On Monday, we fly back to Burundi. All of us. Simon, Lizzie, Zac (10), Grace (8) and Josiah (6).



Burundi is in a terrible state. It’s hard to see, humanly-speaking, how things are going to improve. But we believe in the God of the impossible, and Burundi is our home. We want to be with our friends and colleagues and go through these dark times together. Some, maybe many, think we’re irresponsible and foolish, however this comes on the back of a lot of heart-wrenching prayer and seeking God for His guidance, and both Lizzie and the kids also want to return.

We are flying back into a very tense, fear-filled and fragile situation. Rumours abound. Dead bodies are regularly found on the streets in the morning. The country is at a critical moment in its history. The kids will have to get used to listening to regular gunfire again (I’ve just downloaded an app for white noise to turn up at night-time to mask the scary sounds). As a husband and father, I feel the weight of responsibility like never before, but as I’ve often preached, the safest place to be is in the heart of God’s will, and safety isn’t the absence of danger, it’s the presence of God. We’re immortal until He calls us home.

We can’t just talk a good game, we have to live those words out. You too in this new year of 2016. May it be your best yet!

So I’ve never wanted/needed/hoped for your prayers more than now, for our family and for Burundi. Challenging times. May we all live by faith, not fear.

If you want a short challenging daily reading for the coming year, why not try what was voted Best Devotional of 2015?! You can order it here

I want to say a MASSIVE THANK YOU for your response to the Christmas Appeal and for your ongoing support. The response to providing meat/chocs/shoes for our destitute friends and colleagues was phenomenal.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Our traumatised children don’t understand what is going on. The shootings continue. Christmas has always been the one time of year they hope for a piece of chocolate and some meat, maybe even a new pair of shoes. Times are harder than ever right now. As a father, I long to give them some joy, but we simply can’t afford to even eat enough each day. As you’ve helped in the past, could you help us again? We’re so grateful to you and GLO for being such a blessing. Can we hope for the same this year as in previous ones? Your kindness is what it takes for our kids to explode with joy. God bless you all. 

This is the plea from a brother and colleague in Burundi, representing the 450 staff we support. They sacrifice themselves for the Lord throughout the year. Please help me help them, so that we can give each family a small lump sum and thereby provide their combined c.2,000+ children some joy this Christmas.

For UK folk, click here

For USA folk, click here

Thanks in advance, and here’s wishing you a

                                                VERY MERRY AND MEANINGFUL CHRISTMAS!

 
We’ve started packing today, as we prepare to head back to Burundi.

We took our decision last Friday, having set aside the previous week to pray and seek guidance. I asked for a sign that last day, and had an amazing random (coincidence/God-incidence) meeting on Southampton common as I walked, which provided the confirmation I’d asked for. Yet little did we know that at that very moment at least 87 people (other sources claim into the hundreds) were being killed in what was Burundi’s darkest day for a long time.

News trickled in slowly. Three separate attacks had been launched by unidentified rebels on military posts. They had been repelled with a number of casualties. Then more people were killed, many of whom were lined up and summarily executed, according to human rights groups and multiple witnesses. The government fiercely denied this and insisted those killed had been guilty and were killed in the course of restoring law and order. Whatever happened exactly, the gruesome images have circulated the world, news of Burundi hit the headlines, and there have been numerous declarations and pronouncements of condemnation from anyone and everyone at the UN, AU, EU, EAC, diplomatic bodies, etc –  which frankly we’re all bored of, because nothing results from any of them, in turn because nobody really wants to get their hands dirty in Burundi.

The last several days have been relatively quiet. People are legitimately petrified. I’ve just had an email from a friend asking if he can move out of his dangerous part of town and into a room in our house with his wife, so that’ll now make one couple, two single ladies, and a mother with three kids staying at our place. Many more are trying to leave the country and add to the 250,000+ that have already fled.

But as others are packing to leave, we’re packing to return.

Why would you do that, Simon?

Honestly, it’s a tough call to explain apart from sensing a peace from God, a commitment to live by faith rather than fear, and a longing to be with our precious suffering brothers and sisters out there.

It’s harder still to make that call when the kids are all in a wonderful school here in the UK, whilst we’ve just discovered that many of the teachers at their school in Bujumbura are leaving this week. The government and the Belgians (former colonial power) are about as estranged as they ever have been right now, the latter accused of supporting the opposition. The Belgian School may suffer as a result of that, so we hope it’ll still be open on our return in a few weeks, but that’s just another layer of uncertainty to add to the mix. All classes are doubling up next term if it is open, because of teachers leaving and smaller pupil numbers. Hmm…

So we’ll continue packing, preparing for the next chapter. I’m glad Lizzie backs me to the hilt and shares the same conviction. Many don’t and think we’re crazy. Well, we’d love your support, encouragement and prayers on this difficult journey. Life is fantastically uncertain for so many people, and we choose to embrace the uncertainty in following Jesus wherever He calls. Thanks for any prayers you offer up, and for mobilizing others to do so for this desperate broken beautiful nation.

A few weeks ago I came across this great quote by C.S.Lewis:

“For the Christian there are strictly speaking no chances. A secret master-of-ceremonies has always already been at work. The same Lord who said to the disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you” – that same Lord says to every group of Christian friends: ‘You did not choose each other, but I have chosen you for each other.’ And the friendship is not a reward for our taste and discrimination in seeking each other out. The friendship is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauty of all the others.”

 

Last week I had the joy of hanging out with some old friends. I don’t mean ‘old’ friends in the sense that I’ve known them for many years – in fact none of them I’ve known more than two years. Rather I mean that they’re plain old! Sam (USA/Kenya) is 71, Matthias (Switzerland) is 65, Garth (South Africa) and Ward (USA) are 64, and Tim (Uganda/USA) is 58, with spring chicken me weighing in at a mere 42-years-old. And in the last two years the secret Master of Ceremonies has microwaved and accelerated our friendships to a place that other friendships would have taken far longer to have gotten to.

As things kicked off in Burundi back in April/May, Garth literally jumped on a plane back just to hang out with me in Kenya and be a shoulder to cry on. That’s a true friend. Tim’s been caught on the wrong side of warzones a few times and had to evacuate and lose his cherished way of life and start off again elsewhere. He could relate to what I was going through. They all have a decade or two on me and I value their maturity and wisdom. They share a similar DNA of building deep friendships and trying to get people together from opposing sides around the teachings of Jesus (which often has precious little to do with church or religion). It’s amazing what can happen sometimes with that secret MC.

After meeting with top leaders behind the scenes in Burundi, we flew to Kenya and Ward had chartered a plane into the middle of nowhere in isolated West Pokot, to teach some illiterate pastors. I say illiterate, but this had changed for most of them. A number of them had been AK47-wielding warriors in the past, but had exchanged their guns for the Sword of the Spirit! These former gun-toting killers are now transformed in a beautiful move of God. They couldn’t read or write, but would take a Pokot Bible to a schoolchild, ask them to read a verse, get them to repeat it several times, and thereby learn pieces of Scripture off by heart. And from those memorized verses they then learnt to read – an unconventional methodology! I loved their testimony that you could tell which of their tribesfolk had also decided to follow Jesus – because the new followers now treated their wives better, valued education more highly, improved their levels of sanitation etc. Missionaries often get a bad rap from antagonistic politically-correct secularist writers, but the undeniable reality is that embracing the gospel has the potential to transform the whole individual, indeed whole communities. That is what we saw in Pokot.

Ward had been involved for 20+ years there, and had undertaken a five-day life-changing trek in 2000 through the parched wasteland with Lodinio, his Pokot friend. It included drinking from dung-infested mudholes and more. He wrote a book on it called White Man Walking, which is worth the read. 

And in Ward’s generosity, he took us on for a few days to the Masai Mara to enjoy some R&R at a lovely resort, with amazing safaris, food, laughter, deep discussion, and further deepening friendship. It make me so grateful for all my friends, old and new, wherever they are. Friendship is right up there as one of God’s greatest gifts.  

May you seek out, invest in, nurture and enjoy similarly life-giving and sustaining friendships. Thanks brothers!

Another juicy quote from C.S.Lewis to close:  

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” 

I address this as a naturalized Burundian (ego, nararonse karangamuntu na passeport haheze imyaka ibiri ndabifise) to my fellow Burundians.

The situation in Burundi is alarming. There’s no doubt about that. When the President of the Senate made his infamous pronouncement a few weeks ago, alarm bells began ringing at fever pitch, and social media exploded with suggestions that genocide was imminent. You remember he said: “On this issue, you have to pulverize, you have to exterminate – these people are only good for dying. I give you this order, go!” He used the word ‘gukora’, ‘to work’, which was used in 1994 in Rwanda to mobilise folks to do the work of killing Tutsis. The fact that thus far his words have not been retracted or condemned from on high is clearly alarming.

My friend and colleague Lisette fled to Rwanda ten days ago. She’s a Tutsi, and has an 18-year-old son who is just the sort of young man to get picked up and accused of being a ‘terrorist’ – the highly emotive and inappropriate word being used for those who are actively against the President’s third term. Lisette was frightened for the life of her son, but also for hers. Why? Because her Hutu friend had warned her. The latter had been approached by the Imbonerakure in her ‘quartier’, who reassured her that they knew the ethnicity and address of everyone in the neighbourhood, so she would be quite safe if things kicked off – which meant by extension that Lisette and her son would not be safe at all. On the back of the above high-ranking government official’s unretracted, unrepudiated and therefore tacitly sanctioned inflammatory rhetoric, I totally understand why Lisette decided to flee.

Yes, the situation in Burundi is definitely alarming. In my sixteen years of living here, the intensity of fear I witnessed last week was at its highest in all that time. And the international community has issued a number of pronouncements. On Thursday, Belgium and the EU advised their non-essential staff to leave and the UN Security Council unanimously condemned the abuses taking place. Not that many of us are expecting much ultimately from the international community.

However, use of the ‘G’-word is misplaced and dangerous. We must resist it. The situation in Burundi in November 2015 is nothing like the situation leading up to Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. As a reminder, genocide is violence inflicted “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Burundi is not, and will not become, ‘another Rwanda’. The 50%-50% make-up of the army was established by the Arusha Accords precisely to prevent any such possibility. So the current alarmist rhetoric diminishes the chances of finding a diplomatic resolution to Burundi’s current political problems, and ratchets up the levels of tension in an already highly volatile situation. French online newspaper ‘Liberation’ used the evocative title, ‘Au Burundi, c’est un génocide qui a commencé” (In Burundi, a genocide has started), which is so counter-productive for those of us seeking breakthroughs through dialogue.

Contrary to what is being repeatedly said, bodies are not ‘piling up on the streets of Bujumbura everyday’. Piling up? No! The facts are that at least 240 people – but likely to be much more – have been killed since April, seven months ago. (The murder rate in Baltimore is c.300/year, as a point of reference). Six people were killed last night. Many mornings a body is found dumped on the street, tied up, bloodied, shot through the head. It’s grim. I’ve wept over it. But it’s not genocide. Enough of that word.

Last Wednesday, we hosted the National Prayer Breakfast. It was amazing that the meeting took place at all, organized at short notice in very tense circumstances. All the big guns were there. It was a great opportunity to challenge them to truly love their nation. Rwasa talked about our only hope being to love one another and work from that premise. United we stand, divided we fall. The President addressed the genocide issue and denounced it in no uncertain terms. The main speaker gave a brilliant talk, nailing each and every attendee. A good leader gives up the right to make excuses, he said. And he closed with the Old Testament story (from 1 Kings 3:16-28) of the two mothers who gave birth at the same time. During the night, one mother rolled over and accidentally smothered her baby to death. So she got up and exchanged her dead baby for the other mother’s living baby. In the morning, the other mother discovered her baby dead, but of course on closer inspection saw that it wasn’t her baby after all. So the two of them came before King Solomon, and he in his wisdom ordered the baby to be sawn in two – to which the deceiving mother agreed, choosing a lose/lose whereas the real mother asked the baby to be given to the other lady so that her little one would at least survive, even if not with her – thereby showing the sacrificial selfless love of the true mother.

Why that story? Because the baby for us was the youth of Burundi. 75% of Burundians are under 25-years-old. It’s mainly young people who are dying. They are easy to manipulate. They are our future. So all of you, please, I beg you, don’t kill the baby! Don’t kill our youth! What future are we handing on to them? If we aspire to leadership, then leaders give up the right to constantly make excuses.

Powerful. And hopeful, if we embrace the privilege, challenge and responsibility.

I had been asked in turn to pray for the youth. I pleaded with God to grant us breakthrough, to forgive us, because if the youth are as they are today, it’s because as leaders we’ve behaved as we have up until now. No more excuses. Each drop of blood spilt in this crisis is a defeat, no matter whose it is. No more inflammatory speeches inciting the youth to anything other than peaceful co-existence. With the President of the Senate just ten yards away, I wondered if he (and others) would have felt convicted or accused by it. Hopefully the former.

In closing, I want to mention that a friend of mine was attacked last night. I’m on a school board and he has been the tireless self-giving Head of the Parent/Teacher Association for the last three years. He’s also more recently been appointed Mayor of Bujumbura by the President (which will automatically make him despised by many of you reading this). A group of about ten assailants attacked his house with guns and grenades last night but were repelled. I’m thankful he’s still alive. The fact he is a Tutsi in the ruling CNDD doesn’t fit people’s narratives, also that he is seeking to wipe out corruption in his important position. The sad thing is he is among Burundi’s best, a true patriot, and no doubt the assailants believed they were fighting a just cause in trying to kill him; but if they had met him elsewhere in another context, they’d have really liked him. He’d be fighting for the education of their kids, as I’ve seen him do up close these last few years. Instead they saw him as their enemy and tried to kill him…

Burundians, we need to stop being manipulated. We need to keep resisting the ethnicisation of the crisis and keep fighting for peace. We need to choose the pathway of dialogue and non-violence, however hard that is. You know, there’s shooting taking place as I write this. I’m not saying it’ll be easy. There are no simplistic solutions. There’s undoubtedly a long hard road ahead. And I know right now it’s hard to be hopeful. But please, all of us, from all sides, may we not kill our shared baby! Rather let’s nurture it, and raise it free from prejudice, to flourish in the decades to come. 

“The only thing I know for sure is that I have no idea what is going to happen.”

So said a friend of mine over lunch. It sums up the situation in Burundi right now. Nobody has any idea how things are going to turn out. Every event is seen through radically different lenses depending on which side one supports. The international community is pressing relentlessly for regime change and squeezing the government through withdrawal of aid, whilst the regime is trying its hardest to survive as the economy and security plummets and paranoia soars.

The Twittersphere is buzzing with rumours and anticipation of genocide. Surely not? There may be some ethnic killings, but most Burundians are resisting those people’s malign attempts to ethnicise the issue. There have undoubtedly been some scary and inexcusable pronouncements by high-level officials, but we hope and pray that the people will resist being manipulated into seeking to use violence to resolve the issues. The army is 50-50% Hutu/Tutsi, which was a key arrangement that the framers of the Arusha Accords put in place for precisely that purpose, to prevent one side being able to dominate the other and allow any repeated mass killings on an ethnic basis.

I remain totally apolitical on this blog. I have my views, of course, but all our initiatives behind the scenes tread the very difficult path of neutrality in the hopes of not discounting one or other side as we seek a peaceful resolution to the ongoing crisis (and these initiatives sadly have to remain confidential for now but I assure you many of them are stunning in their bravery and hidden impact). Two of our key guys were with an influential leader who threatened/warned them of the risks of what they were doing. They talked it over, and concluded: “If we’re to die, let’s die preaching non-violence and fighting for peace in our nation.”

Each day here I am meeting folks from 7am to nightfall. People feel in even more danger once darkness descends. That is when the shooting invariably increases, with bodies regularly being dumped the next day on the streets. I was talking to one friend. He said: “Actually it’s been quite quiet and normal in our part of town the last couple of weeks.” I said: “Wasn’t there a girl murdered on your street a few days ago?” He replied: “Oh yeah, I forgot, just a couple of hundred yards away.” We both reflected on how wrong it was to think that made it a relatively normal week…

So I have shed many tears. They come readily to my eyes as I process what I’m being told in conversation after conversation of brokenness and pain with precious friends and colleagues. After one heavy meeting in which we’d both wept, I moved onto the next meeting with an American whom I’d literally just met. I was ready to burst and had to simply start our conversation with: “Sorry, do you mind if I just cry?” Yes, many tears are being shed by many people in and for this beautiful country.

For those of you who pray, please keep doing so. This country needs a miracle.

It’s 5am and still dark as I lie listening to Lizzie’s peaceful breathing next to me. I went to bed last night knowing that a gun battle was taking place in a suburb of Bujumbura where maybe fifty of my colleagues and friends live (with their precious children), and as usual I’m impatient to find out by logging onto Twitter what the results of that carnage were. It’s become a macabre daily ritual for me, and one shared by hundreds of thousands of Burundians in the diaspora who are aching at a distance as they follow what is going on in their homeland and wracked with anxiety over their extended family members caught up in the conflict.

Following events by Twitter is an emotional rollercoaster. You quickly get to know the extremists on either end of the spectrum, the inciters to ethnic violence, and the whackos, but there are also the credible voices to be heard. You need discernment to sift through layers of lies. Every significant event has wildly contrasting interpretations. Pictures circulate regularly of the latest corpses dumped on the side of the road, often with their arms tied behind their backs, bearing signs of torture, and a bullet through the skull. Each side blames the other. Usually it is pretty clear which side has carried it out.

One thing that strikes me is how much Burundians love their country. Objectively it is a stunningly beautiful land. Burundians are wonderfully hospitable. My colleagues and I have taken huge risks in dangerous times precisely because we love this nation so much. And that love is shared across the deep divide in the current crisis. Each side is utterly convinced of the ‘rightness’ of their position, and therefore intransigent in terms of compromise. There is simply no room for open dialogue, which makes it hard to be hopeful, as things deteriorate further.

The IMF’s latest report says Burundi is the poorest country on the planet, with a GDP per capita of just over $315. The economy will shrink by 7.2% this year, it is estimated. The African Union and the European Union are moving towards further targeted sanctions against the regime. The Burundian Government has been backed into a corner, is facing international isolation and condemnation (apart from China and Russia), and needs great wisdom on how to move forward. Approximately 50% of the national budget is dependent on foreign aid which has almost all been withdrawn. How much worse can things get? Well, they could actually get a lot worse still, so please keep praying for a peaceful inclusive political solution, however improbable that may seem at this time.

I love Burundi. I weep for Burundi. Lizzie is the one who can see at close quarters how it is eating me up, how I’m battling to be fully present with her and the children as I grieve for my adopted homeland. Over the last months, I have given dozens of talks around the country, often accompanied by tears. Sometimes it’s totally inappropriate to cry, but on other occasions it feels like a safe place to open the floodgates and let the pain out, sharing it with empathetic folk who want to help shoulder the burden. People want to understand, even if they can’t, and I appreciate them for that.

There’s so much to write about and comment on, and many of you are asking for more detailed updates of what is taking place – but nowadays the blogosphere is not the place to do that. If you want more information, you can write to me directly.

Thanks for caring for beautiful but broken Burundi. 

I wanted to share the below with you (with permission). It’s from one of my best buddies on the planet. He’s a key Burundian leader, very gifted, and willing to lay down his life for the cause. He gave up a very secure international job which guaranteed paying his children’s education to follow God’s call back to working in Burundi. He’s the real deal. May what he writes move you to further prayer for our nation, and beyond that to helping him if you can. It also gives a picture of how things currently are. Notwithstanding the grim situation, it remains our intention as a family to return there in January. Do take a read:

“Dear friends, we are extremely thankful to God for the way you continue to prayerfully support us without failing.  As hardships increases, I thought I’d give you a brief update so that you may pray intelligently.

Last week, a member of our fellowship I’ve seen being restored to fullness after a pretty shattered life insisted he wanted to see me urgently. He’d decided to leave the country definitively. His wife, a direct victim of the previous ethnic killings, could not cope anymore, he told me. We prayed and cried together and then I sent him off with hope to see him again. The following day the man who had worked with me since my early years in student ministry also asked to see me. This man has been literally with me in many dangers. He is so trustworthy that he could be trusted with anything. As long as he was around my wife and I could go anywhere in the world, spend as much time as needed with little worries about our children. He too had come to let me know that he’d decided to leave the country. It is too much and too dangerous for his family, particularly his teenagers. I could hardly take it and yet I had to. Sharing it with my wife who has been experiencing high blood pressure since the crisis started was both hard and dangerous.

These two men are examples of how the political and security situation is increasingly getting hopeless. In order to be witnesses of God’s love to people in growing despair, we need to learn to “believe against all hope” (Rom 4:18).  Please pray for strength and courage to speak the truth in love and for protection because, in times of such political divisions, enemies of the truth are on both sides and dangers come from all directions. As much as I want to be a faithful servant, I still want to be a good husband and father who protects and provides for the family – a balance hard to achieve in times such as these. The crisis has caused my wife and I not to get part of the income with which we had been paying fees for our daughter Francine who studies in London. She got there after she obtained miraculously a partial scholarship and one couple that knew her when she was very little offered her accommodation. This time we are not able to pay our part (£13,000). Pray with and for us to see her through (she still has two years to complete and she is doing very well both academically and spiritually). Pray that as we wait for the One who started the good work in her to bring it to completion, we may dwell in the shelter of the Most High and experience the rest coming from the shadow of the Almighty (Ps. 91:1). In that way we will continue to serve him as we wait for his salvation.”

Thanks for praying. Do contact me if you can help in any way. She gets bumped off the course, I believe, by the end of next week, if the money doesn’t come in. Jehovah Jireh, we need your breakthrough now!

Choices are pretty stark these days in Burundi.

Stay or flee? About 250,000 fled over the last few months, and you have to be pretty desperate to flee.

Once fled, stay fled or return? About 180,000 have stayed away, whether in miserable refugee camps or eating away at fast-diminishing life-savings in rented accommodation in Rwanda or Uganda. About 70,000 have returned, many having run out of money and been forced to return, others hopeful that things are improving.

Food or education? September is the start of the academic year, so there are school books and uniforms to buy. Education trumps food – parents will embrace extreme hunger to give their children the chance to study – but many are missing out on both. Even before the crisis, Burundi was the hungriest nation on earth. I was shocked to see sunken-cheeked friends after being gone three months.

Join or refuse to join the rebellion? Once you accept a weapon, you are beholden to a commander, and must obey. A student in our movement was being pressurized to join, but knew the path of violence was wrong. Yet refusing would bring other problems from those around him…

Frankly, the last two weeks in Burundi have been profoundly depressing for me. Meeting up again with many loved ones who stayed, who fled, who returned, who chose education over food, who are resisting the way of violence – has been a deep, bleak, intimate, heart-wrenching experience. Through many folks’ generosity, I’ve had the joy of giving several hundred people money to help a little, giving them an ‘encouragement de crise’, enabling them to send their kids back to school after all, to eat more than one measly ‘meal’ a day for a few weeks more.

Choices. Of course, I’ve written a whole book on no less than 365 different choices. I should know about choices… well honestly, I’ve been revisiting some of them recently. I need to practice what I preach, but wow preaching is so much easier!

The entry for the 23^rd May looks at ‘Resignation or Acceptance’. I wrote: “Will you choose resignation or acceptance? With resignation, you focus on your problems, completely lose sight of God, and give up – and the door of hope slams firmly shut. But with acceptance, you acknowledge your reality, face up to your problems, and yet look above and beyond them to Jesus who is still on his throne. And with that attitude, the door of hope remains wide open to God’s sovereign and creative plans and purposes.” God, help us not to resign ourselves to Burundi’s descent into total chaos, however many people are predicting it.

On the 10^th January, I looked at ‘Despair or Hope’: “As Father Raniero Cantalamessa writes, the three virtues of faith, hope, and love…

…are like three sisters. Two of them are grown and the other is a small child. They go forward together hand in hand with the child hope in the middle. Looking at them it would seem that the bigger ones are pulling the child, but it is the other way around; it is the little girl who is pulling the two bigger ones. It is hope that pulls faith and love. Without hope everything would stop.

Biblical hope is not like the world’s hope – an expression of desire for an uncertain outcome – as in “I hope things work out in the end”. No, as followers of Christ, our “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1). Fyodor Dostoevsky seemed to understand this. He said, “To live without hope is to cease to live.” Lord, help us rise above despair and not cease to live; help us to cling to hope in you.

On the 7^th January, the entry addresses whether we’ll choose to live by ‘Faith or Fear’. I share some of my dangerous past experiences, and then write: “Interestingly, the question I am most commonly asked is: aren’t you frightened for your kids’ safety in such an unstable country like Burundi?”

This one hits me squarely between the eyes afresh. You see, I wrote that when Burundi was largely peaceful. I’d never experienced war as a father. As a single man in the peak war years, honestly, I expected to die and was totally fearless. But now the dynamic is so very different with three precious little lives looking to me for stability and protection, as well as luscious Lizzie.

So I’ve been asking my trusted Burundian friends these last two weeks whether we should come back as a family in January (if things are then as they are now). All but one said no. Things can change – and I choose to hope for the best despite the external evidence – but there’s no disguising a devastated economy, a huge proliferation of arms, an almost total absence of independent media, a climate of fear and despair, a brewing rebellion, and a huge scary split in the military (the head of the army narrowly missed being assassinated by fellow soldiers the day I flew in, whilst seven others died in the attack).

The one who said we should return? His name’s Leon – one of our star guys and as inspiring a man as you’ll ever meet. The crisis didn’t slow down his work at all. He continued leading Evangelism Explosion, having taken EE Burundi to being the most dynamic EE movement in the whole of Africa. He told me about the night recently when both he and his wife were upcountry doing some training, and a grenade went off right outside their house in Bujumbura. Their 4 and 2-year-old boys were convinced Daddy had been blown up, and screamed throughout the night. Come morning, they rang and heard Daddy’s voice, so they knew he wasn’t dead. That’s surely going to mark those boys, such a traumatic experience… but he said we’ve got to live the gospel, Jesus said it wouldn’t be easy, and how can we preach/challenge/relate to folks who have gone through hardship if we haven’t embraced sharing in those sufferings ourselves?

Wow.

Of course he’s right, isn’t he? Stark choices indeed/in deed…

1. register with your email (so we can send the challenges)
2. do remember your password as you may need it
3. change the time zone to the right one
4. you will then see a screen showing 21 weeks
5. simply click on Week 1