Pack up your bags and leave the country. . .
A Rock of Remembrance
Early February 2010. Karamoja Mission Station, Uganda.
Four hours north of Mbale where a solid vehicle is a must. I’d driven up the afternoon before with my Mbale colleague Bill. Good thinker, someone I trusted, easy company on a long road. We’d talked most of the way up, the kind of conversation that only opens out when there’s enough distance and time to get to the real stuff.
There was plenty to discuss.
We’d come up to hear Ken Sande. His Peacemaker work had been brought in as a resource for the mission, which was not a coincidence given what was living underneath the surface. Ken was a sharp bloke, decent, genuinely worth talking to. That part was good.
What was harder to ignore was the irony of having relational tensions between families that nobody with the authority to address them seemed willing to touch. Mission meetings where decisions were made, options weighed, a conclusion reached, then a prayer offered over what had already been decided. Seeking after already determining.
I was a deacon. My official role was to reduce the financial dependency of the local churches on the mission, which put me in an awkward position when the prevailing drift was moving in the other direction.
What made it harder to just get on with things was what I could see assembled. The main team in Karamoja was genuinely remarkable. Between the long-term missionaries there, you had a collection of gifts, qualifications, and hard-won experience that most mission organisations would have considered a serious asset. If this team could have worked with real synergy, the leverage would have been something to see.
Trust was the missing thing. Without it the gifts sat alongside each other without connecting. People doing good work in most cases. But not the kind of work that only becomes possible when a team is actually pulling in the same direction. One of the long-term missionary women had qualifications and abilities that could have unlocked real progress for others on the team. It wasn’t happening. Not because the need wasn’t there, but because the relational ground beneath it had never been properly cleared.
The short-termers who came for six months or a year, weren’t falling apart. But they needed a base level of pastoral care and it wasn’t materialising. They sensed something was off but had nobody to name it, because the people with pastoral responsibility were, to varying degrees, causing the problems.
So a lot on my mind.
Bert, the deacon stationed up there, was good company at least. Big South Philly bloke, practically capable, thoroughly extroverted, the kind of man who makes a difficult environment feel manageable just by being present. His right-hand man Daniel was a solid character too, easy to be around, very decent bloke.
I was in my third week of a private fast. Nothing dramatic. Skipping lunch each day, using the time to pray instead. Seeking God’s wisdom and his perspective on the work, specifically.
Early the next morning, around six, I was lying in my bunk continuing the prayers. Not polished. The honest kind.
Lord, direct Bill and I. Show us what to do. I’m a foreigner in an American mission. I’ve got ten years in Africa, more than the pastors up here put together, but they outrank me and I’m trying to stay in my lane. But this thing isn’t getting better on its own. What’s my role here? What am I supposed to do with what I can see?
After twenty minutes the bunk above started creaking. Bert and Mary’s teenage son waking up. I grabbed my Bible and journal, slipped outside, going upstairs onto the flat stone roof above the storehouse.
Semi-dark Karamoja opening up under an early sky. That African stillness before the heat arrives and everything adjusts to it.
I had habit of praying Psalm 20 for Eden each morning, so I flipped open my Bible to find it. And in the deepest part of my heart, in that clear and quiet place, I heard:
Andrew. Read that right there. It’s for you.
My eyes landed on the verse exactly when the voice came. Jeremiah 10, verse 17.
Gather up your belongings to leave the land, you who live under siege.
I’ve never been a supporter of the practice of asking God for guidance and then getting it by randomly opening your Bible, dropping a finger on the page, and reading whatever it lands on. I don’t endorse that.
What happened on that roof was my voice and eyes landing on the verse simultaneously. I’d just opened the Bible. I read it again and sat with it.
Wow.
My travelling Bible was NIV. I noticed later that in my usual ESV the same verse reads as way less urgent. The instruction less strident. If God was going to speak through this particular verse He’d waited until I had my travel Bible in my hands.
The footnote in the NIV offered an alternative: Pack your bags and get ready to leave.
I’d only just come back from four months in New Zealand. Most of that had been spent arranging funding, getting paperwork across the line with the New Zealand and American churches. A few meetings with elders that never became the deep conversations I needed. I’d come back to Uganda as a fully supported missionary. Committed to this for a decade or more.
Now, on a rooftop in Karamoja at half six in the morning, God was telling me to pack my bags?
I was hardly under siege but Bill kinda was. Local churches were threatening court action, trying to force the release of funds they felt entitled to. Maybe the verse was for him? But the voice had said Andrew. I didn’t feel a nudge to pass it on. God could tell Bill himself, or make it plainer that I was supposed to be the messenger.
He also hadn’t said when to stop reading so I carried on.
Verse 18: For this is what the Lord says: at this time I will hurl out those who live in this land.
Not nudge or redirect. Hurl.
Verse 19: Woe to me because of my injury. My wound is incurable. Yet I said to myself, this is my sickness and I must endure it.
That one had a familiar shape. The way I’d been telling myself the mission’s problems were just something to endure, that I was probably overreacting, that people back home who’d never spent a year in Africa were perhaps better placed to judge than I was. There’s a particular loneliness in feeling like you’re describing a wound that nobody else can quite see.
Verse 21: The shepherds are senseless and do not inquire of the Lord; so they do not prosper and all their flock is scattered.
Not a comfortable verse to sit with while thinking about mission leadership. The part about not inquiring of the Lord landed specifically. Our mission meetings weren’t prayerless. But the pattern I’d noticed was options weighed, a conclusion reached, decisions made. Then a prayer offered over what had already been settled. Seeking after determining. Was that reason things weren’t prospering? I couldn’t say with certainty, but I wondered.
Then verse 23:
Lord, I know that people’s lives are not their own; it is not for them to direct their steps. Discipline me, Lord, but only in due measure, not in your anger, or you will reduce me to nothing.
I wrote it down then prayed it back.
Lord. You know what’s going on here better than I do. My life belongs to you, not me. You’re the boss. If you’re directing me out, that’s ok. If this is your discipline on the mission, I can receive that. Just please, be gentle. Help me figure out how to go about it. Be gracious.
Sat there a while longer until the light came fully in over Karamoja.
I didn’t tell Bill any of this on the drive home later that day.
Partly because I didn’t have the words. In the Reformed circles we served in, this wasn’t supposed to happen. Yes, God speaks through his Word, but not like this. Not a direct personal address to a specific situation in front of you right now.
The official Reformed understanding was that you applied biblical principles carefully and rationally to your circumstances. You didn’t claim the Holy Spirit had just spoken to you about your mission posting in Uganda through a verse in Jeremiah.
I knew how it would land if I said it out loud.
So I kept quiet and drove.
When I arrived home and eventually cranked up my lappy, an email was waiting. The family who owned the house I was occupying needed it back by mid-May, a week or two earlier than my current contract end date. Pack your bags and leave the land.
Ok Lord, so probably May?
Over the next while I kept working, praying, and watching for more direction while also starting to read a book I’d been sent recently.
Eden’s uncle had written it during twenty years of missionary work in Taiwan. A careful, serious piece of biblical thinking about money, dependency, and what faithfulness actually requires of a missionary in practice. He’d mentioned it when we talked at length in Maryland on my way back through to Uganda and had remembered to email it after I arrived.
The manuscript pointed me to other sources. Reformed missionaries from the early twentieth century who’d wrestled with the same questions in China and come to similar conclusions. I read and prayed and a conviction hardened.
I couldn’t stay and remain faithful to what I believed the scripture actually required of me in my role. If nothing was going to change, staying was adding my weight to a problem rather than addressing it.
My church in New Zealand wasn’t moving quickly. Every conversation I’d tried since I first came to Mbale, and when home in New Zealand for four months recently, ended with a variation of we’ll work through it properly when you’re home next time. After more such stalling I concluded there was only one way they’d take me seriously.
I tendered my resignation.
Which generated a degree of urgency that my previous conversations had not quite managed.
They eventually invited me home. Up to three months (without pay) to sit down and work through the issues rather than lose me altogether. I said yes. Mid-May became the departure date.
I flew out of Kampala on the 15th of May for London and two nights there with my uncle. The morning after I arrived, I opened my laptop.
An email from Bill, sent to everyone in the Uganda mission.
Edith’s test results had come back. Cervical cancer. The doctors were recommending they leave for the United States as soon as possible.
You who live under siege.
It wasn’t Bill, though his court case was real enough. It wasn’t me, increasingly running out of diplomatic gas. It was Edith. Back in February on that rooftop in Karamoja God already knew about the diagnosis coming.
That’s a particular kind of humbling, realising the word you received was larger than your initial reading of it.
All most interesting because at some point across March or April, I’d come to a strong sure sense that by the middle of the year both Bill and I would be out of the country. That by July there would be no expatriate missionaries remaining at Mbale. It didn’t make sense but still.
There had been four. One had left while I was away in New Zealand. When I got back he was gone.
I didn’t mention this belief to anyone. You don’t in cessationist circles where the category I was experiencing doesn’t officially exist because what you’re sensing sounds uncomfortably like prophecy.
I left mid-May. Bill and Edith a month after me. The fourth missionary had been struggling with serious back trouble during his furlough in the States. Bad enough that he never returned to Mbale as planned. Instead they went to a South African theological college where he could access better medical services while driving on smoother roads.
Yep. By the start of July, our Mbale station had no expatriate missionaries.
Exactly what I’d felt pressed on my heart, praying alone, months before. Telling nobody except my journal.
Until September 2010. Bill and his family were in the States by then. Eden and I were married a month. Hoping to encourage him that God was overseeing it all, I wrote him the story for the first time.
I’d held back partly because I hadn’t wanted to add weight to what was already a heavy season for him. Partly because I didn’t want to be thought a crackpot. Bill was a Reformed pastor. The circles we reported to denied prophetic inklings and messages. Sharing earlier would have jeopardized my returning to the Mbale work. But now that outcome was no longer happening why not try helping my brother get his head and heart around what was still going on for them?
Bill’s response was gracious, as I kinda expected. Said he didn’t know how to put these things in a box, so it was best if he didn’t try. He said he was encouraged by the knowledge that God had laid out every moment of our journey for our good and his glory.
That was enough.
One more thing.
The date I eventually flew into the States turned out to be the 18th of May. Eden’s graduation in Ohio was on the 20th. I arrived in Maryland with a day spare to drive up to Ohio with her Dad.
In February on that rooftop neither Eden, nor I, knew her graduation date yet. I don’t think it had even been set.
God knew.
He’d known Edith’s diagnosis. About three more expats departures. He’d known about Eden’s graduation and built my exit date to suit without telling me why.
Lord, I know that people’s lives are not their own; it is not for them to direct their steps.
He directed mine down to the day. A word landing in my heart on a rooftop at six thirty in the morning using my travelling bible version. Through a string of confirmations that only made full sense in hindsight. Answering the prayers of my fast
That’s my experience of Abba Father over a long time. He rarely shows you the whole map. Just the next step. . .
God is good.