How i would like to...
As I drive with Moses, one of my local colleagues, to the Garden of Hope to lead a Bible class for the children, I see one of our children walking on the street. “What is this boy doing on the street?” I wonder. “Shouldn’t he be going to school?”
We stop the car and Moses asks him, “Why aren’t you at school?” We don’t get a really clear answer from this ten-year-old boy. And I don’t understand much of it, because Moses and the boy talk in Setswana. I now know a little bit of Setswana, but I can’t understand it completely yet.
Boy's camp
It is still not entirely clear to me what the boys’ camp entails. Not many people know. It’s a secret of the men and boys who have been there. The rituals last three months and take place in the mountains, far away from civilization. I don’t know much about it, but I do know this: that they don’t teach good things there. What I hear about it is full of tradition, superstition, and sounds to me like unbiblical and almost inhuman rituals. When the boys return, they have difficult behavior, are difficult to correct and many of them become addicted to alcohol and drugs.
How i would like to...
I feel something of this mother’s sadness. At least, this mother seems sad about it. But whether she is sad because she cannot afford the camp for her son, or whether she is sad that her son wants to go there, I don’t know. It is incomprehensible to me, but there are mothers and fathers who send their sons to these camps. Awful!
How I would love to drive up to this boy again and talk to him. Just sit with this boy and ask why he wants to go to that camp, to think with him about what the Lord will think of such a camp, and to pray with him. But I feel so inadequate, because I can’t speak Setswana well enough to talk to him about this.
Grateful
No, it’s not appropriate to only complain about feeling inadequate when it comes to speaking the local language. The Lord has helped thus far! Yes, beyond praying and thinking, even in speaking the local language. When I can do the Bible class in Setswana for the smallest children, when I can pray and sing with them in their own language, isn’t gratitude appropriate then? The Lord has fulfilled His Word. “And the Lord said unto him, Who hath made man’s mouth? Or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? Have not I the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say.”
Learning
It’s so easily said. “Learning to be dependent”, “to despise one’s own strength”, “not my work, but His work”. But to really experience it, is something else. And yet. Yet, how useful it is to experience one’s own shortcomings in all kinds of areas, to look to the Lord, to learn to trust in the Lord alone. To look prayerfully to the Lord and ask Him to perform miracles, in spite of us, beyond praying and thinking. Yes, also for young boys who want to go to boys’ camp. Will the Lord use His Word, so that they may ask for the Lord with their young hearts?
One thing is sure! God gathers His own from every kindred, tongue, people and nation! That’s why there is hope! On the one hand, we have to do the work: to tell the children about the Lord. Tell them that they are lost without Him, with the exhortation, “Seek Jesus much, seek Jesus early, whoever has Jesus, has enough.” And on the other hand, to look up to the Lord. “Lord, I cannot do it, and from ourselves no one will turn unto Thee, but wilt Thou do it?”
Nella Verschuur
