What did I do to them...

I have been thinking a lot about when I was a missionary in Africa.  Today, I saw that the outbreak of the new ebola virus has spread into Liberia.  Liberia.  I lived an entire lifetime in the year I was there.  More and more I wish I could talk about it.  Talk about it the ways I have.  Talk about it in the ways I never have.

Africa is beautiful.  Even in all its horror and all its brutal history, Africa is beautiful.  Or at least it was to me.  Then.

But its beauty is not what lingers in my mind.

I think a lot about what I taught whilst I was there.  Literacy wise, I have no worries.  But I also taught Bible Class to 7th and 8th graders, with 21 nationalities amongst my students.  And, along with a missionary couple, I taught at a small congregation in the heart of the slums of the only true city in Liberia.

The crick that ran through the quarter was literally florescent yellow green.  And that was the water used for cooking and cleaning.  Whole families lived in a single room cinderblock shack.  Generations together even.  Clothing was often rags and sparse.  Folk ate out of large communal pots, primarily palm butter and rice.  Poor does not even being to describe the place.

In the midst of it is/was this tiny congregation in the only large building so very hungry to hear the Word of God.  Very hungry.

The mission compound where I worked was incredibly insular.  Very.  Few left and most enjoyed creature comforts foreign to most of Liberia.  I called it a little America.  On the compound was a school and a hospital.  Both were well-respected and rather popular.  Then, at least, Liberia was most known for banking, so a lot of officials sent their children to our "American" school.  And anyone who cared about surviving accident or illness insisted on coming to our hospital.

There was also a hostel where children of missionaries who were in-country somewhere, some country.  I did not like that.  I did not like the thought behind that.  The reasoning is that one is called to be a missionary before all else.  Only I thought, then, that one was a spouse and a parent before being a missionary.  But those were not seen as callings.  Or vocations.

At the hostel was a 5-year-old Chinese boy who had terrible problems with his stomach. I was convince then and remain so now that his problem was being separated from his parents.  It was wrong to leave him behind.  At least to me, it was.

Somewhere along the line, a missionary ventured off campus and found the congregation in Buzzi Quarter.  That congregation was passed along from missionary to missionary and the couple who was told about it brought me along when they went to teach.  And so I taught.

One of the things I found ironic, in truth, was the fact that the mission church did not have a pastor when I arrived.  The pastor who came to serve there arrived in January, I think.  Maybe he came before the civil war started.  But before he came, one thing that was true, was that most of my students did not attend church.

I've written before that I had no idea what I was doing.  Not knowing before I arrived that I would be teaching a Bible class, I thought I would start by teaching the Trinity.  After all, that would be so easy.  I was so utterly naive.  After muddling my way through the Trinity, I started plowing through the Old Testament.  The thing is, what I thought, then, through my teaching I led several of my students to Christ.  What arrogance.  What false teaching.

There was this 8th grader, this tough boy whom everyone knew was a scoundrel and whom everyone knew would not amount to anything, especially since he had already failed one grade.  One day he came to me and said, "Miss _________" I want what you have."

Being dense, it took me a long while to understand what he meant. Then I prayed with him.  The Jesus prayer.  And he changed.  He did.  Did he create faith?  Did I?  No, I know that now.  But he became faithful ... full of faith.  In the blink of an eye, seemingly, he went from the loser everyone joked about to being the next generation of missionaries.

Another of my students had a harder story.  She was Muslim, her father some sort of high cleric.  Her conversion, if her family ever found out, meant certain and swift death.  And yet she prayed with me.  Afterwards, I was terrified for her and I went to the leadership of the school and the compound wanting sanctuary for her.  But there was none to be had.  I was told that she was not "our problem."

Something I have struggled with, since becoming a Lutheran, is this idea that pastors will not baptize a child unless a parent is willing to raise him or her in the faith.  My best friend, learning that Baptism saves, wanted her children baptized.  I knew all these pastors and none of them would.  Being a Baptist, however, her church is against baptism of young children because its confession is that baptism doesn't save, but is rather a confession of faith.  I think one of the things I admire most about Becky is how long and how hard she fought to get her children baptized.  The way it was explained to me was that to baptize a child is to make that child a target of the devil.  It would be cruel to do so if the child had no one to guard and shepherd the gift of faith he or she received.  When I argued that Becky would be there to shepherd her children, I was told no pastor would baptize a child and leave him or her without pastoral care.

I hated being taught that.  With every fiber of my being I hated it.  Lately, I have wondered if I hated it so much because of all the guilt I carry about my time as a missionary.  All the time I taught false doctrine and all the time I was ... what ... encouraging the creation of defenseless children of Christ???

I joke a lot, lately, about all the clichés of my evangelical past.  One of my greatest shames is that I came back from Africa ... proud ... of the notches in my belt.  I had led a lot of youth to Christ because I so enthusiastically blundered my way through teaching them.  Of course, the truth is, what I did was give them massive doses of the Living Word, over and over and over again.  Heck, I even snuck into the bathrooms (boys and girls) to write Bible verse on the mirrors for them, pretending all the while I had no knowledge of how they appeared.  By the time the pastor arrived, an Old Testament scholar, my students were starving for teaching about the Word of God.  And they filled the pews.

One of my greatest fears is being held accountable for all of that false teaching, for teaching and training youth down this path of futility and despair when it comes to all things spiritual.  Works righteousness is essentially Law masquerading as Gospel.  It is death.  It brings no death.  The Law only condemns and kills.  What did I do to those children???

I absolutely and utterly do not get the fascination with evangelical methodology and teaching that is running amuck in the LCMS. I do not.  And those who go on and on and on about the Third Use of the Law and about sanctification spend little, if any, of their rants focused on the fact that the ONLY ONE who sanctifies is God. The Word, be it Law or Gospel, is worked in us by the Holy Spirit.  Not by pastors and certainly not by ourselves.  Frankly, I don't think that many of those advocating for pious living, personal sanctification, and all those other euphemisms have actually really and truly studied the Christian Book of Concord.  For it is very, very, very clear about the Law and about sanctification.  And man has no part in it.  Yes, discipline is good, but discipline does not save and does not create or sustain faith.  Not at all.

I feel like ... and fear that ... I condemned not just the Muslim covert, but all my students to death.  I have prayed for them ever since I left the war zone that Liberia had become.  But over the years my prayers have changed ... especially in the past four years.  Now, mostly, I merely groan for them.  I have no words to speak to God.  I have fear and I have shame and I dare not speak my fervent hope that somehow, in some way, those youth were taught rightly after they left my spiritual care.  For that's what is was for many of them, and for those I taught in Buzzi Quarter. I was their teacher, their pastor, their minister.

The other day, I looked up the websites of my churches from high school and college.  One of them highlights specifically that if you are a Christian, then you are a minister of the Word.  That is what I taught.  That is what I believed.  I know now that that is false teaching.  However, in reality, I was ... because I was the only one teaching the Word of God to many of the ears listening.

Lord, have mercy upon them.
Christ, have mercy upon them.
Lord, have mercy upon them.

The only good that I see in my time as a missionary is that that is when I first fell in love with bits of the Psalter ... only I didn't know it was the Psalter.  You see, youth from Buzzi Quarter would travel out to the compound to visit me.  They wanted me to read to them more, to pray with them more, to teach them more.  We would sit in the edges of the water on the beach, letting the waves cool our bodies against the oppressive heat, and I would read, I would pray, and I would teach. In return, they taught me their praise songs.  All but one were from Psalms.  The odd one out is from Zephaniah ... which I never knew, until recently, is actually about Jesus.

I gave them the Law, and they gave me Jesus.
I gave them false teaching, and they gave me the Word that I could understand.
I burdened their consciouses with all the does and don'ts required to have a relationship with Jesus, and they gave me a lifeboat of the Living Word that has sustained me over the past 24 years.

Come visit me and, with what's left of my voice, I will sing to you the praise songs, the Scripture verses, I learned.  I have been singing them since the soldiers came and destroyed Liberia.  I have been singing them as my foe—the devil, the world, and my own flesh—has sought to destroy me ever since.

The Lord your God is in your midst,
A victorious warrior.
He will exult over you with joy,
He will be quiet in His love,
He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.

Shout for joy, O daughter of Zion!
Shout in triumph, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
O daughter of Jerusalem!
The Lord has taken away His judgments against you,
He has cleared away your enemies.
The King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst;
You will fear disaster no more.
In that day it will be said to Jerusalem:
Do not be afraid, O Zion;
Do not let your hands fall limp.
The Lord your God He is in your midst.

The Lord your God is in your midst,
A victorious warrior.
He will exult over you with joy,
He will be quiet in His love,
He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.


The Living Word is like a siren's call to my broken and anguished soul, even when I doubt that it is for me.  It is also my balm, even when I doubt that I can be healed.

I sang these Words not knowing that they were the promise of Jesus.  For all I knew, they were simply the hope given to the children of God then, a hope I longed for now.  Even after someone explained that I was singing about Jesus, I thought they were Words for someone else.

Mostly, now, I still think that.  Fear that.  For I fear and dread that were I to come face to face with God He would ask me, "Why did you hurt my children in Africa?"  Somehow, the answer in my head, that I didn't know any better, seems a feeble and useless excuse.

After returning from Africa, those were the bedtime songs I sang whilst babysitting.  Those and Michael Card's acapella version of Psalm 121: 1-4.  Whenever I had a chance to lead worship or was involved in a choir, I taught the African praise songs.  I wanted others to sing them with me.  I wanted others to sing them to me.


The Lord your God is in your midst,
A victorious warrior.
He will exult over you with joy,
He will be quiet in His love,
He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.

Shout for joy, O daughter of Zion!
Shout in triumph, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
O daughter of Jerusalem!
The Lord has taken away His judgments against you,
He has cleared away your enemies.
The King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst;
You will fear disaster no more.
In that day it will be said to Jerusalem:
Do not be afraid, O Zion;
Do not let your hands fall limp.
The Lord your God He is in your midst.

The Lord your God is in your midst,
A victorious warrior.
He will exult over you with joy,
He will be quiet in His love,
He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.


I wanted a refuge.
I wanted forgiveness.
I wanted Jesus.

I still do.


Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief!