We Will Dance Someday

Today I wrap up my time at MCDC/MTC as I head back to Centurion with Patrick for the weekend and then fly home to Philly on Tuesday. I've come full circle in these three weeks. Initially I was discouraged and disappointed due to various factors, many of which revolve around my own needs for attention and significance. After nineteen days with these organizations serving rural South African blacks, I am hopeful.

This place and these organizations are swirling with tensions between blacks, afrikaners, and expat missionaries. But this friction is nothing new, simply a part of the strangeness that swept through creation back in the days of Adam and Eve. Beyond immediate relief, the efforts to beat back the tremendous consequences of HIV/AIDS provide a platform for trudging through the thick waters of racial reconciliation. You need not be an epidemiologist to connect the dots between a three-hundred-year history of oppression and a disproportionately affected black population. These realities do not exist in isolation and neither do their resolutions.

Masibambisane (the “M” in MCDC) means “let us bear the burden together.” In Christ, a new culture is created where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, black nor afrikaner. It is within this culture that the hope for South Africa lies, and the good people of these organizations and communities are pioneering a fresh and difficult path towards a land that has been promised where there are no tears and death has been conquered. I am confident that the same God I see at work in Philadelphia is guiding the steps of these new friends of mine and so I leave here with an expectation of good things to come.