R.B. Klama

There are some people in our lives who test our sanctification.  They hide barbs in their conversations, they open their mouths and pour out contempt on you.  Most of the time, smart people will back away from toxic relationships like this, but sometimes you can’t cut off all connections…sometimes you are related by blood.

I have one such person in my life, and every time there is interaction, I wonder what it will cost me later on…I voiced this thought to a friend of mine and she suggested I take a look at Job.

I was wondering what Job had to do with irritating people, but then Alistair Begg connected the dots for me.  He was talking about suffering and the fact that God is Sovereign–which means that He allows suffering but He is not the author of evil.

There’s an interesting distinction there:  He created the world and it was good….but sin entered and it became imperfect.   He gave us choice to love Him freely—and that’s what this whole story is about.  Do good because you love to do good, not just follow the rules.  It’s a choice to obey.  It’s a choice to disobey.  Obedience has great rewards, and disobedience carries natural consequence…but God is not the author of evil.

When we choose to love God in the midst of suffering (especially when it’s at someone else’s hands), we experience love that is more like Christ’s love–it’s richer, deeper and much more fulfilling…it fills your countenance…there are people I know who have born the consequences of someone else’s sin…and they do it wearing the sweet aroma of Christ…it makes a HUGE impact on everyone around them.  You know who I’m talking about, right?  They’re the people who are so sweet, you could never imagine them any other way.  When they share their testimony, you hear about alot of things that would break most people, shatter most families, and yet, here they are, praising God for His hand in their lives….thanking Him for the sorrow.

I’ll admit I was filled with skepticism when I first met a woman like this.  I was unwilling to believe that she was so content with all the stuff that she had experienced.  The longer I knew her, the more I wanted to reflect Christ like she did…and the more I talked with her, the more of Christ she shared with me.   Before she died, she told me ‘Nothing comes easily in this life.  But the struggle is part of the blessing.  It’s the real test of the light of Christ.  The more you succumb to bitterness, the more your heart closes off to the hope that is in Christ.’

Her words came back to me over and over again when I began walking a difficult path seven years ago.  Grace is never cheap.  Suffering gives us the opportunity to experience intimacy with Him, that transformative power of His sufficiency and His presence that can only come when we love Him and trust Him in all circumstances.

It doesn’t mean it won’t hurt.  Pain is like black paint in a Vermeer painting.  It’s dark, but it highlights the Light–these are opportunities He uses to draw us into Christ-likeness.   These people who test your sanctification?  Let them.  Let God.  Bring it!

This will be a bit of a ramble. I’m flexing my ‘stream of consciousness’ fingers starting…now.

In the daily hustle and bustle of a newsroom, it’s easy to overlook the non-emergency things until they become emergencies.

Some of you might even be thinking ‘been there, done that’…and I find myself taking shortcuts to speed up the things that I have to get done in order to get other things finished.

There are some days I go home and fall into bed exhausted and while drifting off to sleep I find myself thinking “Can’t call it a day yet! I’m not unconscious!  I still have to…..ZZZZzzzzzzzz.”  We joke about this in my family…we’ve even given it a nickname: ‘dooobee’—as in ‘do a lot’ and  ‘busy as a bee’.  In the story of Mary and Martha, I totally ‘get’ Martha.  As a kid, I was always mad at Mary. ‘C’mon! Come help get this meal together! It’s not fixing itself!’ And when she didn’t move, calling in the reinforcements and asking Jesus to get her off her hiney…only to have Him side with her??   I was bafffled. (We’ll get back to this later)

The reality of it is that there are too many times I fall into the Israelite’s way of thinking: I am the sum of the bricks I made today.  You do that too many times, and you start to believe it.  There are a lot of bits in the Bible about rest…it even starts early in Genesis with God setting aside some critical time to REST.  Yet much of His creation is frenetic with the doing, and lost in the ‘being’…which is what happens when you rest.

In the quiet of rest, you can actually hear things.  You can hear our Heavenly Father telling you what a beautiful child you are…or maybe He might be whispering that answer to the question you keep asking (like a toddler: ‘now? now? now? how about now?’).

How do rest and bricks travel down the same road of thought?  I’m not really sure they do.   The bricks can create a false sense of worth, which leads somebody like me into thinking I have to keep producing in order to be valued.  Rest helps me re-new…and I can understand worth far better when I’m being spoken to by our Father through the Word.   Ah…Mary and Martha.   Mary understood knowing Christ.  If she knew His voice and understood what He was saying, it was much easier to obey.  Martha understood the doing end with her servant gifting.  As those gifted this way know, it’s very easy to take on too much and then stress over the details, even if it was originally meant to serve Christ…not being able to BE with Christ prevented her (and us) from the depth of relationship we sought in the first place.

This has to have a conclusion…so I’ll wind up by saying take the REST seriously.   We are not the bricks we make because our worth was summed up in the death and resurrection of our Savior.  Just sayin’.

it’s gonna be really hard to get these pictures id’d correctly.  here goes:

from left to right:

1) picture of a chapel at Child Survival Project UGCS27 Kitimbwa CDC/UG611

2) a mom who was sharing how Compassion International has helped her and introduced her to Christ.  she became so overwhelmed sharing her testimony, she cried.

3) dancing in church…I know. how awesome is that?

4) this same mom is learning how to sew so she can learn to tailor and help support her family better.

5) the moms in this at risk area are learning a lot of things, including how important it is to play with their babies and letting the babies play with each other.

6 and 7) many of the moms have learned a crafting trade so they can make goods to sell at a market.  one mother learned not only how to market her ability, but how to save enough money to buy a pig.  a pig can fetch a good half year’s salary in this area, so she’s learning how to save, invest and build up her business.

8 ) these are just some of the students in Compassion’s Leadership Development Program.  they are the cream of the crop from the sponsored project areas–kids who excel academically and who can handle college-level material.  the LDP program is not automatic for a sponsored child–it’s a high-level program that takes the best in Compassion International’s child programs, sends them to university and trains them to be servant leaders.  of the 300 LDP students attending university in Uganda, Uganda Christian University is educating 153 students.  there are several  attending other public univeristies and at least three studying at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Il…

these pictures represent the ministry, vision and future of Compassion–primarily, they aim to build the kingdom of God.  The Gospel is open and often repeated…and for every child that accepts Christ in Compassion’s projects, leaders say at least 10 others also come to Christ through their faith walk.

…all with the help of a sponsor and $32 a month.

Red dust covers everything in Kampala, Uganda.  When it rains, the red earth becomes brick-colored mud and it gets into everything.

As the team from our sister station, WCSG, Compassion International and MNN visited project sites, we tracked it everywhere.  There was a notable difference between our footprints and those of the people who lived in the villages we were visiting.  For the most part,  our footprints were the outlines of shoes. The throngs of kids and some of their parents we visited were barefoot.  A few people had shoes, but they were the rarity.

Why did that strike me?  I felt really gross when we got back to our hotel after a day of trekking through the bush.  I could wash off the mud.  The people whose homes we’d just visited could rinse, but for the most part, the next time they stepped outside of their home, they’d get dirty again…except that was their way of life.

That difference alone was a stark contrast.  The village we visited yesterday was less primitive than some.  Subsistence farmers can eke out roughly $11 a month…stretched to five mouths to feed.   The people we met had a home.  They had a roof, walls and a floor.  One had furniture.  There were three really worn out toothbrushes and a cracked mirror hanging off the front door of another house…whose kitchen was essentially a lean-to in the yard.

Yet to see their faces, they were so happy Compassion International had taken an interest in them.  Before Compassion began their project in Kitimbwa (about 66 km west of Mukono), the infant mortality rate was high.  Few children, if any, got a chance to go to school.  Mothers and fathers struggled not only with their marital relationship, but also with raising the children.

After Compassion launched the Child Survival Program, basic things like hygiene, nutrition, pre-natal care and infant care were taught.  Mothers were encouraged to play with their babies to help them develop.  Mothers began getting together for play sessions.  They were also given the opportunity to learn a trade so they could earn some money to help lift the family out of poverty.  Once a child gets into the CSP, when they turn three, they can get into the Sponsorship programs.  From there, children get food, medicine, love and given the chance to go to school.

Most importantly, these people, once wallowing in poverty and hopelessness, were exposed to the Gospel on a nearly daily basis.  They heard it, they saw it in action with the Compassion staff, and then some of them felt it.  As we spoke with the project directors, we were told that for every Compassion child that comes to Christ, ten other people also come to Christ because of the reality of the transformation they see in that child’s life.

For the staff we spoke with, that transformation is the driving force behind everything they do.

But, kids grow up.  They age out of the school system, and then what?

Compassion International has introduced another program for the best and brightest of the sponsored children: the Leadership Development Program, or LDP.

Once accepted into the LDP, the sponsored student can go to college.  As we’re told, many of them are excited about getting their law degrees, or social work degrees with the express purpose of continuing that transformation.  Some go back to their villages as part of Compassion International.  Others take change outside of their villages and hope to advocate for families in a court of law.  Still others are making a definite footprint on a national level in government.

It’s so exciting to see how $32 a month can give a child such hope.  It’s even more exciting to walk step by step with them and see where their footprints lead.

On Thursday, I will meet with Misac, a little boy my family is sponsoring from one of the project areas near Kampala.  He shares the same birthdate as my son.   I am so excited to share the hope that we have invested in him.  I asked one of the LDP students I met this week, Joseph, to record a quick encouraging word for Misac. Their stories are very similar, and I thought that for Misac to hear that someone was like him at his age, to know that he can rise above his circumstance, that God is moving powerfully through boys like this–and I realize it’s like the story of loaves and fishes all over again.

God takes so little and creates so much for His glory…