Forgive my megalomania. What I am about to say to you will sound like the grossest arrogance. I have known what it is to be Jesus Christ. I have left the glorious halls of heaven and stepped into the muck of humanity. Incarnation is the ultimate humiliation. Not simply to live fully within the flesh. But to live as a worm and remember when you were a butterfly. Incarnation is metamorphosis in reverse. And that is what it’s like to leave your homeland and be reborn in another. Nor is this a first world to third world demotion. Anyone who has lived in the comfort of their home culture and then been transplanted voluntarily or by force knows what I feel. Christ saved the earth. But it ruined heaven for him in the process. Never again, having passed to the other side can we again feel at home in Egypt. You despise me now. For my presumption. My suffering is small next to the Savior’s. But he was large when he came to earth. I was frail and dumb, even while convinced of my strength and my wisdom. To have it stripped away. To question the thundering voice of my destiny. This was too much for me. Too much for anyone. We are all broken down when we leave our home. Not as a tourist but as a savior. Who’s to say you have not come into the kingdom for such a time as this?

How I would love to return and forget. To lose myself in the smells of my family home. The mist on the fallow fields around the town where I grew up. To hear only one language and to not know another. To sing songs in church without thinking. Just to feel. To feel my culture and my people and my language and my land wrapped around me. To feel all that without feeling it at all. Just to live. All that is taken from me now. Everything is ironic. Family celebrations ring false. To gather at the table for Thanksgiving seems an affront to the starving. To wander through shopping malls and drive through supercities and always to remember, remember, remember. How is this memory a mercy? How are the faces of the dying and the starving and the ill and the poor some sort of sacrament? A requiem for humanity. Noble, heart-wrenching. But, ah, sometimes I would like to forget. I would like to live and struggle in the material world of my home country. Screw the third world. Let them solve their own problems. How has our colonization done anything other than muck things up? I can grow petunias in a rock quarry. But far better to leave the pit to the snakes and the cactus and those desert creatures that thrive in scarcity.

When we begin to live overseas our presuppositions grind up against the alien reality of a different culture. Everything squeezes, squeezes. Until we snap. The bugs never leave you alone. They climb the walls. They are always on your skin. The ants swarm continually until you learn never to leave anything out. Termites are working, working on the walls, and the foundation of your house. Gnawing on everything. Overwhelming a bookshelf if you leave for the weekend. Return and your treasured books are gnawed and encased within red tunnels of mud. People never stop banging on your gate with impossible requests. From being just one in a million in America I am suddenly different and a target. Beggars make a beeline. Thieves make plans. Con artists smile and sidle. How can you tell who the good guys are? How can you decide who to help? Everyone you meet is a pastor of a struggling church, or maybe just a flimflam man with a borrowed tie and a slick story. Every beaten-down woman with a malnourished child on her back is going to die if I don’t help her with money right now. A trip through town can be a gauntlet or a journey through a house of horrors. Lost legs don’t lie. Blind and leprous aren’t faking it. But if I say yes when will I ever be able to say no?

All the civility that causes us to behave breaks down when you live in another country. Family ties. Church conformity. Peer pressure. The desire for a good reputation. All that goes poof. Nothing presses on you anymore. You are left flimsy and vulnerable. That one hidden temptation can become huge and easy to satisfy. Cross-cultural stress can magnify the attractions of the forbidden and strip away our ability to resist. Why did I survive when so many like me fell apart? It is a mercy that I did not flame out. Was it a grace as well?

Bureaucracy is bringing me down. It’s not just the incomprehensible nature of the things I’m asked to do. But it’s the capricious nature of everything that leaves me feeling fatalistic. Could I hurry this up with a little cash under the table? My conscience won’t allow it. But if I’m not going to use the dollar to push things forward I have two other options but at this stage I think there is only one. This blue shirted official is extremely concerned because I have done something wrong on my paperwork. I did not know that my nationality is americana since nacionalidade is a feminine noun. This means that all the paperwork must be redone. Can we just add a little line to the o so it becomes an a? No, that would be tampering with official documents. You must start over. So, I start filling out all these forms trying my best to conceal the boiling rage against this stupid country, and this stupid worker and this stupid system. The man behind the desk looks at me sadly. He is not sad that I haven’t bribed him. Not all officials are corrupt. He is sad because I blamed him for the error. Because I refused to see past the task to the person behind the desk. If I had only been friendly. If I had simply apologized and asked for his help. But foreigners are so stupid that way.

By God’s mercy, in those early years in Tete, I never shouted at an official behind a desk. I never pushed a Mozambican or insulted them. I never spoke ill of this country, its institutions or its future. But behind closed doors, my family heard me rage against it all. My wife found me in our bedroom shaking and swearing because of people who had pushed me too far. Of course now I am philosophical. Now after many years I have learned not to hurry but to wait. And most of all I have learned to laugh. Laughter is the sound of our frustration being rolled in sugar. Laughter is the acknowledgement of our own folly and the admission of our own limitations. Now I laugh. But in 2001, I was wound up. I was on a mission. I was changing the world. And I was meeting frustrations at every turn. The music of the disco next door was pounding. The guy I paid to guard my house was casing the joint for a robbery. Every office I visited was inhabited by strange people with inscrutable motives and grandiose plans that all included me spending thousands of dollars on development projects that had absolutely nothing to do with why I was in Africa. No one was doing what I wanted. I invited people to meetings and they didn’t come. Others called meetings and didn’t invite me. The heat and the dust and the scarcity and the general incomprehensibility of everything ensured that I couldn’t think clearly about the Bible translation or linguistics.

If you think I had a Messiah complex you should have met Bud. He was called from the backwoods of Arkansas because God told him to go to Mozambique and preach to the natives. At that point he didn’t even know how to find it on a map. But he dragged his crazy wife, and his impossible optimism and several thousands of dollars to Tete of all places and started putting chapa roofs on churches and buying bicycles for “pastors.” If you think I was naive just meet Bud. He preached the Gospel every Sunday. The Gospel is very simple. He told everyone this. Actually, the Gospel is really complicated. But Bud was simple. And so he got ripped off and robbed and lied to and every once in a while some kind Mozambican tried to be nice to him. But by that time he was such a bundle of nerves that he had started shaking his fist at government officials and calling perfectly good pastors crooks. Bud made me feel normal. Long after a voice from heaven called him to China and he had disappeared from Africa forever his memory lived on. Sometimes people even knocked at my door and said, “Are you Bud?” No, friend. By God’s grace, I am not Bud.