A Continual Feast in Heaven

In 2009 I traveled to what was then Sudan (now South Sudan) to spend time at the Cornerstone Children’s Home, an orphanage and school founded by a Sudanese expatriate who had relocated to Northern Virginia, where I lived at the time. Cornerstone was located in Nimule, a town that sits right on the northern bank of the Nile, just across the river from Uganda. Many of the residents had in fact recently come from Uganda, where they had been living as refugees during the waning days of the twenty-plus-year civil war that had pitted the government forces in the North against rebels in the South. These children had lost their parents either in the war or to HIV/AIDS or to one of the score of other deadly communicable diseases that regularly ravage that part of the world.

Samuel Juma, my Sudanese colleague in Northern Virginia who visited Community UCC last year, had joined forces with John Juma (no relation), a local pastor in Nimule, to provide housing, food, education, and spiritual nurture for these displaced youngsters while the war was still going on, and after the cease-fire they crossed the Nile and set up shop just outside Nimule. By the time I visited in June 2009, they had established a small compound that housed around 75 children and were in the midst of constructing a house for them to live in. Since they had come back to Sudan they had been sleeping and keeping their scant personal possessions in a cluster of huts, or tukuls, in part of the compound. They bathed using water carried in jerry cans from the pump to the outdoor shower facilities, they relieved themselves in latrines featuring what are known in that part of the world as “squatty potties”—basically holes in the floor that you squat over to transact your business. They went to school either in the compound itself or nearby in the village, and they were fed three meals a day featuring large quantities posho, a starchy concoction somewhere between grits and polenta.

For a little less than two weeks I lived with these orphans and their caregivers—I slept in the stifling heat under mosquito netting, took sponge baths, tried to put off going to the latrine, ate my share of posho, and drank a lot of bottled water. It was a challenging time, but when it was over I returned to my comparatively luxurious life with hot and cold running water, advanced sanitation systems, and abundant food. I had in effect “slummed” in the Third World for a week and a half.

But the Cornerstone Kids remained there in those conditions throughout their childhoods. Besides the living conditions, they also faced violence from the Lord’s Resistance Army and the fighting among former allies that has continued pretty much constantly in the years since the end of the war and the establishment of the nation of South Sudan. In fact, they recently were forced to leave Cornerstone (and their new building) to take refuge once again in Uganda. It’s a hard life, to say the least, and an extremely far cry from what we enjoy here in the global North.

But here’s the thing. I have never encountered—unless it was within the confines of a prison in Illinois, which is another story—such joy and thanksgiving in worship as I witnessed in Nimule. In a bare, sun-baked church built with concrete blocks and furnished with a couple dozen cast-off plastic chairs and not much else, the windows open to the flies, the odors emanating from the latrine, and maybe an occasional breeze, I took part in transcendent worship experiences the two Sundays I was there. Well, I say I took part, but to be honest I was more audience than participant, because the freedom and exuberance of worship of these poor children was utterly unfamiliar to me. Their gratitude to God and their overflowing joy in the midst of their poverty put my own sense of gratitude and joy to shame despite my relative wealth.

Proverbs 15:15 says, “All the days of the poor are hard, but a cheerful heart has a continual feast.” I found this to be entirely true during my time in Nimule. Their bodies may have been eating posho and vegetables, but their souls were feasting all the time. It gives me pause, and it makes me reassess my images of heaven. Forget the gates of pearl and streets of gold; if I wake up after my death and see a concrete-block church and a dirt compound packed hard from countless barefoot soccer players, and if I smell the mingled aromas of cookfire and outhouse, and if I feel the sun beating down relentlessly on the beaming, dark brown faces of children, and if I hear the voices of those children ringing out in joyous song, I will know I have reached my destination.