Planting seeds of hope

Eighteen months ago, my wife Liz and I touched down in Dar es Salaam to take up new positions with The Salvation Army in Tanzania. We arrived having led Salvation Army churches in New Zealand and Australia, and from working at divisional headquarters appointments in Christchurch and Wellington.   It’s probably fair to say that we had had a range of experiences serving God within our own comfort zones, but suddenly we were doing something new and often strange.

In our first year, our kids Sophie and Malachi found it hard to fit in. School seemed strange, their few friends all lived an hour’s drive or more away on the other side of the city, and at times they were adamant they wanted to ‘go home’. This year, they’ve been a lot more settled, for which we’re very grateful.

For Liz and I, there have also been plenty of challenges. My role involves oversight of the training of Salvation Army officers (ministers), and in addition to cultural and language differences, there has been the need to deal with the many practical difficulties that come with such a role. Liz began her time here as Education Officer, but this year has added the role of Social Secretary. The sheer scale of her job overseeing a number of the centres here—including schools, homes for trafficked girls, and more—has seen Liz grapple with huge administrative hurdles along with the need to confront corruption head on.

The bottom line is that we have moved from a place where we had everything we need—resources, support, friends, family and a comfortable lifestyle—to a place where ministry and life itself have much more to do with faith in the face of going without. Let me be clear, we have enough to eat and a good roof over our heads, but we’ve gone from the comfortable homes of New Zealand, to a place where none of the doors close quite right and where the water and power doesn’t always work.

We’ve gone from church halls with data projectors and sound systems to concrete boxes or halls thrown together using crooked poles and recycled corrugated iron. We’ve gone from electronic banking and online shopping to a place where earlier this year an officer returning from the bank was shot in the leg during a robbery. When confronted by the reality of how much of the world actually lives, something has to change, because Western individualism, consumerism and self-interest just don’t cut it anymore.

Someone once said to me that there are places where the gospel—the good news that in Jesus Christ we can encounter forgiveness, life, hope and purpose—makes more sense, because people have nothing else to rely on. When the things you usually rely on aren’t there anymore, you have to ask where your hope is going to be placed—and I think that when the time does come for us to move on from Tanzania, we will live and lead in very different ways.

I love the sense of togetherness that exists here. People live with and for one another, and the idea of unity and mutuality are very important. I love the determined respect people show one another. The lack of cynicism. The bedrock belief that faith makes a difference and God will make a way. Are there things we struggle with? Of course. But in places where life is more of a struggle, hope takes root.

Marked by hope

In February this year, I had the opportunity to spend nine days travelling around the north of Tanzania visiting the cadets (officers in training) as they led small corps (churches) there. It was an incredible opportunity to see things I’ve dreamed of since I was a boy: to stand in the waters of Lake Victoria and cross a distant corner of the Serengeti dotted by herds of zebra and wildebeest, to travel to distant mud huts down tiny pathways in a four wheel drive and experience the beautiful harmony and vibrant dance of African villagers at worship.

A highpoint of this trip was seeing the incredible work of our students. Some were sent to places where they had nowhere to live. Others arrived to find a house, but no one attending their church. Some needed to walk for hours to the nearest source of water. But without exception, as a result of the work they were doing, lives had begun to change. I encountered communities marked by hope.

And for Liz and I? Well, where we perhaps assumed that a simpler lifestyle would mean fewer distractions and a deepening experience of faith, we have found that any relationship worth having requires work, and while at times God has seemed very close, at other times things have been harder. We have found much to admire and much to love about people in Tanzania, but there have been things to confuse or discourage us. The highs have been very high, but the lows are sometimes very low. At times, our journey has been marked by self-doubt and by an awareness of our own frailty and flaws. At times, the road ahead is hard to discern.

Life anywhere has moments when the world seems right, when the sun is shining, when we face the day with a song. And life anywhere has days when we worry, we doubt, we ask: why me?

But even in doubt, hope can grow. Hope that where we are weak, God is strong. Hope that where we don’t see a way forward, God can provide. Hope that despite our frailty, God is able to take what little we have and multiply it beyond any realistic expectation we may have had of ourselves.

Every day, hope breaks into our world—like in those moments when the children from the nursery school run out to hug the white man or the white woman walking to their office, or just to shake our hand and smile the special smile of childhood that’s like the sun breaking through the clouds. Every day, just when we think we might have exhausted the grace of God, there is something, however small, that reminds us that God is still good, that love is still the strongest force on earth, and that the broken things of life can be remade in the hands of the one who longs to set us free.

Lasting change

Can I be honest? I know I have some skills. I know there are some things I can do well. And yet, I make a lot of mistakes—most of them entirely of my own making. Sometimes I feel like the city I live in: a sprawling, unplanned, chaotic and often messy hive of all that’s good and all that’s messed up about this world.

But I believe that I can be better, and not because I have some secret reservoir of strength or because of my own inherent nobility. I believe I can be better because God desires to make things right and whole and good. I can be better if I remember to stop trying so hard and just remember that I don’t have to keep l

ooking for love—love came looking for me.

To do this, I need to turn every day to God. I need to put my trust not in what I have or even what I want, but in the God who is able to supply all my needs. I need to stop waiting for things to fall in my lap, and give myself more to prayer, to reading my Bible, to finding grace in small moments, and—as my children would tell you—to developing more patience.

Maybe that’s what will be a lasting change for Liz and me: that we will learn to slow down. People walk slowly here. Last week, we took the cadets to a local trade fair, and half way there I realised that yet again we were a long way ahead of the people following us! So, maybe we can learn to slow down, to wait upon the Lord, to put aside the unimportant and take up the slow and patient way of community. Maybe we can stop trying to solve every problem, control every situation and right every wrong, and start showing love in the midst of a sometimes indifferent world.    

Maybe we can deny ourselves, and live for the God whose love continues to change the world, from the farthest corner of Tanzania to the smallest towns of Aotearoa New Zealand. Maybe we can hope for that.

By Iain Gainsford