Is It A Magical Wish Or A Commitment?

Hard-working Liberian ladies helping to build a school. Those are cinder blocks being carried on their heads.

All too often, we say that we are going to do something. But we really mean, we'll do it if nothing better comes up. I remember that we were attending a church a while back. We were praying that we would have better community with the people in the church. And as with most things we pray about, we had to follow that up with action. A lot of time prayers are just wishes rather than things we are committed to. For instance, we might want healing. That usually entails that we have to change our lifestyle too. We may want more money. That can entail working harder, going back to school, or switching jobs. We want a better family life. That entails spending time together. We want to stop world hunger. That entails raising money and helping. But we like to keep what we want as a wish rather than a commitment. What we often really want is for our lifestyle to not have to change in order to accommodate the blessing we want to receive while our prayer wish just magically happens.

So we were at this church, praying for better community with people from the church. We were inviting people over for dinner. The whole nine yards. Attending Bible studies. Doing what we could do to make community happen. But nothing seemed to be clicking. Then we were asked over for dinner to a couple's house. Only the second invitation we had ever received in our time at that church. We couldn't pass it. Or could we? They invited me over during the Colts AFC Championship game. Now, I wanted to stay home because they asked us over during a Colts playoff game, a game they weren't going to watch. I was invested in the Colts. I had watched every Colts game that year. And I wasn't about to miss a playoff game. On the other hand, I had been praying for better community. Was my prayer just a wish, below my desire to watch a Colts playoff game? Was I really committed to better community? Or was it just something I wanted if nothing better came up?

How would just wishing have worked for Marlin, Nemo's father in Finding Nemo? If Nemo had just been taken by the scary humans and Marlin didn't go after Him, what would have happened? If Marlin had just sat around, watched television, and wished that he would have his son back, would he have got him back? Or if he would have posted every day on Facebook how he wanted his son back, would that have been enough? Or he could have joined a group and talked about how he wished he had his son back. Would talk be enough? But that isn't what Marlin did. He went out into the great unknown because he was committed to finding his son no matter what the cost. It wasn't just a wish. It was a commitment.  

Or, take a story from the real world. I met a guy named Eric Wowoh in Liberia.  He's one of the group of people from Liberia, who during the Civil War, found themselves in a refugee camp in Nigeria. Eric decided to go visit his friend in Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, to get out of the refugee camp. He knew that he could have a better life living with his friend. Yet when he got to the city and went to his friends' place, his friend had moved and nobody knew where. Eric found himself broke, destitute, and stranded in a strange city. He decided to begin walking back to the refugee camp. Eventually night fell, and he found himself tired. So he discovered an abandoned house to sleep in as he tried to walk his way back to the refugee camp. Yet a band of thugs found him, beat him up, and told the police that he was trespassing. While in jail, Eric and another inmate began dreaming of educating Liberians once they got out of jail, out of the refugee camp, and back to Liberia.

Now this is a crazy dream. You're untrained. You're broke. You're imprisoned in a foreign country. You can't start schools.

Big Dave. Right picture taken just one year
prior to the left one.

Crazier than a 385 pounder saying he's going to run a marathon. But now my friend Dave, has ran three marathons.

Crazier than me, a boy who used to go to school here in Antwerp wearing a shirt that said "God is dead", preaching here on Easter Sunday.

Crazy like Joseph, sitting in prison, being used by God to save a whole nation. Crazy like David, a shepherd, becoming the ruler of God's people. Crazy, like Esther, an orphan raised by her cousin, becoming queen of a foreign land and saving all her people.

God is in the crazy business. The impossible business. Our God wants to do crazy, amazing things. Things that will make this world better than it is. But it can only happen when we do things differently than we are used to doing them. Are you committed?

Back to Eric. He didn't know anything. All he knew was a refugee camp. He didn't have a clue. He hadn't received an education. He didn't know how to start a school. He didn't have any money to start a school. Eric was so clueless that when he flew to the US to raise funds, he didn't accept the food offered on the plane because he thought he would have to pay for it and had no money.

Yet, while in prison in Nigeria, a lady believed his story and fought for his release. She gave him a computer. Eric used this computer to start a computer training school in the refugee camp. Students would take fifteen minutes on the computer at a time. With little things, Eric was faithful.

The day came where they found themselves able to go back to Liberia. He sent his close friends, who had now become brothers, back to Liberia to start a school while he traveled to America to raise money for that school. But it didn't work out the way he wanted. About nine months after he arrived in the States, he still wasn't having any success in raising funds to start the school that God had laid on his heart. He was ready to give up.  He felt that he couldn't accomplish what God had called him to. He emailed a British friend named Martin, who had started making a documentary on him back when Eric was in the refugee camp in Nigeria. Eric told Martin that he couldn't do it and that he was going to give up.

Martin replied, "You are not a normal person. I wouldn't be following you around and recording you if I thought you were normal. You're extraordinary. You can do this." (this is not verbatim. It's going from memory.) And Eric kept on. Eventually, the money came.

Now, you can go to Liberia and see a school that is educating nearly 2,000 kids - providing a free education in a nation where everyone has to pay for their education. You will be able to see two more schools being built. Kids receiving education. Schools bringing hope to their community. Kids learning skills to make their own dreams a reality and their broken nation whole again. All because one man, in a prison in Nigeria, who wasn't qualified, who didn't have the training, stayed faithful and remained committed to the dream that was laid on his heart.

A commitment.

What are you committed to?

Find Your Johnsonville

To put down thoughts regarding our mission trip to Liberia resembles telling people of a great painting by only showing them one square inch of that painting. But words and stories are all I have to hopefully inspire and drum up more interest in what God is doing in Liberia. It is in this feeble attempt to express what God did that I hope His Spirit intermingles with our souls and brings vitality and passion where our souls too often slumber.

I'm going to deal with the biggest achievement of the trip. But in doing this, I realize that God often turns what we thought was an insignificant moment into the most significant event, while the things we thought were great and amazing become a passing footnote to our lives.

Don Winters (left) and John Bennett (right)

Last year, our small Hope 2 Liberia team of four people, traveled to the Heart of Grace school in Lower Johnsonville, outside of the capital city of Monrovia. What we saw there was amazing. This place was different. It was kept up. It was clean. We are part of Hope 2 Liberia, but this place, on the outskirts of Monrovia, was really a place of hope for Liberia. Something was happening here. It was a city on a hill. It was a beacon of hope in the darkness.

But there was also a great problem. A problem we wouldn't have known about except for a random, divine encounter in the airport that eventually led us to Heart of Grace. The school and the surrounding community lacked water. The school had been given a well by a Rotary Club out of Lafayette, Louisianna, but the well had dried up. A man in the neighborhood had spent days hand digging a new well, only to never hit water. The only water they could get was down a steep cliffside. A journey they would make every day, bucket after bucket, because water is life.  

So we saw the situation, but we did not have the pumps and equipment to do something incredible. I remember the feeling in that small group that something would be done. And one of our group members, Jon Bennett, said, "I'm going to come back here and fix this problem." So he went home, 5,000 miles away from Lower Johnsonville and the Heart of Grace school, but that community stayed on his heart. He worked out a plan. His passion to help Johnsonville and his commitment to work hard to meet the needs of those who did not have the ability to meet their own needs, combined with the engineering know-how of John Pierce, brought eventual change. As you are reading this, someone from the community in Lower Johnsonville is probably filling her bucket with safe, purified water. Water that was unsafe to drink at the bottom of the cliff, that traveled through lines laid, and was filtered prior to reaching a spigot at the top of the hill.

Eric Wowoh

Eric Wowoh, a Liberian, founder of the Heart of Grace school, the executive director of Change Agent Network, and a servant of God of the sort I have never before encountered had this to say:

"We now have plenty of water flowing through our school and community here in City View, Lower Johnsonville. Water has always been a major problem for us in this community, especially during the dry season or summer months. We have never had a public system for running water, which has meant everyone had to travel many miles for their water.  In our case, this has meant walking up and down a very challenging, rocky hill to get to a well. Heavily pregnant mothers journeying up and down to fetch water each day has been very normal since people have lived here."

"This is now history as God sent twenty-four members of the Hope 2 Liberia team to help bring an abundance of fresh, safe, clean drinking water to the thirsty in this 17,000 strong community of Lower Johnsonville, including all of the students and staff that use our school, the Heart of Grace."

"Thanks for your continual support and prayers! We are very grateful to all who have helped. This is a huge moment for us - real development and real change. Water is, indeed, life. May God water and refresh your life as you have helped to water the lives of others in such need."

All of this challenges me. And I hope it challenges you. All too often we see the world off kilter from what God has designed it to be, but we just turn a blind eye and unleash our apathy. We say it's a fallen world and things will be this way until Jesus returns. But those teachings weren't given to us so that we could be complacent. They are an acknowledgment that we will always have a mission to accomplish.

People from the Johnsonville community
waiting in line for water.

But do you see what happened here? Thousands of people now have clean drinking water because of the passion of one man. John Bennett - not a pastor, not a plumber, not an engineer - founder and owner of Cool Cayenne Authentic Printed Shirt Co. in Muncie, Indiana. He made a difference. He would be the first to say that he couldn't have done it by himself, but what is happening in Johnsonville right now, as we sit in the comfort of our own homes, wouldn't have been accomplished without his faithfulness to Jesus. When John stands before Jesus and Jesus says, "I was thirsty and you gave me a drink." John will humbly say, "When did I see you thirsty? When did I give you a drink?" And Jesus will say, "Johnsonville."

May we each find our Johnsonvilles. May we each strive to make a difference. Instead of pretending we don't have to do anything and that God's plan will magically get done, may we take seriously God's call to be His hands and feet. We have to get busy being faithful. We are surrounded by the hungry, the thirsty, the immigrant, the naked, the sick, and imprisoned. And in loving them, we love Jesus. Let's love Jesus. Let's love our fellow man.