The Website of Miah and Michelle Collins

We live in a mobile world. I was reading a book chronicling the life of a faithful missionary to South Africa a couple of hundred of years ago (I wasn’t actually reading it a couple hundred years ago). When he left England it was seen as his final departure. There was very little likelihood of him ever returning to his home country, and he never did.

As I sit here in a coffee shop in South Africa, Michelle is back in the States just months after our arrival here, to be with her family as they mourn the loss of Michelle’s grandmother and family matriarch. I’m waiting eagerly for her return on Tuesday.

Michelle and I have settled into a church home. Acts Church meets at a farm house about half an hour’s drive from where we live. The church is about a year and a half old and a lot of the J-Life staffs attends there. John, our ministries’ director, is an elder there.

It is a privilege to have an English speaking home church. When you live here, you realize that English is just one language among many, and although many people here speak English, those of us who would prefer to watch the news, write a love letter, or speak to God in English are in the minority.

I always have felt I’m a small church kind of guy caught in a mega-church so this is a real pleasant change for me. People speak candidly during services about common subjects like depression, crime, economic strain, questions about the future of the country and the constant lure of “the lucky country,” more commonly know as Australia, as well as New Zealand, the UK and the USA. (When America or Europe experiences an economic shakeup, a country like South Africa feels it much worse because developing nations are considered “risky markets” and economists tend to avoid them when there is global economic insecurity as we are experiencing now.)

Michelle and I have found ourselves drawn to this church where a great majority of its tithe goes to projects outside of the church. They are also not interested at all in attracting people from other congregations. It is the responsibility of every person in the church to build meaningful relationships with people in their communities. Once a month the church gathers together not for a service but simply to share a big breakfast which has earned them the nickname “the breakfast church.” I enjoy that a lot.

Over the past week or so a wild fire of violence against immigrants has been sweeping across poor areas of Johannesburg and elsewhere around the country. There is said to be 2 to 3 million Zimbabweans living in South Africa along with many others from across Africa, India, China and the Middle East. Foreigners have been blamed from everything from crime, to stealing jobs and girlfriends. They say about 50 people have been killed so far. I left the controversial issue of immigration in the States and found it quickly gaining attention here. When I realize how much foreigners are despised around the world, and then I realize that we are also a foreigners where we live, it makes me very thankful for the many people who have treated Michelle and I with so much love and hospitality over the past four months.

Michelle and I will be going to neighboring country, Swaziland this weekend. I am excited for Michelle to see the place and the people for the first time. Then we will be going on a trip along the east coast to visit teams and meet with pastors and church leaders to talk about J-Life.

We continue to pray for Zimbabwe, our neighboring country to the north, which will hold its “run-off” election soon. We also remember our friends there: Richmond, Nhlanhla, and Terasiah, who continue to trust God in incredibly difficult circumstances. 

Time. The continuum between reality and unconsciousness.
Isolation. This realization of inner grace that cannot be squelched by the reality of my flesh.
Yet my heart is still burning, on fire with this yearning for more. More power in the desolation of the sabotage of our minds as we’re forced to live in this media driven generation, distorting God’s creation and turning to intellectual misinterpretations of the actuality that cannot be sufficed with a secular explanation. Meandering through the streets wet with the molecules of elements that sustain life, numb to the divinely abnormal beauty of this circular rock that orbits so my feet are drawn to the blackness of the concrete underneath them. Torn between two realms of reality and questioning the integration between them. This inner drive won’t stop beating, beating, beating at my heart and propelling me with forces of passion (a concept of this integration of my realms of humanity and spirituality). Yet the whispers of conformity surround me, beckoning me to the norms of this social depravity. Inhaling......exhaling...it concentrates and simplifies. I think..... therefore I am? Or are these revelations a call to the only non-refutable truth that is experience. I will think it, I will interpret it, I will live it.

Take me as far as I can go before encompassing the knowledge that is only attainable with the departure from this finite mind. I am trapped in the theological web of humanity when my faith is screaming for spirituality. This word that connotates the reality that we are created to live in. The reaction of intense feeling, touch, sight, taste, hear, smell and the connection of our hearts and minds in a space that is an incomprehensible dimension. The tension. It rages within us while simultaneously stifling the actuality that is planted as a fountain of passion and bliss in our hearts. We cultivate our words, our intellect, our interpretation, our presentation. What are we striving for? There is a power that surges in our veins, synapses, and every cell.... this electric voltage that is so much more than the weakness of lightning that jolts like a source of energy illuminating the darkness. WHAT IS THIS POWER? This power that has been hidden from you America. America, the land of the free as your wealth stifles you so you cannot see. Blind to all that burns within your 50 states. Burns with apathy, burns with confusion, burns with a blanket thrown over it to suffocate the flames. Be careful with fire..... or the flame inside of you just might catch! Time is the only thing standing between you and the eternal flames. Yet time is elapsing and even retrograde motion cannot stop the heat of the minute hand. Tick. Tick. Tick.... a notion. Life is our dictionary. Live it before the ashes are blown away!

***I should probably write a little bit about this poetry before I scare some of you. I wrote this after coming back to the US from Zambia in 2005. I wrote this when I was overwhelmed with the wealth and the lifestyles of Americans, me being the prototype. I was writing about my experience with the Holy Spirit in Zambia, and how I wanted to see the US changed by that same Spirit. I had felt and seen the reality of the spiritual realm coming into the physical, and I had noticed that in Africa, the spiritual realm is very seen and is a part of mundane life. I longed for Americans to live in light of this reality as well. Since then, God has matured a lot of my views and has shown me many different truths in light of this struggle. As I continue to experience God’s love and heart for each culture in a unique way, I am following Him and His word throughout all of these challenges.***

So, I am here in the US of A and I am really learning a lot from this experience. As some of you know, I came home to be with my family as my last grandma passed away. I had known before I left to go to South Africa about her condition with pancreatic cancer, and none of this was too much of a surprise. Nevertheless, anytime that you lose someone you love, it’s a shock and it is difficult. I knew coming here that it would be a little harder to be without Miah on this first trip back to my own country, to go through this loss, and this culture shock, and the change alone. But as always, God has been my rock and my refuge, and He has provided all the embraces and emotional sustenance that I ever needed or wanted. He is such a faithful God! 

One of the things that has sustained me in this time is knowing that Jesus has been through what I am going through, and wants to go through it with me all over again, because His love is that incredible. I have been reading the story of Lazarus and Jesus has been speaking to me through this story of what He is doing in my life today. If you read the story, in John 11, you will notice how much the disciples were confused about Jesus wanting to go back to a town where people tried to kill him, to help his friend who was “sleeping”. This is one of those times when Jesus stops trying to let them understand on their own and He just tells them plainly that He is about to do a miracle, for their sake, so that they would believe him. Jesus knew going into the situation what He was going to do. He knew he was about to blow their minds and change their absolute sorrow to absolute joy, but he was not hasty.... he did a few intentional things before he displayed his power and authority. What a beautiful part Martha played in this story as she was able to declare her theology out loud to the disciples. And Jesus must have set that up, because before he raised his friend from the dead, he got to say, in spoken and written word, that He is the resurrection and the life, and what he said following this was the ultimate declaration of authority over life and death. And when He says things like this throughout scripture, He incites a response from each of our hearts.

Immediately after he gets his response, he does something that hits me so hard. He weeps. He weeps....... Jesus, the Son of the living God, knowing He has the power over death and that he was about to bring his friend back to life, wept. I think the shortest verse in the bible has a profound message to all of us on this side of eternity. Jesus does not just show us how to solve all issues of pain and suffering, or even just how to bring life into a situation filled with death, but Jesus shows us how to go through life experiencing the depth of each feeling with each other. He stops to weep with the people, overcome with the emotion that the people around him were feeling. He took the time to drink in the uniqueness of the emotions we feel on this earth. And because of this, I know he understands me, he feels with me, and he hurts with me in this time over my loss.

Praise God that it’s okay to feel. Praise God that it’s okay to be overwhelmed. But praise Him that Jesus did not let His emotions change the reality of who He was or what He came to do. He gets up from mourning and raises Lazarus from the dead. Because of Jesus, death is not where my grandmother is resting right now, but she is resting in LIFE. Turns out, Jesus’ words are true! And I believe them with everything that I am...... read the story.

I have lost an incredible role model in my life. You don’t get people like my grandma too often in this world anymore, and she is definitely a soul that will have infinite impact on this earth. But she also will live on in my actions and in my life and in our family for generations to come. She was a woman who loved hard, who judged not, who was a determined lover of Jesus until her very last days. I think she would want me to leave this entry with this quote from my continuous role model:

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Do you believe this?