Glass Half Empty

A glass would be anything but half empty if you left it outside these days. The rainy season has arrived and everyone knows it, each of the last 7 days has had it's share of precipitation, deluge even, and it looks to continue that way.

Recently it has become more obvious to me how deep the wounds are here. The British are famed for their stiff upper lip. That ability to grin and bear it and avoid conflict, emotions or generally anything sensitive at all costs. Yet I find here something that goes far beyond that but it is very hard to place. Perhaps it is just a complete de-sensitisation because the people here have seen so much that they have become numb. Maybe it is the ostrich move of sticking ones head in the sand and pretending that it never happened. Or somehow they have just learned to live with the loss of so much, knowing that all is not lost. For they still have their lives, if not their family, if not their dignity, if not their limbs, if not their pride, if not their happiness, they yet have life in them.

Who knows, perhaps no one, but all the same Rwanda still lives in the ashes of its past, limps on with the scars of yesteryear.

For our team to get anywhere in town we have to get a bus. 20p will get you anywhere in the city. This process involves a 15 minute walk down our local high street to the local bus station which consist of a dirt courtyard packed with people and various buses. You wait on the bus until its full and then hop off at your destination. Simple enough.

However, in the 15 minutes it takes to walk to the station you will pass people who are simply lying in the street in 30 degree heat, sometimes half on the pavement half in the road with a hand stretched out.

When you get to the bus station you have to push through the swarm of street vendors who flock to the white people. You learn the word for 'no' pretty quickly. Occasionally you will actually be grabbed (it is quite a tactile culture) by someone begging for money, though it is closer to demanding than begging really.

Once you have figured out which bus you need and get on the blind man will have managed to find his way on to the bus and will do the rounds as the bus fills up. If you turn your face from him to look out the window you will likely see more vendors trying to sell you anything from bread to USB sticks through the window. Occasionally they will disperse as though someone just started shooting at them. They don't pay taxes because none of their sales are recorded so their practice is illegal and they would rather not be caught by the heavily armed police. In their place you will find at your window a woman waving the stump of an arm that used to have a hand on the end of it gently thudding against your window, demanding your attention, your pity, your money. Eventually the bus fills and you pull away, the conductor will at some point ask for your 20p and you will place it into a scarred hand full of tattered cash. Then you arrive at your destination and start your day. There were many survivors of the genocide but none got through unscathed.

Despite all of this life goes on. They press on and most seem unaffected by what they see. In fairness most have seen far worse and the fact that the country is at peace is a blessing that outshines the scars of the past.

My Grandmother had a heart attack this week. She is several thousand miles away and I am at least 6 weeks away from being able to see her again. I am a very long way from home.

The longest Saturday of all time was probably the Saturday between good Friday and Easter Sunday. The one in whom the disciples had placed all of their hope, whom they had lived with for the past 3 years and who they believed to be the one who would win the victory of victories was brutally and publicly tortured and executed.

But Sunday came.

When all hope was lost and everything was at its darkest. After all the commotion and chaos and fireworks the ashes rested and there was the cold bitter taste of grief without a mote of hope to carry them.

Yet the tomb was empty. The resurrection, so far beyond expectation that even its evidence was met with scepticism but slowly it dawned. There was not just some hope remaining. There was the most secure, the most unwaveringly sure hope ever to have graced the face of this earth.

There is a resurrection.

There is hope like African rain that will fill your glass to overflowing. A hope in the new life, a new, unbroken body, a new heavens and a new earth. A hope that we go on beyond the veil.

Not an empty star gazing hope but a living, active and life changing hope that the glass is not half empty but filled to capacity. 

Easter

Here is one of the most profound lessons I have learned and continue to learn day by day.

God is sufficient for me... and can be for you - in every circumstance.

There was once a man who lived an abnormal life, a passionate, god fearing, people challenging, radically different life. His name was John and he devoted his whole life to telling people around him to stop doing what they knew to be wrong and turn to God.

This lifestyle caught him quite a lot of attention - he had a large following of people who would go and spread the same message, tell people about him and he would draw huge crowds, big enough for him to catch the attention of the political leaders of his time.

John was not afraid to confront the leaders of his time either - when the king took his own brothers wife for himself John challenged him on this behaviour which resulted in his false imprisonment. Facing one of the toughest circumstances imaginable John did what any normal human would do. He doubted. He asked God

'Are you really enough for me? Are you what I had hoped for? Will you save us? Will you save me?'

 Gods response, in short was 'yes'

Not long after this the kings new wife demands the head of John and the king obliges on the basis of peer pressure and John is murdered in prison.

How is God sufficient in this circumstance? How can I possibly say that he is enough when he promises salvation yet leaves a devout follower to die alone at the hands of an evil man?

Let me tell you a second story

A man, God fearing and perfect in all his ways - he never did anything wrong. Not even once. He was radically different from everyone around him and he told all around him that he was the way the truth and the life - he was enough. That through him salvation would come, that eternal life could be found.

He drew crowds that none had seen the like of before - people would follow him from town to town to hear him speak and to learn more about what he had to offer.

One day this man received a message from a man in prison named John. The message asked

'are you who you say you are? Are you really enough for me? Are you who I had hoped for? Will you save us? Will you save me?'

The response was 'yes'

But we know that some time later John dies a humiliating, degrading death.

This man continues on his mission - telling people that he was the bread of life. The size of the crowds that he commanded made the political leaders fear because they could not control this man and the religious leaders hated him for taking away their power so they conspired to have him killed.

They arrest him and illegally try him in court - they pay false witnesses to testify against him and they proclaim a death sentence. They bring him before the king who has to authorise the execution and due to the pressure of the crowd demanding his death he gives in and authorises the public execution.

He is stripped naked and pinned up to a piece of wood with nails through his wrists and eventually drowns as his own blood fills his lungs.

He brings new definition to humiliation and despair, he makes John's death look dignified by

comparison.

He is taken down and laid in a tomb.

3 days pass and his followers go to his tomb to mourn and prepare him for burial but the body is not there.

Then reports come in - He has risen from the dead. scepticism. Really?

Then he appears among his followers - he shows the holes in his wrists. belief. He eats with them and explains. He is enough. He is Jesus. He is the Saviour.

He died for them but because he is enough death could not hold him. Because he did no wrong he was able to take punishment for all of them so that when they die they can stand before God knowing that their wrongs have been paid for and they can continue on in eternity with God in perfect unity until everything in the past fades into a pale insignificance. He tells them that they enter into that eternity the moment that they believe that the sacrifice made for them is enough. At that point they begin eternal life, though the body may die their spirit lives on forever.

So how does this mean that God was sufficient for John? God was sufficient because even though he had moments of doubt John believed that God was sufficient for him and that belief is credited to him as righteousness before God which gives him eternal life and therefore eternal hope.

God's sufficiency for you is this: not that he removes you from the storms of life (so as to leave you immature and naive) but that he supplies you with himself bringing you into eternity which you can start living now; which strengthens you to withstand the temporary storms of this life so you can remain standing  eternally.

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken;  struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus,  so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. - 2 Corinthians 4 : 8-10

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