We're Back!

Hope with Ms Bingham, Nurse Practitioner who lead medical missions in Zambia, Tanzania, & Uganda

Donna Habegger, friend of family with Hope and Ms Bingham just off the plane in Memphis

Hope was surprised by the Rice family from our home congregation when she arrived on Harding's campus. What a treat to see unexpected family!

Dearest friends and family of HIZ 2012,

We're back! All of our travel went smoothly from Entebbe to Memphis (through AMS and ATL), and we drove back through some rain from Memphis to Searcy. Harding had the lighting ceremony for their campus wide Christmas lights on Monday evening, so we came back to a well lit and beautiful campus. Some students left yesterday evening; the rest are leaving today, tomorrow, or through the end of this week as everyone heads home for a 6-week-long Christmas break. 

HIZ is the only of HU's international programs that consistently starts and ends in Searcy. We took advantage of entire day in Searcy together at the end of a long trip by celebrating a Thanksgiving feast, discussing the challenges of re-entry after 3 months in another culture, and praying together as a group. We're thankful for the memories and experiences behind us; we're expectant for what is still to come. Much of the learning and growth happens in the months after such an experience, and we look forward to challenge of translating the experience into our context in the US.

Back in January of this year we were asked to prepare a chapel program for the 27th of November, the day after our return to campus. We were humbled by the request and intimated with the task of presenting even just a slice of our experience to an audience of several thousand Harding students. After an entire semester of trying to speak, sing, and help in Zambian ways, we were at a loss for how we might do that very same task, but to our HU audience. How do you contextualize a message to an American audience, a message gleaned from an African context after an entire semester of intentional, round-the-clock learning? 

Well, we still aren't really sure what the correct answer is to that question.

But we did our best. After a semester of informal conversation, several group-wide brainstorming sessions, and a handful of committee-style focused meetings, we decided on a message and a medium and went for it. If you were in chapel yesterday, we'd love to get your feedback. If you didn't get a chance to be there, here is the link to the 10:00 chapel program which Harding has stored on iTunes U. We wonder if you get from it the message we were trying to get across:

Having just come back from Zambia, Tanzania, and Uganda, our message was not "Everyone must go to Africa." Instead, having just experienced a host of incredible stories, we felt a burden to call Harding students to finding good stories, both in Searcy and at home over Christmas break. It's been said before that the stories that communicate best are about extraordinary people doing ordinary things, or about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We are all living out a part in a bigger story of an extraordinary God who has worked with, without, and in spite of, ordinary people. At the apex of human history, God became ordinary, he became human. And because of that humanity, the ordinary (humans) participates in the extraordinary.

All semester, we were confronted with ordinary people doing extraordinary things, as part of God's mission and story. We chose to give three snapshots of stories we found in Zambia, and wanted to challenge the chapel audience not only to live a good story themselves (an individual task) but to find good stories (a task that fosters community) in the context of His story, history. 

When someone made in the image of God meets someone else made in the image of God, there is something to be learned about God and the world. This is why I believe International Programs at Harding is such a worthy endeavor. Not that one may only encounter people and learn about God and the world outside of the US. But being with people so radically different than us forces us to broaden our view of the world and reality and ask questions about a global God. This causes us not only to want to learn more about other places and cultures, but to return to our own culture, our own homes, and dedicate ourselves to finding good stories here, stories of the lives of ordinary people that reflect the image of an extraordinary God. 

This semester, we met some incredible Zambian students, teachers, administrators, medical providers, ministers, infant caregivers, night watchmen, and shopkeepers. Through them, we learned something about the God of the nations. We gained a greater perspective on the kingdom of God. And we return home, burdened to make time in our own, busy American lives to find those same stories of people in our families, churches, and schools. These stories were there before we left, we just couldn't see them. Now that we're back, we crave the stories, and we understand that God is honored in each recounting. 

In short, we are all part of God's bigger story. So find an ordinary story that honors God, and find your place in His story.

We hope some of that communicated. And more than anything, we hope this chapel program will function as a springboard for conversation. It is in the conversation, in the search, that learning happens. 

Always learners,

Jeremy Daggett and HIZ 2012