pale tan belly, and a ridged dinosaur tail handing off the center of the back. As the clothes were sorted, tables were brought for them to be laid out on in stacks of size and gender. The people began gathering in a crowd to save a spot in line for their children to have some clothes. We stood around and tried to strike up conversations.
Even in this place so much life was happening. Some of the smiles made you forget where you were or what some of the people had been through. But there were always reminders of the displacement and the transient, perpetually uprooted lives these people led. We heard the bus engine crank and several heads looked up in dismay. Several tongues clicked disapproval and frustration. These men and women couldn’t leave the clothing distribution or they’d risk not getting clothes for their children. But I wondered how many had friends on that bus, or fellow travelers that they might not get to see again. And how many got to say goodbye before the bus left?
Some of the pairs of eyes were doggedly fixed on the ground, thinking of far-off events in far-off places. Many heads swiveled to look in our direction. They wanted to observe, to touch, to smile. Some of the braver tried out their English to greet us or ask us how we were. I found myself most of the time squatted down and talking to children, or smiling and tentatively sticking out my hand to greet them. The smallest ones are often afraid of our skin and don’t know how to respond. One little boy waved at me and flashed wide grin. I made my way over to him and his siblings to clasp his hand but his face immediately froze in fear and he hid behind big brother’s leg. I raised my gaze to the older siblings, “He’s afraid,” I said in Arabic. They giggled to confirm, and smiled at the familiar sounds in the words.
One lady sat on the ground embroidering one of the beautiful Sudanese sheets that are used for everything from bedspreads to seat throws to curtains. Hers was an elephant with gleaming white tusks, surrounded by abstract leaves and flowers, with maybe a few birds begun on the outer edges of the design. I tried to imagine how far that one piece of home had come with her, and where she’d managed to get the needle and embroidery floss. The bright lime green sheet somehow made even this clustered mass of people seem more homely. It was a piece of settled life. She proudly unknotted the edges to show us and model for a picture.
I wandered off to another part of the mass of people. A small baby was crying hard. His head looked too big for his malnourished body. “He’s hot,” someone said with a knowing smile. No, “He’s sick,” said his mother. Rubbing his back turned into the back of a hand to his forehead, rubbing his head. His mother nursed him to calm him and his eyes closed for an untroubled second. He raised his tiny had to rest it on the arm rubbing his head.
I wandered off again, this time finding a mother with a welcoming smile. She held a baby and had two little ones circling her feet. Babies usually cry the loudest at my pale skin, but this one reached out for me. I offered my hand and he was fascinated with it. He held the fingers one at a time and would reach for it again if I ever thoughtlessly dropped it while trying to talk to his mother. The white skin on my palm looked almost luminous in that light, up next to his richly colored fingers. “What is that?” I asked in a high baby voice. “It’s white!” I said in Arabic, to the giggles of those clustered around. The crowd shifted and I said goodbye to this mother so she could move with them and not lose her place in line.
A man introduced himself to me, desperately trying to tell his story in English. He had a toddler boy with him, and his said his wife had a five-day old baby. It was hard to understand whether she was here in the camp, if she had passed, or if she was still in Sudan. As the man broke off the conversation to follow the shifting crowd, he said they were making it little by little. “Little by little,” I repeated in Arabic. His eyes brightened and his wiry body almost bounced with energy. “You speak Arabic?” he asked in his heart language. “Little by little,” I said with a sly smile. Later I saw him trying out his English on another of our group. The little toddler was escaping behind him toward the latrines. He was so intent on his conversation he hadn’t noticed until a group of mommas were almost yelling to get his attention. He sprang off after the little one as I turned my head with a smile.
We waited around as some of the clothes were handed out. The mass of children who’d been pushed right in front of the tables by their parents was overwhelming. So many and so much need. My Arabic felt so insufficient, but I don’t think I would have had the words in any language to know what to say, how to comfort, how best to listen. As we were leaving one mother pushed her way through the crowd to show us her daughter, beaming in a new dress, posing for us. He mother looked on in pride and thanked us for the clothes. The little one let us take her picture before we said goodbye and walked to the car.
We all crammed into the car and someone asked to pray before we left. I couldn’t. I couldn’t speak for a while. I’d kept the tears in until we were behind the closed doors of the car, but they came silently in waves for most of the trip home. Thoughts raced through my head quicker than I could sort them out. What can be done in the face of such deep, dehumanizing need? How can you help or encourage? Who was I to even think I had anything to offer to help, or that I could make a difference at all? Pray for my team and me in the coming days as we sort through what we experienced and brainstorm what to do and how to help in situations like these. Pray especially for Casey and me as we consider how to find a way to help, work with, or minister to some of the separated children that come through check-in stations like these and can be sent to the refugee camps without family to speak of, in prime positions for exploitation in many different forms.
— By Miss Cellanea 