The view from our house in Zomba is so good it should make a missionary feel guilty. Perching like eagles at 1000 metres elevation, we look down upon the tail end of the Great Rift Valley, which runs down the gut of east central Africa before it grinds to a halt in the massif of Mulanje, rising up before our eyes to over 3000 metres. It’s stunning. Go ahead, take a look:
In the rainy season huge nimbus clouds swell and darken over Mulanje and sheets of rain lash the plain; at night lightening splits the sky from top to bottom. After the rain storms dry up a rainbow might dance over the villages lying at our feet. In the dry season the heat shimmers and crackles on the plain, and the air grows thick from the dust kicked up by tens of thousands of men walking to work and tens of thousands of women cooking over fires. It’s like storybook Africa. Through thick air we strain our eyes to see the bulk of Mulanje, 60 km distant, or to see the silver blue smudge of Lake Chilwa to its east.
It’s heavenly isn’t it?
This time last year we were enjoying the view with a friend who had come over for tea. A local of Zomba, she heads a small organization that reaches out to orphans and ”vulnerable children”. In fact, she had just driven back from the very plain we look down upon from our heavenly vantage. But she found no paradise there. Her report was grim. At the end of the dry season food was scarce and hunger rampant. Lake Chilwa, a shallow basin fed only by rain, was drying up…and with it the fishing industry that sustains the locals. Many women were forced to turn to prostitution to feed their kids. One story in particular turned our hearts: she came across a few young brothers living together in the ruins of a hut. Their parents had died; they had no clothes apart from what was on their backs; and the elder brother, aged 14, had to drop out of school to try to find some money to feed his kid brothers. He began weeping as he told her this.
From our heavenly view we saw none of the tragedies being played out beneath us in villages and huts and fields. We knew nothing of the pain and hunger down there. We couldn’t feel the fear of an orphan forced to be a father to his brothers. Nor could we hear him weep for the end of his innocence. If we wanted to help, we’d have to descend into the dust and heat of the plain; and there, see, hear, feel the sufferings of a thousand thousand lives.
This time of year especially we celebrate the fact that God does not look down upon us from afar but is, rather, Emmanuel, God with us. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). God himself forsook his heavenly view of his world, and in Jesus Christ entered fully and completely into the countless tragedies of our world. He is no stranger to hurt or hunger. He is not deaf to the cries of the broken hearted. God dwells in our world as much as he reigns in heaven. Thank God for aid organizations and charities and churches and projects like “Gifts of Change” and individual Christians who pursue the path blazed for us by God himself, who in Christ “descended to the depths…” (Ephesians 4:9).
