“We are marching,
marching we are marching, marching we are marching in the light of God.”
I’ve heard that song a thousand times before in my life. My
mother lived in Swaziland for a couple of years before I was born, and I grew
up singing that song before I even realized Swaziland was a real place. In the
visits I’ve been privileged to make to Swaziland, that song has always been a
constant. Everyone there knows it and likes to sing it.
Coming into this trip, I was really making a concentrated
effort not to draw imagined similarities between Uganda and Swaziland. But it
turns out some things can be familiar, even in countries as different as these.
Besides that song, I discovered that at least in the local languages, the same
terms are used to address people (sisi for a sister or girl, make for a mother
or woman) as in Swaziland and South Africa. And that they also sing and play
children’s games I know from those southern African countries.
All of this has really pressed into me how connected our
world really is. As if those connections spanning thousands of miles across a
gigantic continent were not enough, we sang the Chris Tomlin song, ‘How Great
Is Our God’ in church Sunday. If you didn’t know, Tomlin has recorded a version
of that song with singers from across the globe and it is, in a word,
incredible. I first heard it at Passion this year and was totally blown away. I
remember laying on the ground, totally at a loss because it was such a clear
picture of Heaven and reminded me so much of all the places I’d been and the
people I’d met.
Our first Sunday in Africa, at an awesome church in Mbarara,
Uganda, we sang that song again. And once again I was totally blown away by
God. To come half-way across the world, to a totally new situation, with new
people, new language, new everything, and then hear that familiar song that is
in many ways an ultimate image of the unified church to me, was awe-inspiring.
The heavens proclaim
the glory of God. The skies display His craftsmanship. Day after day they
continue to speak, night after night they make Him known. They speak without a
sound or word, their voice is never heard. Yet their message has gone
throughout the earth, and their words to all the world… – Psalm 19:1-4
No matter how far, how different, how much everything else
has changed, God remains the same. And I’m thoroughly enjoying meeting with Him
in Uganda.
