Africa. You have not captivated my heart. You have not rocked my world. You have not convicted the American me.
Call me a heartless missionary.
I am not the one to
say you can’t judge me. I cannot
even judge myself. As I have
walked your red roads and seen your beautiful inhabitants, my mind has been, in
a way, captive.
Rewind a several
months. I sit on a tractor,
guiding its course across a field turning rye-covered ground into furrows of
dark earth. The engine’s steady
growl is the only voice that speaks to me. It is almost as close as you can get to solitude and silence
in a lightning paced world…But not for me. My mind refuses to be still. Insisting on reasons for why it cannot be still, it casts to
and fro, hoping secretly for some form of emotion to break the mundane quest
for reason. In a whole other way,
my mind is captive.
But Oh, Africa, we all came for You.
And that is what now
captures my mind. Why trade one
captivity for another?
Because I have been
the worst master I have ever had. And
Africa, though I am now free to give my heart, I will not entrust it to you. Know it is for the best. My waking thoughts and even my dreams
are filled with wishes and prayers for you. But most of all, my mind is captive to a calling…
A calling to come for you and give my heart to another.
To leave my mind
captive to the one whose heart is captivated
by you.
My prayer is that my
heart, as well, becomes captive.
To the heart that
came for you First.
