Imperishable Inheritance

Well, it’s been a little while since my last post’three months in fact! I took a little excur­sion to North Africa to dis­cern more clearly the will of God in my life. There is no doubt that I accom­plished my goals and much more during this trip. Due to the length of the arti­cle I will break it into two parts.

Heading Over

I started my jour­ney in the middle of August. I left my job, family, friends, and life in Amer­ica for a short time. I went to London then to Spain where we stayed for a short while being briefed on our upcom­ing trip. We also received intro­duc­tory train­ing into the cul­ture, secu­rity, and we also had a chance for us to become accli­mated to one another. It was a prof­itable time, and it was here that I made a mis­take that would deter­mine the out­come of the trip. We then packed our bags and headed to our new home wide-​eyed and excited.

Intensive Immersion

We then were sub­jected to the rig­or­ous sched­ule that would make up the major­ity of our time. We became accli­mated to our base town, and then we started the sched­ule that con­sisted of an inten­sive phys­i­cal train­ing pro­gram; class in the­ol­ogy, cul­tural anthro­pol­ogy, and infor­ma­tion related to living in this Muslim world; and we also started dis­ci­ple­ship that would last through­out the trip.

It was in this leg of the trip that I became very ill. In fact, at any one time 3-4 of us were sick. It was a con­stant strug­gle, but this was the worst. I missed our first excur­sion due to the ill­ness. I spent a week­end in the fetal posi­tion with incred­i­ble stom­ach pains. I even­tu­ally did recover from this ill­ness, but I would strug­gle with other health issues through­out the trip. It was one of the largest strug­gles amongst my team.

I did make it to the second excur­sion which was a trip to the wilder­ness. Here we prac­tice using GPS, nav­i­ga­tion tech­niques, and other sur­vival tech­niques. One thing I noticed was the amount of team-​building activ­i­ties that we were doing. They stressed to us that the number one reason for mis­sions teams break­ing up was not get­ting along. It was obvi­ous they were out to alle­vi­ate this sad truth that plagues much of the church. I found this espe­cially impor­tant when in a closed coun­try where the stresses of every­day life were extremely heightened.

A New Language and a New Family

We then started one of the most dif­fi­cult aca­d­e­mic things we did which was learn­ing the local dialect. This dialect is a vari­ant of Clas­si­cal Arabic, and it was extremely dif­fi­cult. We were given intro­duc­tory lessons in con­ver­sa­tion, but when we started learn­ing the lan­guage it became evi­dent that it was a dif­fi­cult but not impos­si­ble task. We had to travel each day over an hour to get to our classes, and that alone was enough to stress us out.

During this time the Muslim pillar of Ramadan started. This is sup­pos­edly the month where the Qur’an was revealed to Muham­mad. They spent the month fast­ing from the first prayer (4:00 A.M.) to about 6:30 P.M. It was inter­est­ing to see how every­one in this cul­ture becomes instantly reli­gious; it’s sim­i­lar to Christ­mas and Easter here, but it’s much larger and more promi­nent. This was the first time that Ramadan wasn’t just some­thing I prayed for, but it was some­thing that had a direct and sub­stan­tial impact upon my daily life. Even though we didn’t fast, the cul­tural change around us impacted us greatly.

We then took a trip to the reli­gious and cul­tural center of the coun­try. It was here that I got to see the coun­try as I imag­ined. Up to this point I saw only touristy cities, but this city was dif­fer­ent. Ramadan wasn’t just a cul­tural event here it truly made up the whole of life. Devout Mus­lims were much easier to find here as opposed to our base town that was a tourist spot full of nom­i­nal­ity. We were all split up into home stays where we stayed with a tra­di­tional family that spoke as much Eng­lish as I Arabic.

It was here that I truly expe­ri­enced Ramadan. When I got the courage to go out at night after Fitur (the daily break­ing of the fast), and when I opened the front door there were men pros­trat­ing right in front of the house! The Mosque was so full that the men had spilled over into the streets for prayer. As I watched the cer­e­mo­ni­al­ism I was broken even deeper for these people. It was one of the most hum­bling expe­ri­ences I had while there. I then met with men at the corner cafe right after their prayer, and we talked for hours on phi­los­o­phy, sci­ence, reli­gion, and I got to share the Gospel with them. It was an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence I won’t soon forget.