Come and Listen...

 Wow!  Can't believe we're already one week into our second term.  We had a wonderful break - there's so much to recount from it, so many lessons learned, so many examples of God's provision - but here are some thoughts I (Jim) had on a little camping trip I took with a handful of colleagues here at RVA in the Aberdare Mountains about an hour and a half from here.  It wasn't what I had in mind when I came to Kenya.  If you squint, our camp could be sitting in an open meadow on a rainy day in some sage-brush flat in Colorado.

 Walk over the next ridge, and you're suddenly fishing in some rain-soaked bamboo forest - not much like Colorado, but there I was wading around in Chacos pulling Rainbow Trout out of a stream on a gold-ribbed hare's ear.

And these, I think mom and dad would agree, look more than a little bit like those little 'straw-flowers' we would see in the Colorado high country.

And if you squint, just a little, this bushbuck is a reasonable facsimile of a skinny little Mule Deer in summer coat.

And when the skies cleared briefly one afternoon, the sky was almost Colorado blue.

But it was encounters like these that provided clear evidence that I wasn't back at home wandering old haunts chasing fish up and down the stream. 

The place was THICK with brush and the only trails were slick, muddy ditches deeply pocked with the tracks of Cape Buffalo and Elephants.  Obviously, the specter of rounding some bend in the trail and meeting face to face with one or the other gave this fishing trip a distinctly un-Coloradan feel.  But something kept coming up in my mind I'd read sometime back by either Richard Foster or Dallas Willard about imagining what it would have been like to sit at the water's edge and listen to Christ speak.  

Somehow I forget that Jesus caught fish, cooked them over an open fire, and had real conversations with real people - real people like me.  So between worrying about buffalo and trying to determine whether that track was left by a hyena or a leopard and if that made any difference, I tried to imagine what it might have been like to be Peter and Andrew sitting with their nets, or James and John with theirs. (Mark 1:16)  What was it like?  What was HE like?  What compelled these men to leave their nets and follow Him?

"Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men."

What were they thinking?  What am I thinking?

How did we get here, from Colorado?  Am I fishing for men?

"Follow Me."

It's amazing how He brought us here.  Am I still listening?  When the Spirit leads, am I quick to listen?  When a student is hurting, am I following Christ?  When students irritate me to the core, do I follow The Man by the shore?  When fellow missionaries are jealous, or rude, or angry, do I respond as one who follows Him should?

When we got home, I was doing the dishes and listening to the iPod.  I've really been enjoying David Crowder Band's 'A Collision' and the first real song on the album is "Come and Listen."

Come and listen,

Come to the water's edge all you

Who know and fear the Lord.

Come and listen,

Come to the water's edge, all you

Who are thirsty, come.

Let me tell you what He

has done for me,

He has done for you,

He has done for us.

Life here at RVA is hard.  It's stressful.  The days are long, the demands on our time come from all corners and at all hours, but this term I'm praying that whether it's junior high basketball practice, the dry valley floor, or the kitchen sink I take moments to come to the water's edge, sit at His feet, and listen.