'Witness, climb the mountain and face a cathartic wound to pride. Stumble we into the unknown and the courage comes behind'
I can't help but dwell upon Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the story of an English sea captain, Charles Marlow, who journeys by steam boat up the Congo River. The character Marlow seems to have been merely a proxy for the author himself, who travelled broadly by ship and served for a time on a steamer in Africa and who seemed to have garnered from his travels a profound awareness for the depravity of all men which was merely brought into sharp focus by his encounters with natives of the Congo.
The common thinking in the age of imperialism was that bringing western ideas and culture to the uncivilized world was a moral imperative, and therefore gaining access to the untold riches of the 'Dark Contintent' by nearly any means necessary was justified by the glorious vision of a future where the philosophies of the first world would save the lives and the souls of the native people there.
Over a century later we find, as Conrad did, that the Heart of Darkness exists within all men. Bringing darkness into darkness only yields a more formidable darkness. And so we have apharteid, blood diamonds, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, genocide, slavery and many other atrocities funded, armed and, in some cases, instigated by those who once considered themselves saviors.
But men do not have the power to save.
I'm preparing to go to Soshanguve, South Africa on July 19th, 2012 with a team of missionaries to support a program that seeks to battle the aids epidemic by, among other things, teaching young people the value of abstinence and helping them build life skills. I'll describe this wonderful program in more detail in my next post, but for now my point is this:
we need to leave ourselves behind and, instead, bring Jesus.
I wrote the line at the top of this post a few years ago in a song called "It Ends With a Spark". The song is about recognizing that we alone are ill-equipped to do God's work in a fallen world, but that, when called, we need to go anyway. It says in 2nd Corinthians that, while we believers are like broken clay pots, we carry inside of us a great treasure. The love of Jesus Christ is the only light that can break the darkness of this world and as we go into a community that has forgotten how to hope, the greatest mistake we could make is thinking that, of ourselves, we can give it to them. No, we must go as jars of clay, ever thankful that we may simply be present to witness God's grace in action, and we must hope that, in the process, the light of Jesus breaks the darkness within us, as well.
I can't help but dwell upon Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the story of an English sea captain, Charles Marlow, who journeys by steam boat up the Congo River. The character Marlow seems to have been merely a proxy for the author himself, who travelled broadly by ship and served for a time on a steamer in Africa and who seemed to have garnered from his travels a profound awareness for the depravity of all men which was merely brought into sharp focus by his encounters with natives of the Congo.
The common thinking in the age of imperialism was that bringing western ideas and culture to the uncivilized world was a moral imperative, and therefore gaining access to the untold riches of the 'Dark Contintent' by nearly any means necessary was justified by the glorious vision of a future where the philosophies of the first world would save the lives and the souls of the native people there.
Over a century later we find, as Conrad did, that the Heart of Darkness exists within all men. Bringing darkness into darkness only yields a more formidable darkness. And so we have apharteid, blood diamonds, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, genocide, slavery and many other atrocities funded, armed and, in some cases, instigated by those who once considered themselves saviors.
But men do not have the power to save.
I'm preparing to go to Soshanguve, South Africa on July 19th, 2012 with a team of missionaries to support a program that seeks to battle the aids epidemic by, among other things, teaching young people the value of abstinence and helping them build life skills. I'll describe this wonderful program in more detail in my next post, but for now my point is this:
we need to leave ourselves behind and, instead, bring Jesus.
I wrote the line at the top of this post a few years ago in a song called "It Ends With a Spark". The song is about recognizing that we alone are ill-equipped to do God's work in a fallen world, but that, when called, we need to go anyway. It says in 2nd Corinthians that, while we believers are like broken clay pots, we carry inside of us a great treasure. The love of Jesus Christ is the only light that can break the darkness of this world and as we go into a community that has forgotten how to hope, the greatest mistake we could make is thinking that, of ourselves, we can give it to them. No, we must go as jars of clay, ever thankful that we may simply be present to witness God's grace in action, and we must hope that, in the process, the light of Jesus breaks the darkness within us, as well.
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