While in Swaziland, Kristen learned that Jesus transcends our culture. Many people believe they know everything about Jesus, and yet they fail to see him in everyday life. The new Way Bible, by Tyndale Publishers, helps show readers how to continually discover Christ. For more information, click here.
Here is Kristen’s story:
When I boarded the plane for Africa, I knew that I was going to spend my college summer break in the winter of Southern Africa. I knew I wouldn’t have electricity, my cell phone, or steady access to Internet.
I knew I was going to a foreign land, to live amongst people who spoke a different language, who lived off the land, and had years of hardship written into the lines of their faces. I knew I’d have to learn how to use a squatty potty in place of a toilet, and how to bucket bathe under the stars of a Southern sky.
I knew a lot of things.
I wish I’d known Jesus.
Don’t get me wrong–I had a growing relationship with Jesus Christ. I knew the gospel, believed it, and tried to live it with everything in me.
But when I saw Jesus in Africa, I didn’t recognize him.
He didn’t look like the Jesus I knew in the States. The Jesus I knew in the States was my picture of him, set in the confines of Western Christianity and comfort.
But in Swaziland, Jesus wasn’t comfortable. I saw him in the eyes of a neighbor who asked me to pray for her every day because she felt sick, then told me that Jesus couldn’t be real because he hadn’t healed her–as she swigged alcohol from a bottle and stumbled away.
He was in the laughter of the orphans who ran alongside me, barefoot, on the way to school. The same children who had buried their mothers and fathers, and now lived with their grandparents.
Jesus stood behind every hard question I asked and every answer I wrestled for.
Questions like, “How can you love someone who rapes a child? How can you hear the keening of a new widow and somehow give her hope?”
In sponge baths and in conversation on a dirt road I knew he was there; I could see him in the rhythmic dance of the Swazi people, and in the room as my teammates and I sang an elderly woman from her hospital bed into eternity.
This Jesus held my gaze and directed it to what broke his heart and the joy all around. He let me see through his eyes and view his kingdom, free from the trappings of this world, and most of all, his delight in restoration, both on this earth and in a time to come.
Swaziland has the world’s highest AIDS rate, and it’s been predicted that if the rate doesn’t reverse, the entire nation will be dead by 2052. Quite literally, this nation is surrounded by death…a valley of dry bones.
But the Jesus I wish I’d known, the One Who Comes to Restore, promises that one day, those very bones will rise up and dance.
“For the Son of Man came to seek and save that which was lost.” Luke 19:10
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