Freedom

Freedom!

Last March I had the amazing opportunity to go on an overseas mission’s trip to South Africa. The 22 hour plane flight left my feet swollen but allowed me to catch up on the latest flicks out in Hollywood. Seriously my feet swelled so much that I couldn’t even fit them into my sandals. As the plane touched down in Johannesburg I was aware that I was in for a life changing, world view altering experience. We traveled around Jo-burg meeting with people, helping kids, and serving those who will not live to see 2008 due to the AIDS pandemic. After a week we headed down to Cape Town to serve in the community of Kayamude. The size of this community is about the acreage of Willow’s campus yet 25,000 Africans live there and experience extreme poverty and oppression on a daily basis. It was amazing to see all that God has done through Willow over the last three years, from donating money, to volunteer support and prayer. In the very center of this town was a community center call Kuyasa run by the most amazing couple I’ve ever met. This couple served with their kids along side Mother Teresa for some time in Calcutta and felt called by God to return to their homeland and start a community center that would cater to the holistic needs of that community.

Kuyasa in their language speaks of light breaking through the dawn, as the prophet Isaiah wrote about in the 58th chapter of Isaiah. We spent a week at that community center helping with various things, mostly really really hard manual labor. The more we served and worked among these people the more I saw of God, the more I was able to peer into his Global heart for all people. My last day there we had finished all the jobs that were asked of us and began to look at the road that led into the community center. This road or driveway was really not a whole lot to look at, for all practical purposes it was just a dirt driveway that led to this amazing refuge of hope. For some reason I grabbed a thick bristled broom, the ones you would find at home depot and began to sweep the driveway. I have no idea why I did this, I’ve never been much of a sweeper, perhaps it was to just look busy. But after about 10 minutes of sweeping dirt I saw something. Appearing through the dirt was what looked like to be a brick, I couldn’t quite figure out why a brick would be under the dirt but then again I’d been finding all kinds of buried stuff all week. The sweeping continued and the more I swept the dirt and caked mud away the more I saw. The one brick was now two or three, and you can imagine the intensity of my sweeping increased. Now by this time I recruited some friends to come and help me, I could only do so much on my own. So a few friends began sweeping as well and after an hour or so we discovered that these were not just bricks but a cobble stone driveway. The leaders of the center were blown away because for the past three years they had no idea that such beauty lied beneath the surface, it just needed to be discovered.

Over the past 6 months I’ve been making my way through the book “Waking the Dead” by John Eldridge and three weeks ago I came to the section where he discussed a verse found in Proverbs 4 that says “above all else guard your hearts for it’s the wellspring of life.” I’ve been thinking about this verse for going on three weeks now and during a prayer walk recently God reminded me of how he came here to earth to “give life, and give it to the full”, He came to Awaken our hearts, to free us, to call out the greatness and beauty that resides in each heart of his beloved. So what does it look like to guard our hearts? I have been wrestling with this and have found that so many of us have dirt and mud that restricts our hearts. Most of us really do want to live life to its full but it seems like our hearts wont allow us to. God has also been revealing to me that I constantly need to grab the “thick bristled broom” in my life and do some serious sweeping or cleaning however not in isolation. On the contrary invite others to help me in this process. To really trust and lean into God’s redemptive community knowing and trusting that true beauty lies beneath.

Can you imagine what your life would look like if you walked free? Can you picture God using you in the lives of others? I hope and pray that as we finish this year, we can reflect on the status of our hearts.

“William your heart is free, now have the courage to follow it.”
-Braveheart