Thursday, October 30, 2014

"I just do this."

Million-dollar mountainside views peppered with wildflowers and sweet, sweet baby smiles take our breath away every single time we drive into Dwaleni. A very different reality surfaces when you enter the homes, stories and lives there. Dwaleni has an incredibly high level of violence, abuse, a version of Christianity that is confused with ancestral worship, and a reliance on witchcraft.

 Ten ThousandHomes has built two houses there for young ladies who’ve overcome more than they should have ever known. Busi has been on her own since she was 12 years old, living in a shack and raising her 8-year old brother. Now she’s 21-years old with her own child. 

Busi in October 2011 in front of her former home.
Click here and here to read more stories. 
As a teenager, Neli was left to raise her three younger siblings and her own child in a house the size of a queen-sized bed. Both Busi and Neli, children left to lead adult lives, dreamt only of going to school. They both had to drop out when they had babies.

Neli's family at their Welcome Home party.
Click here, here and here for more stories. 


School is required by law in America, and there are a thousand theories on best educational policies for our children. School attendance is required in South Africa up to grade 10 as well… but you’re not actually welcome if you don’t have a birth certificate. Or if you can’t afford to buy the uniform.  If you don’t have enough food, medicine or supplies to physically get there, you just don’t. There are certainly no truant officers or repercussions.

You go until you get pregnant, and then you stay home and do what everybody else does. Nobody dreams of what they will be when they grow up because they already live grown up lives.

Last year, thanks to good love and generous donations, TTH was able to send Neli and her family back to school with new uniforms and pay preschool tuition for her baby. This year, we sent Busi back too with her baby in preschool. They are the most motivated, committed students I’ve ever seen because they need something to hold onto. They need life to look different than this because they are barely surviving this.

This past Sunday, Busi came to me covered in stress. “I can’t pass, Kacy. I try soooo hard. And I failed two subjects last term. I can’t pass. I don’t know what to do.” She meets with Neli’s family to study together, and we try to give them study tools and help with homework as often as we can. But they can’t pass.

I started to ask Busi questions to try to grasp the root of the problem, and, in true high school fashion, she threw Neli under the bus. “I failed two, but Neli failed FOUR!” A secret part of me smiled that they were acting like real sisters, and Busi was not alone in this anymore.

Yesterday, we gathered together in Neli’s dirt yard around a chocolate cake and report cards. Four high school girls and two primary school boys – one was Neli’s little brother Mpendulo and one was Macbeth, who is from Dwaleni but lives on the base with us now because his mom is on staff with TTH.

They showed me their overwhelming school exam schedules – exams start today! Busi had followed my suggestions, but said her teachers refused to give her study tools or exam reviews. The overwhelmedness sat heavy in that circle – even on me. I didn’t know how to help. What could we do before tomorrow if they didn’t even know what to study?
 
Neli and Phepile's exam schedule. 

Busi and Thully's exam schedule.

So… we ate cake.
And sat together.
Until what was really going on started to pour out.
Neli and Busi started, with clouded eyes and shaking hands. And then the other girls added in.

“There’s demons. The teachers tell us we have demons in our minds.”

“My eyes hurt so bad. I can’t see when I get to school. I open my books, and I can’t read. It looks like there’s nothing there.”

“My head hurts when I try to study or go to school. It makes me not think. I can’t understand.”
“Me too. My head hurts too much.”

“They are taking our books to the sangoma (witchdoctor) and calling our names out (casting spells or curses).”

“I don’t sleep at night. It sounds like there’s baboons banging down my house. I’m so scared. It’s my enemies. I wake up and try to pray.” 

“It’s the demons.”

I’m sitting on the ground with Busi’s baby in my lap. And the girls are all up pacing, fretting, with fountains of fear flowing from their mouths. Both their normal worlds and their deepest secrets finally being aired out. Macbeth and Mpendulo say they hear and see they same things, “but not too much”.

I ask everyone in the yard what they do when these horrible things happen. The pacing girls say they pray, but “it’s not working”. Mpendulo shrugs.

Macbeth, with all the innocence and childlikeness a little boy should have, puts his fingers in his ears and says, “I just do this.”

I was suddenly so aware of the chasm. It had nothing to do with geography, upbringing, language… Macbeth was coming from the same place and same schools as they were. But Macbeth has a family of faith. He lives in a community of people who know the power of the name of Jesus and the perfect love that drives out fear.

Everyday, handfuls of people at Ten Thousand Homes ask Macbeth how his day at school was, are willing to help him, and will celebrate his victories – and amazing dancing and lip sync skills.

I looked at the girls who were parenting, running a household, battling oppression, prejudice and their own bodies just to stay alive.

I said, “Your life is hard, isn’t it?”
Shoulders dropped. Heads nodded.
I said, “You’re raising families, and you need someone to raise you.”
Eyes filled with a longing even stronger than the fear that had just been there.
I said, “It’s hard not to have a mom or dad to talk to when you’re scared.”
Decompression. That was it. That was the epicenter.

Remember the monster under your bed?
Or, in my case, Count Dracula in the closet with dynamite?
Remember the bumps in the night?

And remember when your mom or someone came in and turned on the lights?
Remember when you told someone about your bad dream, and then it wasn’t so bad or so vivid anymore? Remember when somebody reached for you and it helped you reach reality?

What if no one had ever turned the light on for your little kid self, and all of that fear, all those monsters, and all those bumps grew up with you and became the head of your mind, body and household?  

We all need someone to turn on the lights for us.
Because where there is light, there can be no darkness.

Macbeth put his little fingers in his little ears and said, “I just do this.”
We prayed over each person, read Scripture, taught them the power of speaking the name of Jesus out, helped them understand that, through Jesus’ blood, they are overcomers and darkness has no dominions over their minds. We spoke Truth until their eyes weren’t so cloudy and they believed they would be able to think clearly the next day.

And then I asked Neli, “So what can you do when you go to school tomorrow and the teachers or students are talking to you about demons?”

Neli put her fingers in her ears and said, “I can just do this.”

A little boy from the same neighborhood put his fingers in his ears and cast out the boogie monsters.
They just needed someone to hear the stories of the nightmares they live in so they could open their eyes and wake up and know the Father of Lights has never forsaken them.
They just needed to hear a little voice say, “I just do this” to remember how much power in within them.

We’re up against a big battle here, y’all. School exams and the end of the year amp everything up. Please pray for Neli’s and Busi’s family fervently – as well as all the students taking exams.

And then go turn on the lights. Remind them of Who is real and Who has won.

You can change the world with two fingers in your ears. Just do that. 

Macbeth

Friday, October 17, 2014

What if love was a rodeo

Facebook is currently obsessed with pumpkin spice everything.

Fall is in the air on the other side of the world, and all the snuggly flavors and colors and smells to go with it make me dream of curling up into an oversized chair with an oversized mug of snuggle and taking a dramatic, feel-good, cinnamon flavored deep breath. Friends in America rejoice as the heat of summer gets turned down and the holiday festivities begin to start up.

This time of the year feels slightly less snuggly in South Africa.
It’s that time of year.

It’s the time where the entire country seems to hit the slump of weariness from the hard work of surviving, and even the sky starts to cry. The rain begins and ushers in the summertime infantry of creepers and crawlers in the cottage. In the communities, discontentment and drudgery start just enough grumbles for wildfires and riots to explode. And everyone seems to just try to make it until the country shuts itself down in December.
Myself included.

My silent blog is a symptom of a disillusioned heart. It seems like the wildness and weariness of the land are overtaking all these heart-sown seeds and all these beautiful people. It feels like I’ve poured my heart and soul into the everlasting promises I believe into a land that is destined to turn on an axis of chronic chaos.

When I look around, though spring flowers are blooming, I see tired, backsliding people.
Myself included.

We’ve crossed a million milestones this year.
We’ve done a hundred happy dances and eaten at least that many pieces of cake.
We clear away the crumbs, and we slip and we slide.

As I run out of strength and words and vision, I cry out to the anchor for my soul. I prayed this week for vision... for something. Because “where there is no vision, the people perish…” (Proverbs 29:18 AKJV) And I felt like I was perishing.

My Vision and my Anchor reminded me of the words that have been there all along.

“My angel will go ahead of you and bring you into the land… I will make all your enemies turn their backs and run…
But I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you. Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have increased enough to take possession of the land.”
Exodus 23:23, 27, 29, 30

What if it’s not really backsliding?
What if it’s just really good love?
What if He’s just a really faithful God even when my vision is blurred because I’m looking the wrong way?

The land is good and is made for a crazy-good, snuggly, overflowing cornucopia of greatness, abundance… of REAL LOVE. Not just the love I know how to look for. 

There’s promise for this land.
There was another Promised Land in which a lot more people spent a lot more time slaving, fighting, walking, praying, wandering, hoping, crying, battling and backsliding toward. Finally, when they made it to the great SHEBANG and crossed over miracle-style into the land of milk and honey, the glory of God came down and said…

…Wait for it…

I love you so much that you can’t have it all right now.
I love you so much that you have to keep fighting battles.
I love you so much you have to keep losing a little bit so you can gain a whole lot.
I love you so much I won’t give you the whole wide world today because the whole wide world is just too wild for you today.
I love you so much I want you to require me, to beg me for my vision, and to bring me to every battle line.
I love you so much I’ll let you backslide until you find me.

Ishya
There are too many wild animals in the land.
There are too many severed families, defeated hearts and broken bodies.
There are too many loud sounds, and all the people would not be able to hear the battle cry or the victory shouts yet.

So maybe backsliding is really just backtracking to get back to the real vision, the real promises, the real love.

What if love was a rodeo?

8 seconds at a time.
One hand up high. One hand holding tight.
When we are released out of that chute into the arena, we fix our everything on the battle before us, never losing our ability to hear that victory buzzer.
Then we wait for the next go-round.
We wear our shiny belt buckles to remember the wins while we go into the next one.
One bull and battle at a time, we hold on.

He knows the grand prize that awaits us, and He wants no one to miss out. He won’t let the wild animals overtake us, even when we think we just want to take on the whole rodeo in 8 seconds and get it over with.

Real love holds on tight and rides 8 seconds at a time. Real love gets dirty, gets hurt and gets bucked. Real love holds on to what’s real.

So, today, I am just holding on. And counting on that real, good love that is better than I can understand.

“I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have so that no one will take your crown.”

Revelation 3:11