I am so excited for Cape Town! As the final in-person advance of our doctoral program, I\u2019ve been eyeing this moment since the beginning, and it\u2019s hard to believe it is finally here. I love to travel and experience new places, to learn their history, culture, and people\u2014and South Africa has no shortage of those things. This week I\u2019ve been hastily making trip preparations: packing, finishing tasks at work and home, setting up support for my family while I\u2019m away, and trying to prepare my head and heart for this time and place.<\/p>\n
As I\u2019ve been reading through Waldmeir\u2019s and Russell\u2019s works on the end of apartheid and where South Africa has gone since, I\u2019ve been overwhelmed by the complex web of people, places, and conversations that brought about the \u201cmiracle\u201d of transition\u2014a momentous event in human history. I\u2019m also a fan of comedian Trevor Noah, and I devoured his book Born a Crime<\/em> these past few weeks in preparation. Noah\u2019s personal take on growing up under apartheid was eye-opening. The organized way in which people were divided, ranked, segregated, and entrenched in broken worldviews was heartbreaking and illuminating. In his story, Noah and his family had little agency to change apartheid itself, but they changed their response to it. His mother\u2019s resilience had a tremendous impact on his life.<\/p>\n In a similar way, Nelson Mandela\u2019s views on forgiveness and reconciliation were shaped by his experiences and enabled him to lead his country toward peace. Two quotes from Long Walk to Freedom<\/em> stood out to me. The first reveals his humility as a leader: \u201cI have always endeavored to listen to what each person had to say before venturing my own opinion. Often, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard in the discussion. I have found that a leader loses nothing by being able to listen, and he gains much thereby.\u201d<\/em> (pp. 25\u201326). His upbringing in a culture of consensus-style leadership shaped this posture.<\/p>\n The second reflects his ability to separate individuals from the system of apartheid: \u201cIn prison, my anger toward whites decreased, but my hatred for the system grew. I wanted South Africa to see that I loved even my enemies while hating the system that turned us against one another.\u201d<\/em> (p. 464). This echoes Paul\u2019s admonition to the Ephesians: \u201cPut on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil\u2019s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.\u201d<\/em> (Ephesians 6:11\u201312, NIV). Apartheid was emphatically a broken system in a broken world\u2014and such systems persist today in South Africa and around the globe. The principle remains: see the image of God in others, and seek reconciliation and forgiveness, even toward those who \u201cdo not know what they are doing.\u201d<\/p>\n During our time in Cape Town, my prayer is that God will help me to listen and to see. To listen to the people, the culture, the land we are visiting, and to my fellow classmates, who are much wiser than I. And to see\u2014to see clearly the transformative power of forgiveness, the downfall of corruption and power-centered leadership, and to recognize those things both \u201cout there\u201d and \u201cin myself,\u201d that God might shape me into a healthier and more Christlike leader.<\/p>\n So here we go! Next week in Cape Town!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am so excited for Cape Town! As the final in-person advance of our doctoral program, I\u2019ve been eyeing this moment since the beginning, and it\u2019s hard to believe it is finally here. I love to travel and experience new places, to learn their history, culture, and people\u2014and South Africa has no shortage of those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3481],"class_list":["post-42144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp03-waldmeir-russell","cohort-dlgp03"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42144"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42145,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42144\/revisions\/42145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}