Category Archives: Islamic theology

April 22, 2011 · 10:43 pm

Of What It Means To Be Forgiven.

God does not forgive sin.

At least, not in the way that we so casually fling the word about. Living in a Muslim country has taught me that the Evangelical Christian church has more in common with Islam than we ought to be comfortable with-particularly in the way that we use the word “forgive”. Islamic doctrine teaches that at the end of a Muslim’s life, Allah weighs his good and bad deeds on a scale and then makes an arbitrary decision as to whether or not to “forgive” that particular individual. For Allah to “forgive” a Muslim means that he has decided to let the offense go. He’s sliding sin under the cosmic rug-deciding that it’s okay, and he’s not going to do anything about it. If a Muslim is “forgiven”, sin quietly slips away and simply goes unpunished. 

When we talk about God forgiving sin, we’re often implying that He does much the same thing. But a holy, just God can’t do that. A God that is both perfectly holy and perfectly just cannot tolerate sin and must punish it. And the Bible details exactly how sin must be punished: by death. Not a physical death-but an eternal separation from God [better known as hell].

Crushed under the damning weight of sin, desperate people like you and I find ourselves gently drawn to the only place we have to go: the cross.

When God “forgives” sinners like me, He is not simply choosing to ignore the sin-He’s pouring every ounce of His wrath towards my sin into Jesus, who stands in the gap between me and the holy God that has to met out the just punishment for my cosmic treason. That is how I am forgiven. My forgiveness was costly. It was horrific and bloody-an innocent man that had already been beaten beyond recognition was nailed to a couple planks of wood to die an unimaginable death  in my stead. Nothing was swept under the rug. On the cross, Jesus absorbed the wrath of God on my behalf-and there it was finished.

The cross is the picture of God’s absolute rage against sin-and His relentless love and mercy towards sinners. In sending Jesus to earth to live the perfect life that we could not, and take the punishment for our sin on our behalves, God spoke. God spoke, and what He said is that He loves us and we don’t have to be the way we are. We need no longer be enslaved to the sin that whispers to us every morning when we wake up. We are more sinful and wretched than we ever dared to imagine-but we are more loved than we ever dared hope. We have been ransomed from sin and death-bought back at unfathomable expense. That’s the cross. And when we say that God forgives sin-the cross is what we’re talking about.

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Filed under God's faithfulness, Hope, Islamic theology, Musings

March 24, 2011 · 2:54 pm

The Girl On The Left. [Just One More?]

People slip so easily into an endless sea of faceless humanity. Their names and stories are quickly forgotten as they are reduced to mere statistics-numbers overheard on the five o’clock news and forgotten by dinner time.

That girl you see on the left? She’s a statistic.

You see, she’s just one more. One more Senegalese girl whose boyfriend was hitting her and cheating on her when I met her.

One more Senegalese girl who was convinced that she deserved it. That she wasn’t worth any more than that.

One more Senegalese girl who is trying to earn her way into heaven-and who lives her life with a gnawing, ever-growing dread that she is not good enough.

The problem with statistics is that they are comprised of individual stories. And this is Fatou’s.

Christy and I met Fatou last year, and were instantaneously struck by her soft, brown eyes and hesitant smile. She was haltingly open-speaking with surprising candor about her abusive relationship with her boyfriend, fears of one day marrying a man that she would have to share with three other wives, and an ever-growing certainty that she was going to hell. I remember a long, sun-soaked afternoon about a year ago spent sitting at my kitchen table with Miriam [whom you’ve met before] and Fatou. Miriam is a devout Muslim, and is always covered from the top of her head to her feet. Sitting beside her in stark contrast,  Fatou was wearing a tank top that April day. I’m sure you’re intimately familiar with the fact that Muslim women are expected to be covered at all times-and clearly, Fatou was not. Gently, I asked her why she and Miriam were dressed so differently.

In a moment of mind-numbing, blunt honestly, that sweet girl looked at me and shrugged her frail shoulders sadly. “If there really is a heaven and there really is a hell, I know I’m going to hell. I can’t be good enough-why would I try?”

Fatou had simply surrendered in a hopeless fight she somehow knew she could only lose. Somehow she understood that one day when she stands before God, she won’t be “good” enough for Him to accept her.

Christy and I shared the gospel with Fatou countless times last year-coming at it from every angle we could think of. I remember the evening that she turned to me and said, “You have such a good heart. I want Jesus to clean my heart too, so it can be like yours.”

Here’s the thing about Fatou. She believes the gospel-all of it. She believes that the Bible is true-that she can never be good enough for God to accept her, but that He loves her so intensely that He sent Jesus to be good on her behalf, and to absorb the punishment for her sins so that she could be reconciled to God.

So what gives?

Fatou was raised by her grandmother-a Muslim woman who vehemently threatens that should Fatou ever decide to follow Jesus, she will curse her and expel her from the family. She is afraid that even after her grandmother is dead, if she chooses Jesus, “her spirit will curse her”. Something in Fatou’s broken heart has resonated with the irrational love of Jesus-but right now, that longing is not enough to cause her to walk away from her family.

Thus, Fatou is crippled by the paralyzing terror that comes with knowing that she stands to lose everything that is familiar to her if she chooses Jesus, and a certainty that there is no hope if she does not.

A thinly veiled ache emanates from her soft, hopeless eyes that seem desperate for more. Several weeks ago, Fatou commented to Michelle “I just want to follow someone that will give me something to believe in!” And given that she feels like she cannot follow Jesus, she’s been looking to different cult leaders [known as Marabouts] within Islam in Senegal.

She visited the house of one such man last week to participate in a dark ritual making her one of his followers. After eating dinner, followers are asked to verbally give the Marabout their soul, and then to physically bow down to him.

Fatou later commented that immediately after she repeated the ritual vow, she felt sick. Somehow, she knew that she could not give a mere man her soul-”because God created it”. And when asked to bow down to the Marabout, that sweet, feisty Muslim girl snapped, “my heart refused”.

Fatou’s mom died three weeks ago. In an animistic twist to the folk-Islam Fatou follows, she believes that her mother’s spirit wanders the earth for forty days after her death-and even feels the unspeakable pain of her own body slowly decaying in the ground. Feeling the weight of her dead mother’s soul on her painfully inadequate shoulders, Fatou has spent hours every day tearfully begging Allah to accept her Mother into Paradise.

Fatou is torn between what she knows to be true-and the demands of her family. Her search for something-anything that might replace Jesus within Islam is proving absolutely futile-the other day in a bout of frustration, she exclaimed “I don’t understand! Why don’t all Muslims follow the teachings of Jesus!?”

Christy didn’t have a good answer for that one. :)

Fatou is studying the Bible with us every Tuesday morning, and has determined to ask her Grandmother why she doesn’t follow Jesus.

 To the Western mind, this might sound simple. You believe-just follow Jesus. But consider for a moment the simple fact you and I probably don’t understand what the gospel costs the way that Fatou does. Jesus demands every piece of our lives from each of us-Fatou understands this in a painfully tangible way. The gospel has not been cheapened for her the way it can be for those of us in the Western world that will only ever experience a shadow of the “cost” to following Jesus that Fatou will. And Fatou has yet to understand that the cost is worth the reward.

But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in Him… -Phil 3: 7-9a

If you would, pray with me that this becomes her story. That she would indeed consider every other piece of her life insignificant next to knowing Jesus-and that she would find herself in Him. To Jesus, she is not “just one more”. Fatou is treasured by God Himself.

And He knows her name and story.

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Filed under Islamic theology, Ministry moments, Team

January 1, 2011 · 10:08 pm

The Lost Boys. [They Each Have Names.]

I briefly left my apartment yesterday for the first time in…well, much too long. When I opened the front door of my building, I immediately saw two things.

Her:

And him:

I’m going to call him Pierre. He’s a “talibe boy” which means that a couple of years ago, lured by the false promise that their son would be fed and educated, Pierre’s parents sold him to a local cult leader called a “marabout”. They are almost certainly from poverty-stricken village, and were probably promised that if they sold Pierre, they would be guarenteed a spot in Paradise after they died. [A Muslim's dream.] And so as a two year old toddler, Pierre became one of the thousands of barefoot “Lost Boys” that aimlessly wander the filthy streets of Dakar.  He spends his days pleading for spare change with a rusty, dented tomato paste can-desperately trying to meet his daily quota. If he fails, he’ll be beaten. Pierre will grow up illiterate-unable to so much as color inside the lines, much less write his own name.

And honestly, nobody really cares about his name. The marabout owns him-that is his identity. 

I really want to adopt Pierre. He belongs in a cheerfully colored preschool with a bright blue Thomas the Tank Engine lunchbox tucked away safely in his cubby. He ought to come home to someone that would scoop him up in a bear hug and let him eat too many chocolate chip cookies for snack. Someone that would proudly hang every single one of his finger paintings on the fridge, and read him “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” as many times as he wanted before gently tucking him into bed at night. Someone that could teach him that he is valuable.

That four year old little boy doesn’t belong sitting hopelessly on the side of the road like this. No child does.  But that’s Pierre’s reality. He and some other talibe boys were playing with firecrackers right outside my door yesterday.

They saw my camera, and ran to ask me to take their pictures. I love Pierre’s toothy little grin.

One of them had a scratched up, bleeding face-which is what happens when you let little boys play with firecrackers. I’ll bet each one of them would love a Mom and Dad to tell him “no”.

Pierre was covered in scabies-all the boys were. Beside him is the old tomato paste can he uses to beg. It’s full of sugar cubes because in Senegal, it’s considered good luck to give a talibe sugar. Thus, in addition to being incredibly malnourished, Pierre’s teeth are beginning to rot.

Senegal is a hub for human trafficking-mostly women and children. The women are sold into the sex trade, and…well, you see what happens to the children. Many of them are prostituted as well. Statistically, there is at least a 4/5 chance that Pierre is sexually abused.

At four years old, his greatest concern should be where on earth he left his green crayon-not where on earth he’s going to find his next meal. I don’t have an answer, here. I just know that Pierre is not a nameless, faceless statistic to Jesus. He is of infinite value and worth to God-and thus, should be of infinite value and worth to me. Each of these boys have names and stories-names and stories that God knows as well as yours and mine.

I think somehow, their stories ought to change ours.

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Filed under Islamic theology, Musings, Senegal, The daily grind

November 16, 2010 · 5:57 pm

Of Crunched Prayer Beads. [Oops.]

Stories like this one make me miss girls like these ones. Both of whom might easily find themselves in the exact same situation...

Where did we leave off?

That’s right, with me on the beach in my trampy outfit.  My team and I had made plans to eat by the ocean that Friday night, and then to hop in a couple of the filthy, canary yellow, precarious death traps masquerading as taxis and head to an ice cream shop [called, get this: NICECREAM] downtown. And with the promise of flavors like “Obama ice cream”, how could we possibly go wrong?

 Because I’m simply mad about using time efficiently, we arranged for everybody to meet me with dinner in hand, on the beach at the very end of my run. [Let’s talk about who came out on top in that deal…]

 Well what I’d failed to take into consideration in my meticulous planning was the critical, minor detail that during said jaunt from the beach to downtown Dakar, I would still be in my running clothes.

The best laid plans.

But what’s a girl to do? By the time I realized what I’d done, we were eating chicken pasta and caprice on a cliff by the ocean while the sun slowly bowed offstage to the Atlantic’s standing ovation, in a theatrical waltz of purples and reds. [Life is hard.]

We finished our al fresco dinner, and then divided up into two groups to hop into those aforementioned taxis, head downtown, and try to find an ice cream place that none of us ACTUALLY knew how to get to.  If you’ve lived internationally, a slow smile just crept across your face because you understand what it is to hop in a car with a complete stranger that does not speak your language, and drive off into the foreign unknown without the foggiest idea of exactly where you’re headed and even less idea as to where you’ll actually end up.

Ben, Ted and I hailed a taxi, and gave a very nice Wolof-speaking gentleman the general area of town we were aiming for, hoping that we’d spy Nicecream on the way. No such luck. After about twenty minutes of aimless driving, one very frustrated Senegalese taxi driver dropped three rather baffled, very lost STINTers on the side of the road, and sputtered off into the night in a glorious blaze of exhaust and smoke.

It was thus that I found myself downtown in a Muslim, African country at nine o’clock at night, wearing running shorts and a tank top.

 

Because we’re survivors [cue Destiny’s Child!] and I was once a Girl Scout for three and a half whole weeks, we immediately found the nearest tree and looked for moss to ascertain the direction of due north.

…or we would have, had we been able to find so much as a bush.  But we live in Dakar, and consequently had to settle for wandering aimlessly in the dark, hoping we would somehow bump into Nicecream.

I felt for all the world, like I did the time my Mom found a stash of approximately twenty six thousand tootsie roll wrappers under my bed. You know those hand-in-the-cookie-jar moments as a kid when you get caught doing something you’re entirely guilty of, and there’s not a darn thing you can do except stand there with an abashed, sheepish look on your face?

That was me in my running clothes, bumbling around my Muslim city in the dark.

Now, you have to understand that I’m almost never out at night-once the sun sets, I’m not allowed outside of my apartment without one of the men. And while I understand the reasoning behind that, I do dearly miss evenings spent outside. I really love nighttime. All that to say, in all of my excited, distracted enthusiasm at being outside in the cool dark, I didn’t even notice what I’d done until he grabbed me.

In fact, I wasn’t even sure who “he” was-I never saw him. All I knew was that suddenly and without warning, someone was angrily clutching my arm. Instinctively, I ripped it away and turned heatedly to face the offender-Ben and Ted right behind me.  

…and that’s when understanding slowly dawned. My nemesis was a Senegalese man standing carefully on his prayer rug-which along with his prayer beads, I had just stepped on in all of my scandalous, ugly-American glory.

You see, for a Muslim man to even think of praying, he has to perform a lengthy ritual washing process known as an ablution.  It’s incredibly detailed-instructions are precisely dictated for every step-from the kind of water you are permitted to use to wash yourself, to the order, number of times, and manner in which you wash your different body parts. A lengthy list of offenses will invalidate your ablution-and thus, prevent Allah from hearing and accepting your prayers. Amongst said list, is touching a woman.

And there I was, standing guiltily in my shorts on a very irate Muslim man’s prayer rug with his brown string of prayer beads crunched under my tennis shoe. Somebody ought to have just slapped a scarlet “A” on my forehead and called it a day.

Missionary fail. The poor guy had to be convinced he was going to hell six times over for that one.

As Ben and Ted joined me in a frenzied, apologetic chorus of “desolee’s”, we quickly backed away and got the heck out of dodge.

On the bright side, that Obama flavored ice cream was delish.

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Filed under Cross cultural moments, Islamic theology

November 5, 2010 · 5:07 pm

Of Fairies, Mummies, and Jesus. [Oh My!]

Some of the girls that came to our Halloween party.

And the conversation went something like this:

Awa: What are American traditions on Halloween?

Me: Well, we all dress up in costumes and ask our neighbors for candy.

Awa: Why?

Me: …*cricket

With some of my favorites! From left to right: Miriam, Benedicte, Awa and Awa.

 

Dear. Goodness. Have any of us ever actually thought about that? I hadn’t the foggiest idea! It threw me into a bit of a panic-I mean, how many other activities do I mindlessly engage in without even the most fleeting thought as to why? And so I started contemplating other absurd traditions that we stoutly cling to as Americans. Let’s talk about hot dogs, for one.  Who on earth woke up one day and decided that the quintessential American food-the signature flourish at Fourth of July picnics and baseball games from sea to shining sea-ought to be processed pig parts in a clear, edible casing?

Delish. No wonder the French think we’re Neanderthals.

And while we’re on a roll, when did we start wishing on blown out birthday candles? Why do I hang a giant sock over my fireplace for a morbidly obese man to creep in and fill with toothpaste and Starbucks gift cards?

Why do I throw my money into small bodies of water at the mall? And why do I habitually lie about the color of my underwear every St. Patrick’s day?

 And TEETH under my pillow? I put my OLD, DEAD TEETH under my HEAD for a miniature, winged fairy to come collect for

Our TP mummy-making contest. ...my team did not win.

money?!

…someone really ought to teach the poor thing a marketable skill and get her out of the tooth-hawking business.

It was with a slightly bemused stammer that I endeavored to explain our quirky little Halloween traditions yesterday to a group of Senegalese students that couldn’t figure out quite what to make of the fact that I still dress up every year.

Both thought provoking and wildly entertaining.

Somehow, everything connects back to Jesus-every little thing-and Halloween is no exception. One of the most

Our hot-mess mummies.

 exciting pieces of my job is discovering innovative ways to help students understand that they were created for Jesus-that there is a heart-longing for Him that can be satisfied by no created thing.  It’s beautiful. In a concerted effort to get to the gospel in a fresh, creative way, my team and I threw a “traditional American Halloween party” yesterday.  Given the fact that we are the only Americans that most of our students know, we get to define the finer points of American culture in whatever manner we deem appropriate. [Thus, our students believe that Americans sit around and talk about Jesus at every party they have. ;)]  In light of the unfortunate reality that Target and Harris Teeter are very far away indeed, our “traditional” fete consisted of some fun-sized Snickers bars [Ben and I later concluded that there is nothing even vaguely “fun” about “fun-sized” candy], a pink toilet paper mummy wrapping contest, and a discussion about fear, power and Jesus.  

Sev.

Fear proved to be a captivating topic. Imagine for a brief moment, that you’re a Muslim. You wake up at five AM every early morning to answer the first of five calls to prayer that resound through your city throughout  the day-carefully going through a ritual washing process in a fearful attempt to cleanse yourself before you cautiously kneel on your worn prayer rug. Quietly, you begin to murmur the familiar Arabic prayers that are as much a part of you as your very name-echoes of your culture, your family.  You press your forehead to the ground and nervously, timidly approach a distant god that may or may not be listening. Muslims believe that Allah sits on top of “seven heavens”-and so physically as well as emotionally, Allah is far, far from them.  There is no assurance as to what will happen to them when they die. Everything is left up to the “divine and merciful will of Allah”-so no matter how good you are, how many times you pray, whether or not you scrape together enough money to make the coveted pilgrimage to Mecca-…you could do everything right, but Allah might still send you to hell.

“Merciful”?

To be a Muslim is to be haunted by disabling, suffocating fear.  A continual, gnawing, ever-growing hopeless dread that you have not done enough.

Yesterday, a Congolese man named Severy stood up in front of twenty five spellbound students and talked about the fear that they are so intimately acquainted with-and the God that is passionately pursuing their hearts with whom they are not.  Sev explained that before he decided to walk with Jesus, he’d been rendered absolutely powerless by his own sin. I watched the eyes around me light up-each heart in the room echoing his story. You could see raw pain hopelessly etched into some of their faces-“That’s me. I can’t do enough. That’s my story.”

 Sev talked about what happened when he at long last came to the ecstatically freeing conclusion that Jesus-not he-was the only solution to his problem of sin. Sev was beaming as he explained how the perfect love that He found in Christ had exorcised fear from his life!

Joy is an all together different thing to me now than it was before my life in a Muslim country. May I never, never take it for granted again.

About twenty five students heard the gospel yesterday-many for the first time.  The idea that the God of the Universe loves you, wants you, and died so that you could know Him is entirely counter-intuitive to the Muslim heart that secretly longs for it to be true.  Ask God to show my students that the gospel is for them.

 “And as He stands in victory-sin’s curse has lost its grip on me!”

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Filed under Cross cultural hilarity, Holidays other than Christmas, Islamic theology, Ministry moments