Things I Learned in Ghana: Lesson #1

The Roads of Ghana are notoriously bad.

First you have the traffic, and even when it’s light, doesn’t follow any sort of rules. For example one day we were driving down a 2 lane road that was a little backed up. Before I knew it my fellow drivers had turned the road into a 4-Lane with 3 lanes going one way and another going the other way. I’ve seen countless number of “infractions” which would drive a visiting traffic cop crazy, let alone me with my constant “conversations” I have with other drives.
Secondly, the infrastructure in Ghana is well below our standards in the U.S. When it rains many roads are closed because they are simply impassable. Pot holes are everywhere on the few roads that are paved and a large number of the other roads have simply been created by vehicles trying to get to where they’re going. These are called “bush” roads.

One day last November while at a pastor’s meeting we where going around the table saying what we were each thankful for. When it got to one of our senior pastors, Dean, he said he was thankful for the roads in Ghana.

I was floored, I couldn’t believe what he had just said and I wasn’t the only one. He had lived in the U.S. He had traveled on our amazing Interstate system and seen pot holes fixed when they sprang up. Of all the things to be thankful for, why was he thankful for what I thought had to be one of the worst things in Ghana?

He went on to explain that he had just returned from the D.R. Congo. It seems that the roads there are similar to the one in Ghana, but as you travel between villages there are armed bandits all along the routes who demand payment for passage and if you don’t or can’t pay terrible things can happen to you. So with that perspective, he was thankful for the roads in Ghana.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. What was a curse to me – the roads of Ghana – where a blessing to someone else. So who was right? Was I right because I knew that there was something better out there and as long as I had my eyes set on what could be (US Roads) the roads in Ghana were bad. Or was Dean right? He had seen the great and he had seen the worst so when he saw where he was and yet he found blessing in it.

Think about Peter, James and John who got to see Christ in all his glory during the Transfiguration (Luke 9:28). They got to see and experience the great, the awesome, the perfection of Christ Glorified, yet didn’t stay there.
Then the same disciples experience the worst of humanity as they ministered out into the world.
The disciples, having experienced the great and wonderful, didn’t sit around and complain because what they had wasn’t as good as what was happening on the mountain top, though Peter started to when he was up there, but the writers of the Gospels, nicely say ”He didn’t know what he was talking about.”
No, they went out and served and found blessings wherever they were at. It didn’t have to be the best to still be a blessing.

Remember that nothing on this earth is the best, that will come in due time.

I’m still chewing on all of this and there are a ton of lessons that come from Dean’s simple statement “Thank God for our Roads in Ghana.” What do you think? Leave a comment or a lesson learned. I’ve made it easier to leave comments no longer do you have to sign up.