Four Years!

This month marks four years from the time I first moved to Madagascar. I can’t believe it’s been that long! I know that God has truly changed my life forever through what He’s allowed me to experience here.

He has blessed me abundantly in relationships here. He’s given me Malagasy friends who have taught me about language, culture, life, and His nature. He’s also given me a mission family who constantly inspire me to be more like Him through their love and example.

He has blessed me with experiences I could never have imagined . . . some painful, some hilarious, some deeply fulfilling—all meaningful.

He’s given me new skills! I never thought I could learn to drive stick-shift, or cook, or throw out old water without it splashing back on me, or sing in another language, or drive a moped, or jump into a moving car . . .

He’s shown me all I’m not. It seems that with every new piece of language or cultural information I may discover, I’m stunned to realize how much more exists to be learned! It seems that with each victory, and each failure, what shows most clearly is what I’m lacking. But the very best part is that all that I’m not, He Is. He has been so, so faithful to me. When I have been weak, or happy, or afraid, or excited, or bewildered, or surprised, or faithless—He has been with me; He has been Himself!

He is Himself—His huge, beautiful, active, glorious Self! Somehow, in the depths of His grace, He chose to take me on this journey with Him. He chose to let me see that His is, and has been, active on an island the size of Texas in the middle of the Indian Ocean from the beginning, and that He has set eternity in the hearts of people here.

When I moved here, I wondered if I would one day love Madagascar. By His grace, I do—I love this place, and these people. But my love is selfish, impure, and is as nothing to His! His loving, pursuing activity in the lives of people, families, villages here takes my breath away. And somehow He’s let me be a part of this activity!

When I first arrived here, I had no idea what my time here would come to mean to me. Even now, I can’t see the full picture of what God is doing, either in my life or in the lives of people here. I’ve been thinking about a line C. S. Lewis wrote in Out of the Silent Planet:

“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, [man], as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing . . . What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure . . . When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then—that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.”

When I think about Madagascar, I “still know very little about it”. I still know very little, too, about what God is doing here, and what He’s doing in my life through my time here. But I truly believe that this place and these relationships will “make [something] in me all my days” . . . that I’ll never be the same.

And yet, even if my life has been shifted, knocked in its course by these last few years, I am just one person. How unfathomable that He is at work like this, changing lives and redirecting histories all over the world and throughout time according to His glorious plan!

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!

How unsearchable his judgments,
    

and his paths beyond tracing out!

“Who has known the mind of the Lord?
    

Or who has been his counselor?”

“Who has ever given to God,
    

that God should repay them?”

For from him and through him and for him are all things.

To him be the glory forever! Amen.”

Romans 11:33-36