RYAN BIRCH | guest writer

South Africa. Familiar sounding, but faint when my mind attempted to formulate a picture of what it looks like. It’s in the Sub-Saharan region of Africa and it’s overseas—definition complete? Hardly.

“Why South Africa?”

I don’t claim any spiritual authority that God specifically whispered in my ear: “Souuuuutthhh Afriiiccaaa”—but I will say that God helped stir the idea of South Africa within me. Whether God was saying now, later, never, or even cared at all, I went and prayed and said, “I want this God. I want to do this. I don’t mean to bargain with you, so I’ll just tell you right now...if the doors open on this one for me, I’m going.” Little did I know, He was listening.

In a nutshell, I came here to learn. I wanted to get a taste of a reality beyond my own. I prayed to get here and now I’m praying to be here.

I feel as if Americans see Africa as this rite of passage for Christian culture. We go there, help the poor, little, black, suffering Africans, and come home like pompous children hoping for recognition: “Oh, look at me Jesus. I’m so good. Did you see what I did over there in Africa?”

As I flew over a bed of clouds that mimicked the surface of a second layer of ocean, it dawned on me that in order for me to make the most of this experience, I especially needed one thing. One thing that would change me, help me, open me up…I needed to be humbled.

Let me expand on this.

Humbled. Not in the manner I use when comfortably mentioning in a Biblestudy that the Lord is really breaking me, clinging to an insecure need to label everything God does in my life.

I mean humbled. This version would imply my 32-year-old Cornerstone Christian College (CCC) roommate from Lesotho, Kaama. As he sits next to my bed late at night he explains to me how he was beat and left for dead, bleeding profusely, lying on the dirt ground. In his last waning moments of life, after his body was rushed to a hospital in critical care, it decided to completely cave in. Constriction, loss of breath, death upon him. As an unbeliever, Kaama prayed in his moment of desperation, “God I don’t know if you are real, but if you are out there, if you give me breath again, I promise I will devote my entire life to you and do whatever you ask of me.”

BAM! The very second he finished that thought... air rushed through his lungs again. Life breathed in Kaama, Kaama breathed in God. And from there the rest is history. His life is God’s and he couldn’t be happier having brain damage that renders the left side of his body relatively useless.

I mean humbled. Humbled in the fashion in which a fellow CCC student named Reagan pulls me alongside him, in a free flowing love that circulates through his words with genuine grace, and shares with me the death of his brother and his brother’s child and the painful effect this experience has left.

Then he adds: “Don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t feel like there are two sides of me. The happy Reagan and the sad Reagan that I hide. I have no cover up. This is I. I have learned to merge my scars. I now heal through my woundedness and it is a part of my being.”

Humbled. Where I acknowledge the poverty that lies 15 minutes away in the Township of Gugulethu or Kyalitsha—where there are literally neighborhoods of homemade shacks built with mud, wood, or metallic scraps—scarce money, water, or electricity (if any at all). Where families live under those conditions, jam packed in shacks that were half the size of my room where I was staying in Cape Town. Then I stumbled into a childcare that had little kids, stacked next to one another with every inch available, napping. The smiles on the caretaker’s faces were telling. If you ask me, undermanned with babies and toddlers does not equal success, but that just goes to show you the strength and beauty of a woman.

Now, I don’t want this experience to become a fairy tale of how much I did or how much I’ve been through. I’m missing the point if it is.

I want this experience to enter straight into my heart and help me live in every breath, the way Kaama showed me is possible.

I just want this experience to leave from my heart and help me be. I saw this trait in Reagan’s eyes. I want that look that tells of appreciating not everything, but every moment we have.

As time continues to expire here in Pietermaritzburg, I’m doing things a little differently. I’m thanking God for three meals a day, I’m thanking God for good health care, and I’m thanking God for an abstaining sexual lifestyle (meaning I don’t have HIV/AIDS).

I know God is preparing me, readying me, breaking me down, and unlayering me to the point of selfless exhaustion to want to make an impact in our community service projects. I’m looking forward to how tired I’m going to be for wanting to help so badly.

Let me just be real with you. I don’t have it together, I don’t have it figured out, I am not fearless, and I am a jerk. Hi, I’m Ryan Birch, and I’m a Christian.

Your response: “Hiiiiii Ryyaaannnn”

Thankfully, God does have it together amidst the craziness of worldly suffering. God does have it figured out amidst the doubts we live off of. God is fearless in the face of evil. God is love, amidst HIV/AIDS victims, the poor, the widowed wives, and the moments of breathlessness in hospitals. God is good.

So where I pick up from here is where I leave you. I’m getting away with Christ not because I’m in Africa, but because He is everywhere. I feel Him beside me as I watch monkeys run past my classroom, listen to friends pour their hearts out in difficult situations, and especially in a laugh or two.

outh Africa is wrapping me up in the here and now and I’m willing to go with that. I’m attempting to be a part of those “unforced rhythms of grace” and finding joy.
Now there’s a new picture that my mind attempts to formulate. So let’s try this again: South Africa. My rhythm of grace, my humbling learning experience, and my mirror-in-the-face reality check. Maybe God liked the idea of me coming here after all.