I’m an avid rugby fan.
Growing up my dad tweaked my interest in the sport from a young age, and
I remember him watching a few of the games of the 1995 rugby world cup on pay
per view. It wasn’t until we moved
back to South Africa in 1999 that I grew to really love the sport. Dad and I would go over to a friend’s
house to utilize their cable TV to watch our province play. Since then, I’ve been hooked. One of my favorite viewing places here
in Kenya is a sports bar about 25 minutes away via public transport. They have loads of TVs and pretty good
food.
Saturday night I went to watch one of our South African
teams play a New Zealand team.
Almost immediately after I sat down, I Kenyan gal came and sat in the
spot next to me. I was quite sure
that she would be being flirtatious the rest of the evening. I was right. Although, I’m not actively on the Smirnoff Ice downing lady
market at the moment. We began to
talk about different things, and she learned that I have been here teaching at
ANU. She had grown up in the
church and attended the Nazarene church for a while. Since then she’s gone through a period of doubt in her
faith. I asked her why, and she
told me it’s because God hasn’t answered her prayers. I told her, “You know God doesn’t always answer our prayers
positively, and I think there are times when God doesn’t answer our prayers
because we ask them selfishly.”
The crux of her message was that she really felt like God had failed her
in this situation. She told me
she’d done all the ‘right things’ growing up. She’d gone to church, to Sunday School, etc. But there was something that Caroline
was lacking, and I think its something that a lot of nominal Christians
struggle with.
Sunday put a lot of
things in perspective for me. I
was teaching a Sunday School class at church on John 10. One of the lines from that passage
says: “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, 15
just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for
the sheep.” This knowing is
something that takes some action on our part. I think about what it means to know someone. I can know someone’s name, but that
doesn’t mean I know them. To know
someone, you have to spend time with them, you have to interact with them, you
have to live intentionally desiring to become closer to that individual. Because Jesus knows us and we know him,
he lays down his life for us.
That’s commitment! That’s a
depth of knowledge that is incredibly tough to comprehend. Amazingly, one of the people in attendance in Sunday School was a an actual shepherd from the community. He shared that if he lost a sheep, he'd go after it out of the love he feels for it. Do we have that same love for God?
Our relationship with God isn’t about
doing the right things, but living in right relationship with him. Our of that right relationship with God
flows the rest. Caroline was
lacking the commitment. It’s
something we all struggle with, and I’ve struggled with, but something we are
promised in scripture time and time again, is that if we abide in Christ, he
will remain with us. Still, God
won’t answer our prayers the way we always want, maybe it seems like he won’t
even answer them, yet that presence, that knowledge of God is what sustains
us.
I didn't know that I'd be undesirably hit on for two and half hours by a tipsy gal, and yet end up having a deep talk with her about God. Strange how things happen sometimes. Caroline had quite a lot to drink, and ironically lives relatively close to me, so I paid for her matatu ride home and we parted ways.
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