'“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are ever before me. Your children hasten back, and those who laid you waste depart from you. Lift up your eyes and look around; all your children gather and come to you. As surely as I live,” declares the Lord, “you will wear them all as ornaments; you will put them on, like a bride. '
Isaiah 49:15-18 ESV
In my late teens, I spent some time in Uganda, working at an orphanage in a rural community. I think we too often romanticize foreign missions, but this experience in my youth was a lesson that I would not learn until my adult years. I have always been abstract-minded, and because of that, I was drawn into theology. I wanted to know what the secrets of the world were; I wanted to know which word in the Greek was used in that verse; I wanted to enlighten people, but most importantly, I wanted to bring people to the Jesus I was so enamored with. My flaw here was that, to me, even if I didn’t truly think it explicitly, I had not been enamored with Christ at all. Instead, it was philosophy that I had truly fallen in love with. And I fell astray. What power was there in an academic or metaphysical conundrum? Where, if not in arguments and syllogisms, was the power of Christ?
I will tell you a story. When I worked at the orphanage, it was part of an ongoing project established by many churches, each pitching in to build a community. There was a chapel, a school, housing, etc. When it came to the act of building the actual structures, the organization was not picky and simply hired the locals, many of whom were either Muslim or Animist. At the end of construction, a banquet was held, and everyone who had pitched in got to come to a feast. It was here that something would happen that would not click until my 30s. We were told promptly that we were probably, as Westerners, going to be surprised by several things (polygamy and such), but these are just cultural differences. And that is what happened. Men arrived, some with as many as twelve wives, but it was one wife in particular, a wife somewhere in the middle. He, her own husband, didn’t even know her name.
My point is not one of cultural differences, but of the power of Christ, which transcends culture. Because the power of Christ is not found in a textbook, but instead it is found in the fact that “My husband may not know my name, but God does.” That is the power of Christ. It is not found in a debate, but rather in the solace of the weak and weary. God’s love is an action, not an academic.