on the road to Kagadi

It's that time again. It has been a year since I fasted from television. Funny that what was then a sacrifice has become a way of life now. Don't get me wrong. I watch television, just much less frequently than I used to. And let me say for the record, I am so glad. I said it then and I'll say it now. There is so little good television, so little that builds up or educates or glorifies. It is just mostly not good. You know I'm right.

So, today is day one of 21 days of prayer and fasting, 2011 edition. I am so excited about this year because I am actually going to participate in a more traditional fast. I can give you more details if you want, but that part's really not interesting. I have never done this before, in a traditional since. And really, even after last year's experience, I can honestly say I've never been in this place in my Walk, have never felt more called to participate and have never felt closer to my God. I have big faith that He will do big things in me and through my fasting and prayer over the next 21 days... and forever.

Since I don't really know what I'm doing, I decided to follow some instruction and teaching and encouragement. There is so much at my fingertips now that I want to make sure and grab - so much for the taking. I don't want to miss a thing. I will be reading Stovall Weems' book Awakening throughout. After the first day's reading, I can tell you it's going to be good.

I learned in church this morning that fasting is about putting to death your body, and really your soul, in order that your spirit will thrive and grow and takeover control of you. I have never known this about the fast. A key verse I have read and heard is Joel 2.12 - " 'Even now,' declares the Lord, 'return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.' " The point is to return to your place of salvation. You know, that emotional high that came right as you sealed the deal? For some, I suppose it's the very moment of initial salvation, when you first committed your life to Christ. For me, it happened years later.

When I was seven years old, I "asked Jesus into my heart." I was scared of Hell. I asked him that day in backyard Bible school and I asked him every chance I got after that, just to make sure. I'm not implying that at such a young age I didn't know what I was doing or that I wasn't saved from that moment on. I really don't know about those things. Weird. What I am saying is that after years of church-going and Christian-schooling and Bible-reading and memorizing and prayer-praying and Sunday-schooling, I did not fully grasp the depth of the wealth and the life that was mine because of the immeasurable love of my God.

Read that last sentence again, because it's big...

I was on a medical mission trip to Uganda with a group from Oak Mountain Presbyterian Church in the summer of 2007. It was a dream come true for sure. I had always known that I would be a medical missionary all through high school. I wanted it so badly, but Chemistry and Biology disagreed with me and I let it go. A doctor I would not be. But you better believe I jumped on the opportunity to play one for a couple of weeks.

The trip was too short and lacked the amount of medical clinic I felt we could have provided and that would have satiated my thirst for a dream deferred. Nonetheless, it was magical. I can say to you with every ounce of honesty in my bones that I fell in love with Africa, with Uganda, with those people and their infectious smiles and limitless hope and gratifying simplicity. I would have stayed there, or at least gone back if I had been in a different place in my life. I left a part of me there. A chunk of my heart will always be in Uganda.

I took Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz to read along the way. Great book. Probably not for everyone, but it's right up my ally and happened to be the voice God chose to use to talk to me while I was away. We were on a short bus, driving way too fast down our wrong side of a narrow, muddied, potholed road somewhere on the road to Kagadi from Kampala. A trip that should have taken a couple of hours ended up taking four or five, if I remember correctly. It was nuts - the only time I feared for my life the entire two weeks I was gone. I read to keep my mind off the circumstance. It was in chapter seven, "Grace," that God spoke to me so audibly I could hear the breaths he took between sentences. I wept and underlined and starred. The lines I made resemble a heart monitor's - the road was so rough I couldn't make a straight mark.

At the end of the chapter, at the bottom of page 86, I wrote, "I get it. Uganda. 7.9.07. 12:54 pm."
My life has not been the same since that minute.

I believe truly that was the moment of my transformation. Don't misread. I am not, nor am I almost, transformed. But at that moment, I began to find a God I had not even known existed before. What has become a greater passion and a deeper relationship and a bigger God than I had ever known started in that moment, halfway around the world, in that little bus, amid those potholes and that mud, somewhere on the road to Kagadi.

In that moment, I felt a more real, more intense freedom and happiness and clarity than I had before and have since. That is where I am headed over the next 21 days. I am child-like in my eagerness to "return to [Him] with all my heart." I can't wait to get back there, once my body and soul are defeated and my spirit can soar without the dead weight they offer. There is where my God is. He wants us to live in that moment. I want to live in that moment.

Surely I don't have to go halfway around the world to get back there. Surely God is as much in my Alabama home as he was on the road to Kagadi. Over these next days, my greatest prayer is that I will be as far away from "the world" now, in my own home, as I was then - on the road to Kagadi. And that I would stay there.