Burdensome Honor - Reflections on Mission to Uganda

I have a dear friend who currently serves as a missionary in Senegal.  We got to talk the other day about my experience of ministry in Uganda this past August.  He asked me what impressed me the most about the people there.  I told him it was the hospitality.  Initially I found Ugandan hospitality overwhelming.  It felt like wherever we went they made a big fuss over us as their “visitors,” as they always referred to us, which seemed unnecessary and at times inconvenient.  We usually had a schedule we were trying to keep, visiting more than one place in a day.  We would begin with hopes to spend 3 or so hours in one place in the morning and then hit the road again so that we could get to another village or church in the afternoon.  Problem was that once we arrived at a spot we were at the mercy of their hospitality, which always involved eating…a lot.  Keeping a schedule in Uganda was a practice in futility.

My friend in Senegal laughed at this because it was the same situation in West Africa where he had spent the last decade ministering and planting churches.  He said the Malians were actually self-aware about how they came off to their Western brothers and sisters.  They referred to it as “burdensome honor.”  What an incredible term!  He said even with this self-awareness they were very honest about the fact that they could not help themselves.  The irony that their attempts to honor and celebrate their guests was often a real difficulty for their guests to the point of being a burden simply couldn’t be helped.  They had to do what they had to do, and in Africa you make a big deal about your “visitors” no matter what.  My friend jokingly said he had taken to calling it “militant hospitality,” but you just learn to live with it and it eventually becomes part of your rhythm of life there.

The welcome at Oyoe village

I am the type of person that hates to be late, so you can imagine how burdensome their hospitality was for me at first.  In my world if I’m not early for an appointment I am late.  I’m sure it had something to do with my Dad’s tendency to be in the car in the driveway ready to go to wherever we were headed as a family that day, be it church, dinner out, or a weekend getaway to the lake…while the other 8 of us scrambled to get ourselves out to the car…but that’s another post for another time.  Sooooooo, the first few stops on our travels around Uganda were hard for me to know we were supposed to be somewhere later, and we were just not going to make it on time.  Don’t worry, whatever anxiety I was feeling I kept it stuffed deep, deep, deep inside so as to not bother anyone else and suffer alone silently…like you’re supposed to, right?  I’ve got this whole life thing licked.  Who needs therapy?:)

But, there was one day when it was so bad that it broke something in me.  We had gone to the home of a family that had opened their house to one of our guides, Audrey (who is also one of the coolest people I have ever met), to use as a base of operations as she reached out to minister to the surrounding area.  The home belonged to Mr. Omara.  He is a tall slender man with tall sons…they joked that I was a long lost relative thanks to my height.  Audrey would stay with Mr. Omara’s family and walk to the surrounding villages, which were miles apart by the way, share Jesus with them, invite their children into her education program, and help the women of the village develop local businesses to gain more financial freedom.  One of Mr. Omara’s sons, Michael, with whom I became friends, had gone through Audrey’s Love Unveiled Ministries and was now a Chemical Engineer and one of her volunteer leaders.  In the Oyoe village Audrey had helped train a group of women to become seamstresses.  She helped them get a group of new Singer sewing machines and fabric and begin their own shop.  They made custom dresses and had already turned quite a profit, which allowed them to begin to rise above the poverty level.  It is an awesome ministry.

Audrey

We wanted to thank Mr. Omara and his family for their support of Audrey and Love Unveiled Ministries, so we went to spend the morning at their homestead.  As we arrived they already had a rather large breakfast prepared for us and they had invited their extended family and neighbors to come and worship and pray with us.  We ate, Mr. Omara introduced us to all of his other guests, Audrey introduced us to them, Bishop Andrew spoke, we sang, and we prayed.  Things were going swimmingly, and I thought we’d be on the road soon and off to our next stop in the Diocese of Nebbi.  Then Audrey came up to Bishop Andrew and me and informed us that the family had slaughtered one of their goats and were making lunch for us.  What do you say to that?!  Oh darn it…we have to go…sorry about your goat.  It’s not like they grabbed some Taco Bell or McDonald’s or made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for us…something quick and relatively cheap…no, they killed the freakin’ goat!  Audrey knew we were trying to keep our schedule, and asked us what we thought we should do.  Of course the Bishop and I agreed that we had to stay for lunch and accept their generous gift of food.  Audrey confirmed that would be the right move.

From left to right: Michael, an uncle, Mr. Omara, Bishop Andrew (who was deeply secure about his height), myself, and Michael’s oldest brother

Burdensome honor…it was at first, but then the Lord graciously opened my eyes to what they were doing.  Mr. Omara and his family, and all of the Ugandans we met, truly wanted to honor and celebrate the moment with us.  They wanted to thank God for bringing us together.  Our connection, our relationship with them was the most important thing to them right then.  They were not ruled by the clock like we are here in the West.  I had enough African classmates in seminary and missionary professors who taught us such things about Africa, but it was up to this point theoretical, purely information.  Living it was a different thing.  It was something I noticed as Mr. Omara and his sons toured us around his property showing us his orchards and fields.  Whenever they referred to time or a time period it was always connected to people and living things.  Time was never its own thing…some abstract concept.  We would ask how long they had lived on this property or when they had built a structure, etc. and they would always answer in terms of generations or seasons of life as opposed to years.  His son would say, “We’ve been here for three generations” instead of saying they bought the land in 1942 or something to that effect.  This was driven home in the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Omara’s parents were buried right in the middle of their property, in the midst of their houses. We walked by their gravestones as we went from one building to the next. It was yet another way of honoring their family and loved ones. The passage of time was never divorced from the people and things living it.  

This was a beautiful thing because it meant that they were free to enjoy time.  Too often here in the West we are slaves to time.  We live in the tyranny of the urgent with our over-scheduled lives.  We’re worried about missing appointments, meeting deadlines, meetings that run too long, not having enough time for what we really want to do, fear of getting old, annoyed at being too young like my pre-teen daughter, etc., etc.  As Dolly Parton sang, “Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’  Barely gettin' by, it's all takin' and no givin’”  Our relationship to time is not a healthy one.  In Africa I actually witnessed and experienced at a greater depth what it meant to be present.  C.S. Lewis wrote of it in his brilliant The Screwtape Letters.  For those of you who don’t know it it is a correspondence between an old experienced demon and his nephew Wormwood. Wormwood is new at all this devilish work, and his uncle Screwtape trains him.  This an excerpt from it:

The humans live in time but our Enemy (Jesus) destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present — either meditating on their eternal union with Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.” (emphasis mine)

Mr. Omara’s family and some of our team

I have always loved Lewis’ treatment of time, but I got to see it and feel it in a new way with my brothers and sisters in Uganda and their beautiful burdensome honor.  It was only truly burdensome to my old self desperately trying to stay faithful to its cruel, tyrannical, false god of time.  And thankfully, the Lord, put my old self to death in that moment along with that goat.  He blew up our schedule and pulled us into being present with Mr. Omara and his family…touching eternity with them…getting a taste of heaven with them where all peoples from every tongue and tribe and nation will join together in worship of our Lord Jesus Christ.  And we will be welcomed to His table of fellowship, the Lamb of God, who gave his life for us, so that we might be present with Him forever.  We will be His guests of honor because he has taken our burdens upon himself and given us his freedom.  We will eat and drink and laugh with Him.  It will be the best party we’ve ever been to, and we’ll never want it to end.  And it never will.  Amen.

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