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Unfamiliar Territory
Unfamiliar Territory
Unfamiliar Territory
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Unfamiliar Territory

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Ignoring the pleas of friends and colleagues and refusing to give in to nagging fears, Dr. James Judge divorced a life of privilege for an uncivilized village and an unknown people. Forever changed by a relief trip to Africa, he abandoned his practice, sold all his worldly belongings, and uprooted his family, giving up everything he once held dear to return to the remote village of Lamu, Kenya. In this unbelievably true story, Judge chronicles the remarkable people he encountered and what they taught him about mercy, compassion, and the power of the human spirit.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherThomas Nelson
Release dateSep 8, 2001
ISBN9781418556426
Unfamiliar Territory

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    Book preview

    Unfamiliar Territory - James Judge

    UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY

    UNFAMILIAR

    TERRITORY

    James Judge, M.D.

    2

    Copyright © 2001 James Judge

    All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

    Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations used in this book are from The King James Version of the Bible (KJV).

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Judge, James, 1953-

      Unfamiliar territory / James Judge.

              p. cm.

    ISBN 0-8499-1609-9

    1. Judge, James, 1953- 2. Missions, Medical—Kenya. 3. Medical missionaries—Kenya—Biography. 4. Hospitals—Kenya. I. Title

    RA991.K4 J84 2001

    601'.92—dc21

    [B]

    2001026967

    Printed in the United States of America

    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 — 06 05 04 03 02 01

    For Emily, Katie, and Jenny

    Once upon a time there were three beautiful princesses,

    and together, they went on a great adventure to a strange

    and wondrous place that was far, far, away.

    A place called Africa.

    "All that is gold does not glitter;

    not all those that wander are lost."

    —J. R. R. TOLKIEN

    CONTENTS

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    Chapter 1 Vocatus

    Chapter 2 Karibu

    Chapter 3 You’re Not in Wheaton Anymore

    Chapter 4 Little Sarah and the Week That Was

    Chapter 5 The Masai Man

    Chapter 6 A Different Kind of Christmas

    Chapter 7 A Trip to Lamu

    Chapter 8 The Journey to the Njemps

    Chapter 9 Rainy Season

    Epilogue

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    Anote of thanks to the many people who contributed to our experience overseas and the book that grew out of it.

    To all the people at W Publishing Group, for your support and encouragement. Especially to Ami McConnell for your gracious tolerance of my process, and to Bridgett O’Lannerghty for everything you did to make the book better.

    To Cindy, for everything you did to enhance this book and for everything you do to enhance my life. Both would be severely diminished without you. For the room you created to make this book happen, for the sacrifices you make every day.

    To Emily, Katie, and Jenny. My favorite audience, my heroes. For your commitment to His purposes in this world, for your loving hearts.

    To Michael Buckley, for your review of the manuscript, which allowed me to see the stories through new eyes.

    To all the people who were so gracious to us during this year away, a belated thank you. To Wes Farah, to Jack Zimmermann, to all the doctors at the clinic. To the people at World Medical Mission and Africa Inland Mission. To those who loved us while we were there in Africa. To the Faders and the Bowers and the Bransfords and the Bustrums and the Howards and to Bryan Hagerman. To the Snyders, who made the year even more precious. To the students of Moffatt Bible College and to all the staff at Kifabe Medical Center and Rift Valley Academy who allowed us the privilege of sharing a moment in their lives.

    INTRODUCTION

    It was only one year. From this side of it, it seems absurd to have wrestled with it as much as I did, but at the time, spending that year in that way seemed like a high-risk venture. It is only now, looking back ten years later, that I see just exactly what the risk really was. In reality, the greatest risk was that which comes of listening too carefully to common sense and making ordinary choices. A risk made all the more dangerous by the fact that it tends to masquerade as being no risk at all. The greatest risk we faced was that we might have said no and missed the year altogether.

    It was a year of living out of context. A year of living in unfamiliar territory, and something about being there, without the familiar props of our personal culture, distilled us down to our simple selves. Evenings that before had been jammed full of perfectly good things like work and Brownies and gymnastics and church, would give way to evenings filled with something even better—one another. The year would become the line running through the middle of our family’s life.

    It was time outside of time. A time that stripped us of all things familiar, leaving us holding to nothing else except the unshakable essence of three things: our essential love for one another, our most basic faith, and our own unspoken hopes. It was our time, it was a gift, and by it we would measure the rest of our days.

    1

    VOCATUS

    Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit.

    Bidden or unbidden, God is present.

    —CARL JUNG

    It was three in the morning, and our midnight flight was halfway between Amsterdam and Nairobi. We were suspended thirty thousand feet up, timeless, in a muted world somewhere between here and there. As the jet cut its way through the night sky, the hypnotic one-toned white noise of the 767 pulled me toward sleep. I scanned the darkened cabin. Mostly dimmed lights all around. The flight attendants had disappeared. The sleeping passengers were all curled in various interpretations of the fetal position, looking as if they were seeking some way of becoming smaller. With insufficient blankets pulled up tightly underneath their chins and tiny pillows just barely visible, they looked like a room full of oversized children, finally down for their naps.

    I looked over at my family in the row beside me. There was Emily, our twelve-year-old, looking intense even as she slept. She was the passionate child, the gregarious one, the one not fearless but brave. The child who could turn anything into a marvelous adventure; who could Huck Finn us all into believing that selling pizzas for a school fund-raiser was the most exciting thing a person could possibly think to do, no one more convinced of it than she.

    Next to her was Kate, our fourth-grader, as tenuous as Emily was unquestioning. She was the feeler, the one asking all the questions Emily had forgotten to ask. The child given to vacillating moods of brooding and hilarity, rarely providing any storm warning as to which was on the horizon. The child I had the hardest time getting close to. The one who frightened me, just a little, maybe because she reflected a part of me I kept tightly locked away. Sometimes small mirrors have a way of accentuating your flaws.

    Then there was Jenny, age six, the child born happy. The child for whom today was enough. The child with the gift of being satisfied, dreaming her happy, contented dreams.

    At the end of the row was Cindy, my wife. What was going through her head as she laid there? The small crow’s feet between her eyes that were always present as she struggled toward sleep were gone now. I was glad. Hopefully she had escaped the never-ending mother’s list playing perpetually in her head. She and the girls seemed so innocent, sleeping as peaceful children, unaware they had any option except to trust.

    I pushed my seat back and tried to let the drone and the vibration lull me to sleep, but instead I tacked back and forth across the line that separates waking from dreams. It was the first day and the first night of what would be a year in unfamiliar territory. Territory not bounded so much by lines on a map as by wonders and struggles and challenges we had never faced before. I was bobbing up and down in a father’s private world of thoughts; that gray, underground sea of questions and fears fathers keep mostly to themselves. What was I doing? I had uprooted my family and was taking them halfway around the world to Kenya, where I would fill in for a year as a volunteer doctor at a mission hospital. As I twisted in my seat, it wasn’t long before I found myself slogging, one more time, through the all-too-familiar mire of second-guessing. How sure was I this was the right thing to do? What was at the bottom of it all, anyway? Was it the first step on a bigger journey? What was really driving me? Was it primarily a desire to help, or was there something else? Something a little less noble. Did it matter, one way or the other? Whoever said you got points taken off for mixed motivation? If I was wrong about all this, would there be a price to pay? And who besides me would be paying?

    My thoughts floated back to where it all began. As I traced the path that had brought us thus far, three faces faded in and out of focus. Three who had, unknowing, stood at a crossroads and pointed the way here: a pastor, a patient, and Jenny. One repeated a phrase, the other a sentence, and the little one simply sang her song. Only now, as each one spoke, it wasn’t their voices I heard, but a different voice, a familiar voice, a voice that warmed me as I listened. It was that voice, more than anything else, that had captured me. Like some vagabond star on an uncharted path, it had swept through my world, and now I was caught up in its gravitational wake. Where it was taking us, I could not be completely sure.

    It had all started at Christmas, eight months earlier. Our pastor talked one morning about giving. For some reason, there was a phrase within his sermon that kept pounding on me, as if the entire message consisted of the same two inescapable words, repeated over and over again: costly gift. Costly gift. Costly gift. The message was a challenge to give back to God a gift that, in some small way, reflected the costly character of the gift God gave the world with the birth of His Son. A gift, not out of our surplus, like most of our giving, but rather something that would extract a price, require some kind of giving up, some doing without. Maybe He suspected what ensuing benefits would likely fall to those of us who rarely do this, who work so very hard at staying within the bounds of safety and abundance. Costly gift. I couldn’t escape the phrase. Over the next several days it haunted me, followed me everywhere, like a secondary shadow. Costly gift, costly gift. It was obsessive. Each time I had a moment to run back to my own thoughts, these two words awaited me. I knew, knew somewhere deeper than knowing, where the knowing and the feeling are the same, that I was being asked for more than money. And somewhere in it was the inexplicable surety that whatever I would be asked to give came with a promise attached. A vague promise that had something to do with the inexorable link between giving and receiving.

    Part of what captivated me so completely about that phrase was that I knew there was something of God in it. Something I hadn’t heard for a long time. Something that felt like direction. Although I looked OK from the outside, the truth was, there was a lot about my life that was just going through the motions. I had been keeping God at arms’ distance for a long time. I think I blamed Him for the fact that, as midlife approached, the logistics of my life weren’t turning out quite as I had imagined. Despite what I thought was a great plan for my life, God or the circumstances or my own choices had pushed me down a different path. I didn’t know why. My self-authored script had been so neatly written: A couple years of living and practicing in the U.S., getting the family established, getting the practice of medicine learned. And then, off to some exotic somewhere, where the everyday need of me would be undeniable.

    In an attempt to determine just exactly where that exotic somewhere might be, my family and I had spent several months in Africa on two separate occasions. But as much as I tried to will it so, I came back from each trip without any clear sense that I was being directed to return for a long-term commitment. I couldn’t understand it. The need was so blatant, the willingness so sincere, the resources so ready. Why hadn’t God rubber-stamped my plan? I was left unable to move. If my previous overseas experiences had taught me any lesson, it was the necessity of being sure I was called by more than a sense of adventure or some narcissistic need to be needed. There was another voice that needed to speak. I couldn’t make a move that drastic, could not face everything that might come with that decision, without a strong sense of invitation. When the invitation didn’t come, when it became progressively and undeniably clear it was my plan, my script, not His, I became angry. To make matters worse, no clear rewrite for my life had arrived in its place, leaving me no option except to wait and live each day, one day at a time, in the most unexotic place I could imagine—suburbia.

    My life so far had been a series of steps. In a way, I was always climbing toward something I thought was better, higher, bigger, never really appreciating the step I was standing on. After our last trip overseas, I returned with the improbable conclusion that we were supposed to stay right where we were. I felt as if the steps had ended and there was no place to go, and I struggled with the possibility that the last half of my life would simply be a rerun of the first. And so, like a spoiled two-year-old who hadn’t gotten his way, I folded my arms and turned the other way, convinced that the Father calling me back to Himself, trying to comfort me, was the same one doing the withholding.

    This was the troubled internal sea upon which those two words, costly gift, sailed, in search of a place to land. And in a demonstration of sheer, measureless, absurd grace, land they did. The moment was cut in crystal. Cindy and I were sitting on the couch in the sunroom. Cars rushed by on the busy street in front of our house. Morning sun flooded in. We were talking with our dear friend Catherine, who had lived in Kenya and had worked there as a teacher and dorm parent at a large missionary school. She told us she had just spoken with one of the physicians working at the hospital adjacent to the school. Before she could even say the words, I had the clear and physical sense something was coming: the invitation I had been waiting for. For a moment I was a man watching a man as he watched a door open. Her words struck the air without conjunctions, like Morse code tapped out distinctly from some unknown other side. Missionary hospital—Kenya—losing four of seven doctors—extreme need for the next year—do you know anyone who might help? It came like a lightning strike. I looked at Catherine and felt the wheel turn; my life lurched forward one notch into the future.

    What made this experience so unusual, was how out of

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