African Leadings

Photo credit: http://www.toonpool.com/user/2442/files/africa_635355.jpg

I have wanted to be a missionary ever since I was a child. God instilled the desire to share the good news of Jesus to all creation from the moment I believed in the Lord Jesus Christ and was saved, and I pray that I will act on that conviction through evangelism and future missionary work. I figure that if missionary work is part of my job, I will have to evangelize and will be forced to remember and proclaim the Gospel!

I have loved Africa ever since I was a child as well. I went to Kenya when I was ten-almost-eleven, and that encouraged my love for the continent, but I think I was interested in it even before I visited. I know that I do not love Africa on my own; God has called me there and continues to call me there.

When my focus drifts from God, sometimes He flashes an outline of the continent in my head, and I joyfully remember where He has called me, the greater purpose in my life. God recently gave me another vision or image as well.

The latest image consists of my hand and a black African woman’s hand woven together. We are walking, holding hands, and we are friends. Perhaps I am sharing her burden, as Galatians 6 commands; perhaps she is sharing mine. She is an image reminding me and encouraging me to my future beyond college and the U.S., and I look forward to meeting my African friend.

People ask me where I would like to go in Africa. Some disbelieve my call there, but most people I meet encourage me and are excited. My answer to their location question is unknown. I am interested in central and eastern subSaharan Africa, although I do not fully know why.

I could be more interested in that side of the continent because I visited Kenya seven and a half years ago. I am certainly more interested in the countries with the darkest skinned people, for I have always been attracted to black skin.

I told God that I would go wherever He wants me, even if that means a lighter skinned, Muslim country in northern Africa, however. As I write this, I realize that I did not tell Him the same for western Africa and the southern half of the continent; I shall pray now for Him to open up my heart to those places.

But could my interest in central and eastern Africa — Uganda, Burundi, the DRC, Rwanda, Kenya, and perhaps Tanzania and the CAR, et cetera — be from Him just as He has led me to Africa as a whole? The more I look at a map of Africa and ponder it, the more I am inexplicably drawn to central and eastern Africa.

I am excited to see God narrow my interests a bit. Reflecting on what I studied this past year in my multiple college papers that I chose to write on Africa, I noticed that they all had something to do with refugees. Additionally, I am currently interning at Lutheran Family Services, a refugee and asylee service, and loving it.

After college, I would love to get married and have a family, live in Africa, write print journalism, and do some form of missionary work.

Today my refugee friend told me to go to Rwanda. He was speaking of its beauty, as it is “the land of one thousand hills,” but when he found out my career goals, he admitted that there is much about which I could write and tell the world as a journalist, and he told me about the need for religious classes to be reinstituted in schools there.

My friend was socialized having a religion class from Kindergarten through tenth grade in Burundi, up through 1991. His final two years of secondary school did not include the over-an-hour long classes on Christianity, Catholicism, or religion, and his twelve year old daughter, a newly arrived refugee in the U.S., has had none.

I will continue to study Africa, particularly central and eastern Africa, and pray about God’s future for me. I recognize that I should also begin to learn kiswahili, kinyarwanda, or some other language spoken in Africa despite not knowing specifically where I will go yet. I hope to visit the continent again in the next few years, and I look forward to learning more about refugee and immigrant situations and the cultures represented by my African friends who are now present in the U.S.