24 Safari

I want to give you the full picture of my safari, so I have included a few pictures and also a snippet of a conversation I had alla'tent. Enjoy the smorgasbord!

I explained, as we lay in our adjacent beds, how I am starting to really like this God guy, but I am still not a born again Christian.

She responded, "If it makes you feel any better, before I came here I was the girl who went out and got drunk every night. Not anymore though. I think I'm over that."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why are you over it?

I ask because not every teen would say ‘I got drunk’ with a negative connotation, you know? At home there is not such a bold line between right and wrong, rather there is the golden rule: do what you can handle – if you can no longer handle it, stop. So if you don’t mind me asking, what made you want to stop?”

I stared at the angled ceiling of the tent and could see in my peripheral vision that she was doing the same. “Since I’ve been here we have done much praying and reading of the bible. I’m a lot closer with God than I ever was. I know he wouldn’t like to see me doing those other things, so I’ve decided to stop.”

“You, Steve, and Anne read the bible?”

“Yes. Mostly Anne and I.”

“Did you come here with the objective to do that? Get closer to God I mean?”

“I came here because of a bad break up.”

“Pole.”

“Asante.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“Yeah – my brother is stationed in California right now, but he hasn’t spoken to my family in a while. My sister goes to school in state. She just got married. We’re close.”

“Aw, congratulations! Do you like her husband?”

She laughed at my forwardness. “Yeah. He really loves her too. She actually stood him up on their first date, but he tried again. Look at them now…”

Look at them now. As we continued to talk, she told me about how she lived in Bosnia for a year growing up, how she loves her hometown though it yields a surprising number of murders annually, and that she re-booked her plane ticket to go home a month early. This made her excited because her friend just had a baby whom she could now help dress up for Halloween. Look at her now.I marveled. Everything she told me was so happy-sad, but to her it was all just quietly happy. I guess that’s what God did for her.