A Spacious Place

Psalms 33 talks about God providing a spacious place. I'm not sure what its referring to exactly, but for us this football pitch at our little school is our spacious place. Its a kind of a miracle, I suppose you could say.

Here is the story.

Five months ago when people asked about the school I would explain it like this:

This school should be a very easy thing really. We have many people who have offered to provide funding. We have a lot of interested parents. And there are a number of experience, wonderful teachers who should be willing to teach. The biggest challenge will be finding a place to rent. Finding a good venue in Kampala is tricky at the best to times. But a school is particularly, extremely, extra challenging. But we trust God for these things - this school is a going to be a step of faith.

The truth was, we didn't intend this school to be a faith-based organization. We wanted it to be "Christian", sure. And yes, I acknowledge that ultimately everything depends on God - in him we live and move and have our being. But we didn't think it would ever boil down to depending entirely on faith.

Shoboda in his book Messy (which I highly recommend) talks about the "if God doesn't show up we're screwed" faith. We did not aspired to that kind of faith.

That's like everyone right? We want a safe faith where we make wise choices and take minimal risks, we trust God for safety through the night, but in Kampala we still have razor wire on our perimeter fence, 24 security guard, burglar bars on the windows and a herd of mangy dogs. If thieves get through all that, then we trust God to still save us.

But getting a school venue in Kampala is extremely difficult, so we knew we needed God's help. And there is no story to it. What happened was that Linda immediately found this premises. Its a stones throw from a major intersection in a great neighborhood. Excellent road access to the lot, parking for 30 cars. Ample play ground area. Space to build five classrooms. Another huge parking area that can be used as a basket ball court. A beautiful house that works well as a school. An agreeable landlord that already has a long-term educational institution renting his adjacent property. And all this for a very reasonable price. To say nothing of the football pitch at the bottom of the yard. For Uganda, trust me, this is a miracle.

Meanwhile the "easy" things collapsed. The donors evaporated, parents got other ideas or left, teachers moved away. So there it is - if this school has one thing going for it - it has a fantastically spacious, very beautiful campus. We are now coming to terms with the fact that if God doesn't show up in providing the right teachers, and funding for the school and ultimately kids - we are completely toasted.

And for the record, I'm writing in real time. I don't know how this story will end. One way or another this is a journey of faith ...

Withering fig trees

My brother Dan said I needed to start a blog about our little school - Acacia Classical Academy. So, let me start with a miracle. It's one of Jesus's miracles. But its by far his most weird one. You could call it absurd.

Making the lame walk, calming storms, raising the dead. Those are the normal miracles that Jesus did and he did lots of them. He finds people in need; he brings healing and transformation. Its a pretty simple formula which he used in basically every case except this one.

The fig tree cursing and withering is different. Here, Jesus is hungry so he goes over to the big old leafy fig tree and can't find any fruit. The reason he can't find fruit, Mark notes, is that it's not fig season so there aren't supposed to be any figs. Nonetheless Jesus is clearly annoyed and he curses the tree and it withers.

Unlike any other miracle, Jesus is trying to sort our his own personal issue - hunger. And unlike any other miracle instead of fixing broken stuff, which he normally does, Jesus kills off a perfectly healthy tree. And again unlike any other miracle, this doesn't solve the underlying problem which was hunger. As I said, it a uniquely absurd very strange miracle.

To make matters worse, it is in the wake of this odd manifestation of divine power that Jesus decides to teach us about divine power. Pray with faith, Jesus says, and you will get what you ask for. Wow. Really? Even on strange things like cursing unproductive fig trees? No strings attached. Have faith-pray-and its yours. Its as simple as that.

Now, of course, most of us don't believe that's how faith really works. Right? Faith is not an ask-and-get machine. We don't like name-it-claim-it, prosperity gospel theology. Certainly I don't.

But I read this text the day after I had had a small crisis of faith about our little school. My worry was then (and still is) if we could or should trust God to help us build this school - if we have the right to ask God and expect his provision. I know he can if he wants to, but does he want to? Is it safe to trust God? Somehow, in this text I think Jesus is challenging us to trust. To experiment with trust. To take a leap of faith with reckless abandon. When given the choice between wisdom and faith - choose faith.

It reminds me of the glass floor on the CN Tower in Toronto. The Canadians puttied a great window of glass into the floor some 346 meters above the earth. I was up there cautiously sticking a leg onto the glass, when beside me a man ran up and took a suicidal leap out into the middle of this glass. We all wet ourselves, of course.

I think part of the fig-tree faith miracle, is that Jesus longs for us to experience that great jump into the middle. He wants to stretch our faith onto to the glass floor.

None of us want to do that. We like safety nets.

Somehow or other, in this school project we have ended up standing on this glass floor. Its not nice or comfortable. But we're here and we're not going back. This blog should be a little bit about our story.