April

Six months have gone by since I arrived in Cape Town. I’ve lived incredible experiences, formed exceptionally strong relationships, witnessed how ALIVE Christ really is, been to some of the world’s most beautiful places, and grown to appreciate the complexity of suffering. With everything external that I witness, the internal changes are just as big.

Because of who God made me, I process a lot of ‘random’ thoughts. Mostly these are questions to which the answer is something very relevant and significant to me. There often are questions to which I cannot find a satisfying answer, but it is the search or the answer that is important and many times leads me to even bigger questions. This whole process of how my brain works is amplified when I get to spend so much quality time with myself and my Heavenly Father like I am during these 9 months. This explanation may make sense only to me and be lost on everyone else, but it is the path by which I find conclusions to some of the things I share with you on this blog. That said, I want to tell you a bit about a few of the many things that have been on my heart and mind during the past month.

One of my recent revelations is, perhaps, vague, but vast and meaningful to me at the same time. I have to come to learn/appreciate how beautifully infinite the possibilities of existence are. We don’t often stop to reflect on it, but when you think about it, it is such an incredibly remarkable thing that despite there being over 6 ½ Billion people in the world, not a single one of them will ever live the life that you have. The experiences you experience, the people you meet, the places you see, they’re all entirely uniquely to your life. What’s more, you can make of your life absolutely anything you want. Now, while I appreciate and understand that certain things are restrained by one’s upbringing, abilities, and ‘fortune’, you can do ANYTHING you want with your life. Maybe you want to be a free lance writer travelling across South America. Or maybe you want to train to be an astronaut and travel to space only to retire in a few years and open a butch shop in Nepal. Perhaps you want to make jewelry and donate your profits to a farmer in Nigeria. It’s possible that you want to be an artist who finds inspiration in European architecture. Now, I know these things are completely random and seemingly mindless. But I think that’s what’s so great about it. In a manner of seconds, I came up with different possibilities of what you or anybody’s life could be. There is such an infinite amount of possibilities completely unique to who you are that you can do with your life. Maybe it’s a stupid and obvious thought, but I find something beautiful in it.

This leads me to another thought. I always knew that I would do what I wanted to because it was what I wanted and not because I felt any type of social or family pressure to do it. If I didn’t think that way I would never be where I am today. But I only slightly deviated from the path. I still went to high school, got the grades I got, and am now going into university. I promise you I know the importance of education. I get to see what a lack of it looks like every day in Ocean View. But I cannot help but think how overrated a post-secondary education is. Yes, being knowledgeable and fully preparing yourself to be better at whatever it is you want to do are important. I just feel that, even though you can choose your own career path, everyone just does the same. People go to college, get a job, find a compatible mate with whom they can begin a good family, work, take vacations, live special moments every so often, and die. I make it sound quite dull. All of these things can actually be quite beautiful. But yet, they’re all the same thing in a way. I feel like we are all cattle just following the same marked path. Once we pass through the gates, there is an open fence which gives a sense of freedom and specialty. But without realizing it, we are all in the same enclosed space. I want to live outside of that space. If I don’t want to go to college and do something of actual importance in my life, I need to do it. Don’t worry, I’m still going to go. It’s just the thought of knowing that people do all these things: college, work, family, maybe church; and despite how well they may do all these things, whatever they may have accomplished in any aspect of their lives, in the end it can all be in vain. There is no satisfaction in what they did no matter how well they may have done it. You could be very famous, incredibly wealthy, successfully devoted to your family, and reach 70 without knowing what the heck you did with your life. I find that thought depressing.

As depressing as it all may sound, even if you don’t become a Martin Luther or anything near it, there is one and only one thing that can fill the satisfaction of living worthy life. That is, knowing that you lived a life in full devotion to Jesus Christ. Not just in devotion to a good cause, but to Jesus Christ alone. A life lived for him is literally the ONLY thing I can rationalize is worth living for. It’s the only thing that I could picture myself at 75 looking back at, and finding genuine satisfaction with what I did with my life.

This has also led me to wonder what the world would look like if ‘Christians’ looked at their life from the perspective of their faith. In other words, what would it look like if our first priority truly was our work for the Gospel? If, instead of having a job in which we occasionally were inspired to try to let others know about our faith, the main reason why we had a certain job was because the setting was the right one to make God’s love evident. What if, instead of being teachers who happened to be Christians, we were Christians who happened to teach? What if we chose a university primarily because it was the right place for us to minister to others? I may not be explaining myself well. I just think the world would look completely different if those who call themselves followers of Christ actually followed Him. Faith with no deeds is no faith at all. There’s a quote that by Dallas Willard that says “Faith is treated as something that only should make us different, not that actually does or can make us different. In reality we vainly struggle against the evils of this world, waiting to die and go to heaven. Somehow we’ve gotten the idea that the essence of faith is entirely a mental and inward thing.” Unfortunately, I find him to be right. The American church, generally speaking, is just too bland, too vague.

Now that I’ve been able to say some of that, I’ll let you see a glimpse of what has happened in the past month or so.

At the end of March we held clinic at a new primary school called Christian David Primary. We were supposed to have 25 kids but ended up with over 30. As great as it is that kids are wanting to go, 35 kids is a lot for 2 or 3 coaches. Situations like these are really teaching me how to use discipline and meanness when dealing with kids sometimes. The clinic was a success and we have a coach starting to work there next week.

During around that time, I was also hugely blessed with the opportunity to help run a soccer camp in a town 2 ½ hours away from Cape Town called Gansbai (the G is really a harsh H or J sound). As part of a larger holiday club for kids, Casey and I, as well as other coaches from around the country, came in to run the soccer camp that was going on at the same time. The club was run by an organization called the Football Foundation for South Africa. We had about 150 kids show up every day for the kid’s club part, and I believe 6 soccer teams with around 16 players each. Me and another one of the coaches organized a certain ‘station’ each day where we would work on different aspects of soccer. It was a great opportunity to affirm myself as a coach and to work with black children, a completely different culture and language than the Coloureds I live and work with.

Though working with the children and doing soccer was awesome, it wasn’t the best part of the trip. During our stay there, we were hosted by an American family, the Johnsons from Tennesse, who own a resort called Mosaic Farm. This 5 star resort is one of the most beautiful, peaceful places I’ve been to. We were fed amazing food from their 4 star restaurant and treated like royalty by their incredible staff. A lot of the pictures I have posted are of this unique place. More importantly than being able to do all this, for free, was the friendships we built whilst helping out there. We spent an amazing time with our new New York friends who were there to record the work that was being done by everyone in Gansbai. It was great to see these MTV and Nickelodeon producers come to see the beauty of this incredible country that is South Africa. It was really an awesome experience and I am so grateful to God for allowing me to live it.

Also, it’s been extremely inspiring to see the great work that Sarah Prince has been doing with Ocean View’s women. I’ll let you find out more about that if you want on their blog, www.caseyandsarahafrica.blogspot.com. They are WAY better with their blogging responsibilities and I’m often doing the same things they talk about.

There have also been some wonderful things happening with our boys. We’ve been having a few of them whom we have grown particularly close to come to church on Sundays. This is usually to the Methodist church that Sarah pastors. But two Sundays ago they also went to Hillsong United, a Sydney, Australia based church known for its amazing worship. There, after the sermon, the people attending were asked to raise close their eyes and raise their hands if they were ready to seek Christ. When this moment came, all three of the boys that went raised their hands to indicate that they wanted to put Jesus first in their lives. It’s really beautiful to see how our presence here is working in their lives. This also opens up the doors to directly share the Gospel with them. Hopefully this week we will be meeting with them to have a Bible study of some sort. Please pray for that.

There are some more things that I need to write about which I’m hoping I’ll be able to do by the end of the week. Writing this thing can be quite fun and quite a pain in the butt, and right now it’s the latter. There are some great things happening but I want to do them justice so I will write about them sometime this week when I’m in a writing mood. My writing tends to suffer when I’m now, like now.

I do want to ask you for prayer for something specific. With the World Cup coming up, and all the foreigners that will be coming in because of it, child trafficking is alarmingly relevant right now. Kids of all ages are being taken to be used as sex slaves during the time of festivity that the country will be living. I know it’s something that we hear about sometimes, but it’s a whole different thing when you’re actually in the places where it’s taking place. Please pray for this in whatever way you find useful. For the protection of the kids, awareness of the problem, governmental interference. This reminds me to tell you that they’re thinking about making prostitution legal in South Africa for the World Cup. Please pray for the situation. It’s such a huge, horrific problem, yet we don’t always think much of it in the United States.

Thank you so much for all your love, support, and prayers. I thank God not only for the incredible experience lived here, but for the people at home who so greatly represent His love. I hope and pray that things are going well for everyone. Please let me know if there is any way in which I can be praying for you, whatever it is. (andychenlo@hotmail.com)

Love,

Andy