Recently, I have been talking to a lot of different people about the time I’ll be spending in Sudan and Uganda this summer and the work that I will be doing. Random people. Like my neighbor from across the street who asked me if we sold our motorcycle, and I told him that we did so that we could put the money toward our mission trip to Sudan. He scrunched up his face and asked, “Why would you want to go to the Sudan? Have you ever been to Africa before?” Or my dentist, who was holding me hostage in the chair telling me that they kill Christians in places like that, and that a missionary couple he knows went to Tanzania one year and felt perfectly safe, then returned the next year and feared for their lives. Or how about one of my students, whose world is so limited that his only comment was, “Well, don’t gets AIDS.”
These conversations are interesting to me because I know that as the people are walking away, they are thinking that I’ve gone and lost my mind!
Crazy. That’s exactly what it is…but not the kind of crazy that most people think. My theme for the year has been Crazy Love (like the book), and though it really does seem completely crazy to most people to leave my husband and job behind, hop on a plane, and spend three months living in Uganda, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. It’s simply saying to God that I will go wherever and whenever He calls. So, if that’s crazy, then Jesus was crazy, and I want to be crazy, too!