Off with the DUST!! Nile Beginnings is back to life!

Welcome to Nile Beginnings!! If you followed along this blog back in the summer of 2008 you will remember it chronicled my trip to Jerusalem and Uganda. Well.... Africa is back on the front burner again. I want to use the blog again to chronicle the ups and downs of a much too ambitious project called PROJECT AFRICA 2010. If you can believe this, we are taking a team of 17 or 18 Correctional and Police officers and staff to Uganda in May 2010 to build a school / clinic on land that has been given to our team together with Sophie Osaya (who owns the land).

Now I suppose you imagine at this point I will extol the virtues of a project like this, sell you the idea by using the rosiest scenarios I can create, and make it sound like this is going to be 'simple as pie'. Well hopefully you will get some of that. But there is another side to this I want to share with you along the way. that is that WE ARE FRICKIN CRAZY TO TRY SOMETHING LIKE THIS!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! 18 typical A-personality Corrections and Police officers spending two intense weeks together building a project after having spent 8 months together raising $70,000?!!! If there is a God, WE NEED HIM NOW. The vision is simple: put aside all opinions of each other, all previous beefs, and come together under the humanitarian banner to help poor kids and poor families in Eastern Uganda together with their partnership. We plan this to be the first of many trips to come where we build this little community of sustainable development and poverty relief.

Anyway, it's going to be hard as hell. That's o.k. We will pull it off. We will learn something along the way, and we will both have an impact there as well as they who we will become family with us will have a (probably bigger) impact on us.

Nile beginnings is my personal blog about such things and other rambling nonsense. I guess nowadays I might as well join the societal cult of feeling that any and all self-absorbed personal observations of life happen to be SO IMPORTANT that it must be published. I have been thinking a lot about life lately, and some big issues of faith, belief and relationships that have been either on my mind or driving me insane. So like the honesty I want to use to share Project Africa 2010 with you, I want to use the same honesty about a number of other (perhaps deeper) things I have been wrestling with. I'm 41, been at my job 10 years and have done well and enjoyed it, but reaching a place of restless unhappiness that I don't quite understand. I sense a new chapter of my life beginning to find paper met by pen. Nile beginnings is about that kind of thing. The Nile is a fascinating River. Longest in the world, it starts in Uganda in a beautiful place called the Source of the Nile (I know... creative name). From there it winds it's powerful reputation and mystique all the way to the Nile Delta in Egypt where it enters the Mediterranean.

Having stood there on the banks where Gandhi had his ashes released into its waters, I like so many feel something meaningful about the Nile river. With all its history, lives that were shaped by it since the time of the Pharaohs, the lives sustained by it, the lives taken by it, and its life giving importance I felt drawn to stand and watch it flow past me. But at every moment, no matter what it's mighty reputation, the Nile has it's beginning point. The place it starts all over again. It too must begin all over again. It's previous importance and accomplishments mean absolutely nothing now. It must begin again, again, and again.

I want that for me too. I want to begin all over again in many areas of my life. I can't jump into the source of the Nile... (I'm terrified of snakes and crocodiles), but what I can do is release myself into the hands of an all powerful and creative God who can write on me the next chapter of my life as He does on a scroll with the ink of his mysterious and unknown love and purpose.

For me to do this I have to rant a little and bring honest cards onto the table. I need to shed the past. This is the most difficult thing for Church people to do! Most of us live a series of emotional lies and half truths when it comes to organized religion. We are not honest about many things we see and experience and so we tend to do the next best thing and that is put on a stronger sales job. I'm so done with that. When you go to Uganda and meet little children and look into their eyes and see hope, joy as well as gut wrenching deep need, it brings you back to what matters most in life. The simple things. love. people. laughter. joy. help. kinship. I remember that passage in the scriptures where it says true religion is to look after the needs of widows and orphans. Pretty simple. As I look around at most organized religion we are doing today in our part of the world I can't help but wonder where all the bullshit came from. Enough already. Strip those filthy shit rags woven by the ego needs of men and women who obsess about controlling outcomes and making themselves feel validated by putting their stamp on the spiritual lives of others. We need a few more new beginnings, we need to flush a few more filthy rags and perhaps flush a few men and women who weave them.

The Nile is mighty because it has it's Beginning. The place it all starts. A new chance. A do-over. a limitless source of being fresh. And it is a powerful source. The mouth of the Nile is massive. It's one of the rivers in the world that runs opposite to many others that start small and end huge. The Nile Starts Huge and ends smaller as it loses most of it's water along the way of passing through dry North Africa. But that is how it sustains so much life.

OOO man...! Sounds like me!! Raising kids, holding down jobs, a ministry, and mostly tending to the needs of others as a pastor, I am spent. I feel much smaller and feel like I am putting out much less than when Istarted. I am looking for a new start, a new beginning, a new chapter, a Nile Beginning. If you're in the same boat as me, then hopefully you find yours too. Maybe we'll find it together. I feel no guarantee that I will. However I do feel certain that without an honest look at the way things are we will just rely on yesterdays accomplishments and bullshit ourselves enough to maintain a semblance of useless organized religion or a bunch of moderately happy lives. Nope. Not for me. Not any more.