Loving South Africa

A Life Changed: The Sum of Our Days is the Sum of Our Lives, by Megan Foley

“Because how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.“ Annie Dillard. As I reflect on the leadership of our LSA partners, this quote above rings true. Because how they spend their days is indeed how they spend their lives. For our LSA partners, serving 'the least of these' is not something they have to do. In their bones they may themselves feel the urgency that they have to respond, somehow, some way, to the pandemic they see before their very eyes. But certainly they could spend their days doing otherwise. South Africa, with its extreme gap between the rich and the poor, appears to provide many opportunities for those in the middle to upper class to "succeed." Our partners are redefining "upward mobility" and looking towards the Kingdom of God as their measuring stick.

"Success" to Joe is to spend his day writing a grant that will empower his young, South African leaders to grasp the despair and also the hope that exists around them, and to spread this same hope to their desperate brothers and sisters. For Peter success is mentoring a youth at World Changers Academy, a youth living with HIV, to dream and then to act...and in this, both experiencing and sharing the love of Christ. Sizwe may measure a day by the youth he observes building a community center within his old neighborhood, giving back, because of the days he spent at WCA. Here he learned that to give is better than to receive. And Wade and Noel may spend their days demolishing the old and building the new so that Makaphutu can serve hundreds of AIDS orphans in the near future.

They will labor and expend themselves for Christ and for their fellow sisters and brothers. They may drive by the mass graves each morning and remind themselves that 2/3 of the young women this year may die of HIV/AIDS. They may drive by the local Department of Health and remember there is still a battle to be won to bring anti-retroviral’s affordable access into small communities. And they will sit in a small, grassroots church service and praise God and weep with Him for what their eyes saw today. This is how our partners spend their days. This is how our partners spend their lives.