After three months here in Nigeria I am feeling pretty settled into life here. The market doesn’t scare me as much. I have my Nigerian driver’s license, we’ve made a few friends, and I can understand the accent most of the time. I have squished more cockroaches than I care to recount, survived parent-teacher conferences and I have resigned myself to the fact that attempting to straighten my hair is simply a complete waste of time. However, the biggest challenge of the last few weeks hasn’t been Nigeria; it has been how easily I always seem to slip into things that are easy, comfortable and shallow.m Just to be clear, it is not that I have any desire for anything more stretching to be added into my life right now. I feel sufficiently stretched, and my desire for adventure is pretty much at capacity. Living in Nigeria and learning how to be a teacher have been more than enough entertainment, but I am becoming increasingly aware that faithfulness is proven over time, and that character is developed as we make one decision to honor God at a time, every day, in every moment.
We have had some amazing experiences and made some great memories. I took my class on a field trip to the top of a place called Bower Tower; we are starting to get involved with an orphanage and hosted a Luke 14 feast which was pretty amazing. We also had some short term doctors come and stay with us! It was great to get to know them and have a little piece of home! They couldn’t say enough positive things about the Nigerian people. That they had never experienced better hospitality, stronger families or friendlier people than they had here in Nigeria. Now, I knew that I was supposed to smile, tell them that they were right and that I was the luckiest girl alive to be living in such a perfect community. However, that was not the Nigeria that I was experiencing. My ears were ringing, partly from the fact that I had said things like that after getting back from a short term missions trip. The other part of me was irritated because after living here for a few months, that was not the general opinion that I had of Nigeria. I do know a bunch of Godly, wonderful and humble Nigerians, but overall the Nigerian people that I had been getting to know were aggressive and generally fairly unreasonable. Specifically, the parents of my students had been harsh and demanding. I was buried deeply in resolving behavior issues with several of my students that could mostly be traced back to either poor parenting, or the fact that one or both parents live in another country. The kindest people that I have met here are either from India or South Africa! So, friendly? not exactly, and strong families? Well, not the ones that I was seeing. I was seeing a Nigeria full of hurting, sinful, very real people.
This is when I realized that I was settling for shallow. All of the things that I saw in people might have been true, but I was looking at them with a selfish perspective and I was desperately missing a very key component. “And Jesus looked at them and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” Compassion? He looks at people with all of our insecurities, selfishness and sin and the only thing that he feels for us is compassion because we are lost. Looking at a bunch of people that are hard to love, His response is unbelievable to me. And the reality that I am one of those people that are extremely hard to love is incredibly humbling. Now that I’ve been here longer than a short term trip, I am getting to know real people, with real issues, and real expectations. But I’m learning that I can have two responses. I can either become bitter because I’m settling for a shallow, selfish perspective, or I can rely more on Christ, and look through his eyes at his people, with his compassion. I don’t have to deny that there is something wrong, or pretend like everything is perfect, because true, deep compassion is unconditional.
I’m completely blown away by how much deeper God’s perspective is than mine. I think I’m being loving, but I’m settling for being kind. I do just enough to get by and call it working hard, and I see people from the perspective of how they relate to me. I complain about suffering, I’m impatient with people, even if only in my heart and I’m counting the days until I’m back in my comfortable home with my wonderful family. God on the other hand loves us enough to not care about what we think of him. He uses suffering to bring us to Him, because without it we wouldn’t even be able to see that we have a problem, and he looks at us with compassion.
Thank you so much for all of you that are praying for me. It means more than you’ll ever know, and if you pray anything for me will you pray that God molds my heart to be more like his. I want to have his eyes and see his people with compassion. I have been given nineteen children to love this year and I know that I can only do it with God’s heart. Pray that I have the wisdom to love and discipline them well and that I will look at them and their parents with compassion.
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