Jinja Mission Team - Busoga Churches of Christ

Shortly after Adam arrived here in Jinja (December 2005), he introduced Emily and I to one of his many adventure videos, this one entitled “Touching the Void.”  The documentary recounts the story of 2 climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, in their attempt to ascend the almost vertical western face of Siula Grande, a 22,000 foot monument within the colossal outdoor natural museum of Peru , otherwise known as the Peruvian Andes Mountains .  Simpson and Yates conquered the face and reached the summit by the second day, though during the descent it seemed that the mountain itself was not conquered, but still fighting.  At about 19,000 feet, Simpson slipped down an ice cliff and smashed his tibia.  He recalls in the film the common knowledge among climbers that in such a situation, one dies- The end.  When his partner to whom he was tied caught up to him, they assessed the situation and decided to attempt an extremely risky rescue attempt.  They tied their 150-foot ropes together allowing Simpson to be lowered slowly, 300 feet at a time. They descended several thousand feet through this arduous process until Simpson gained too much speed on the steep slope and careened over a ledge.  Yates, a few hundred feet above, was not able to see his partner through the blistering storm, though he knew from the tension on the rope that something was wrong.  He waited for several hours for Simpson to resolve the problem.  Dangling in mid air on the other end of the rope, Simpson was attempting to climb back up the rope to the ledge as the unforgiving night became darker and the howling wind colder.  He tried for hours, but with freezing hands that were only getting colder, he eventually submitted to the elements.  The time came where Yates was forced to cut the rope, realizing that if he stayed they would both most certainly die.  As Yates cut the rope, Simpson fell almost 100 feet into a crevasse onto an ice-bridge below.  The next morning, Yates descended the mountain, found the ledge and spotted the crevasse into which Simpson had fallen, deducing that his partner had surely died.  Simpson, however, broken and bruised crawled down along the ice-bridge and out another opening to daylight.  Over the course of the next few days, without food and with only the water from frozen snow and ice, Simpson gradually lowered himself down the side of the mountain along their trail back to the base camp.  He arrived just hours before Yates had planned to make his journey back to civilization, physically exhausted and mentally delusional.  Simpson’s escape is widely regarded as one of the greatest feats in mountaineering.  The tagline to this film is, “The closer you are to death, the more you realize you are alive.” 

Adam loved stories like this.  He loved adventure, he loved survival, and I have yet to meet anyone with as many near-death adventure stories than my friend Adam Langford .  I loved being in a large group with him as the phase of the conversation would eventually turn to storytelling, which happens here with the regularity of the setting sun.  If there were several of us who knew him well, we might spur a familiar favorite, saying, “tell them about the avalanche,”  “tell them about getting caught on the mountain,” or perhaps, “tell them about almost falling down the crevasse” (all of them true).   He loved storytelling and he had the gift of offering a tale a thousand times over, only to leave his listeners with the hope of hearing another, or perhaps even the same story again.  For him, this was his art, both in receiving and in sharing a story.   He told me once that he hoped to live life looking for a good story, though as I reflect on my time with him, he seemed to live a life that produced a good story. It was not necessary for him to be the hero- he left those personal heroic stories (and there were plenty) for other people to tell.  In fact, in most of his stories he did not come out looking that great at all, though they all possessed a moral that subtly illuminated the person he desired to be and the better world he envisioned.   He was one of the few people whom I have known that possessed the confidence and freedom to live his life as if he was writing his own story, with all of the intricacies of dynamic characters, irony, and climax through the themes of grace and redemption.  

However, most of my time spent with Adam over the last year and a half was not spent in the midst of adventure and survival (though there were bouts with malaria, bacterial infections and road trips that could definitely qualify).  Most of my memories here with him are very ordinary- evenings spent around the dinner table in conversation about the day’s events, trips to a hotel down the street to watch a soccer game, team meetings and Tuesdays on the golf-field (I can’t in good conscience call it a golf course for fear that it will evoke the image of an American course, though the Nile view is inspiring), and hours spent on his back porch looking across the mouth of the Nile as we attempted to dream up a better world.  My favorite memories with him are the conversations through days and nights as we struggled together to figure out how to live responsibly in this world in light of the life of Christ, within all if the world’s economic, political and cultural complexities.  It was all very ordinary, and it was every day- nothing that would incline us to take a picture.  It is the memory of these experiences, many of them common regardless of nationality or economic class, that I carry with me like a satchel filled with pearls, often opening it back up for one more peek to assure myself that they are real and that they are mine.  

As I recall these memories that are so very common in any life, I am struck with both the universality and the particularity of our situation.  One of the lessons that we have learned through our time here is that if theology is to mean anything, it must address the issues of survival, solidarity and suffering.  Death is all around us and we are constantly being invited to attend funerals.  From the first month after our arrival, we have been asked to participate in funeral ceremonies.  I would even go as far as saying that it is impossible to understand the nature of the church here in Africa apart from the participation in a burial.  I do believe, though, that it was at Moses’ funeral that I first shared the world shattering grief with my brothers and sisters here.  We wept together over the incomprehensible loss of our friends, Moses and Adam.  In the midst of my grief it occurred to me that there are few people in Uganda that don’t understand my situation.  I have yet to meet someone who does not have a story on hand about a mother, father, child or friend who has recently passed away.  Many people have expressed the pain that comes with the feeling that no one understands one’s particular situation in such a state of grief, but my soul has been crying out with an equal if not greater fervor due to the perceived injustice that every person either knows or will know the pain that I am experiencing.  And yet, there are particularities to this experience that do make it difficult for anyone else to understand.  Adam’s parents, extended family, Ben, Kym, the rest of our team and all of those friends of Adam that he met along his much too short 28 year old journey share a very particular relationship with Adam, which makes our grief particular though it forms us into a community. 

We are now the community of survivors that are “Touching the Void.”  Our adventure is not on a mountain, though we feel that the air is thin and each step requires a bit more effort, and it is not one that we will recall with laughter around a dinner table, as were so many that Adam loved and shared.  This adventure is our individual and communal confrontation with a ubiquitous absence.  It seems that everywhere we go, Adam and Moses are not there.  However elementary this may sound, it is the reality that I seem to be having the hardest time accepting.  In our driveway, Moses’ car is parked directly behind Adam’s motorcycle, but Adam and Moses are missing.  We just moved boxes and boxes of Adam’s things from our entryway to the Langford house, though we kept them there for several weeks as they somehow represented his presence in the midst of his absence.  We still expect to see Moses and Adam at the Source every time we walk in.  Dinner is a bit different, and Emily still talks about cooking just a little bit more, just in case Adam stops by (she was on a mission to fatten him up).  They are not in the restaurants we frequented, in Jinja or Kampala .  Adam is not watching a soccer match in the TV section at GAME (store that resembles a Target…kind-of) as he is waiting for us to finish our shopping.  Our house is a bit quieter, and the silence melts the cold hard facts into a liquid reality until it evaporates into a vapor that we breathe.  After being enslaved by the Egyptians, the children of Abraham, soon to be referred to by God as “My people,” experienced 430 years of the absence of God preceding the Exodus.  The disciples, following the crucifixion of their “Messiah” grieved for 3 hopeless days before the resurrection.  Over the last couple of months, as we have mourned the absence of our friends, our brothers, there is a part of our ever-questioning hearts that are also mourning the perceived absence of God.  I don’t know how long it will last- 430 years or 3 more days, but I take comfort in the words of encouragement from Eugene Peterson, who states, “The story in which God does his saving work arises among a people whose primary experience of God is his absence” (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p.153).  On the other hand, it may not be that God is absent, but the god that I want, who is absent.  It is in times like this that I would prefer an imperialistic power god (assuming that such a god would intervene on my behalf, on my terms, on my timing), one who exhibits an explosive intervention where we walk through the waters of this horrific situation with shouts of praise and joy, miraculously reunited in the arms of Adam and Moses.  But what I know, the God to whom I have access, is one who has been revealed to us most directly in the form of a man on a cross.  This is the God that sees our pain and knows our pain, who refused to fight by the standards of the world, and who showed us that true life-giving power, the genetic material of the eternal God, can only be found through the means of suffering and death.  But the means of suffering and death are not to be confused with the end…

So here we are- waiting anxiously for resurrection.  I believe that we will see Adam and Moses again, in some realm called “heaven,” a term for which I struggle to gain a working definition, but which has been promised as it includes the redemption of all things, being made new, and bowing in the presence of the exalted Lord.  But this is not the resurrection to which I am now referring.  In all my study of the Bible, in my years in the church, the core of my beliefs are culminated in the passionate conviction that through God’s work in the person of Jesus Christ, Life is the final word.  I am convicted that in Christ, there is no death without resurrection, now as much as in the end times.  In the midst of my grief I am searching for the resurrection that is happening as we speak, for I have witnessed a very real death.   Through my tears I am looking for the seedlings that are emerging from this fertile Soga soil that were only a few short months ago dead seeds.  I am searching anxiously for the men and women who knew Adam and Moses, and who are now following their lead into a reckless life committed to sharing news that is truly Good.  I am waiting for my Lord to spit into my blind eyes and open them to a reality where God has used nail-pierced hands to form new life out of the pain that we have offered up.   Because of Adam’s welcoming spirit and extroverted nature, his influence spans the states and beyond.  His story is being told as one who loved to the point of sacrifice, who gave up wealth for the sake of struggling with people who are forgotten by many as he attempted as well as he could to be an imitator of Christ Jesus.  My hope and conviction are that resurrection is happening all around the world. 

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