In Denile

I stuck my feet in the Nile River the other day. It wasn’t exactly what I imagined. From where I stood, I could look upstream all the way to the source of the river. But this river doesn’t begin as a spring on a mountaintop somewhere. It doesn’t bubble and babble its way through fallen leaves and over forgotten pebbles. It doesn’t slowly gather speed and volume over hundreds of miles, turning from a spring to a brook to a stream. This river begins as a ripple and a current change in the world’s largest lake. At its source, the Nile River is about 150 meters wide and its current is already dangerously strong. Standing at the source, you can look out over the great waters and see the very spot where the lake gives way to the river. In fact the waters of this mother of all lakes actually break in waves over the surface of the river and find themselves swept downstream and all the way to the Mediterranean.

I never really expected to stand in the Nile River, and I certainly never expected that if I did, I would be looking around at lush green hills covered with banana trees and clear blue skies. When I imagined stepping in the Nile, I imagined pyramids and camels. I imagined baby Moses floating in a basket among the reeds by Pharaoh’s palace. I imagined sand and dust and six thousand years of history enveloping me into its story.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my imagination lately. I do a lot of imagining—imagining places I’d like to go, imagining what my life could be like, imagining who I’d like to be. But I have discovered over and over lately--now that my life is much more fluid and much less structured than it used to be—that the stuff of my imagination is never quite good enough. It is never big enough or extravagant enough or exciting enough. God’s imagination is always trumping mine! He is always giving me bigger, more extravagant, more exciting things than I could have imagined myself. Sure, His imagination involves the unconventional, the unexpected, and occasionally the downright bizarre more often than not. But who ever said that the conventional, expected, “normal” way of life was the life that we, as followers of Christ, were meant to live? I find that as I stop questioning God’s sanity as he unveils his imagination in my life, the more fulfilling, the more exciting, the more alive my life is. As I let Him be the Great Storyteller instead of trying to write my own lame-o stories, I find myself neck deep in adventures I never dreamed of.

My dreams of the Nile River were different from what I found. You see, as the Nile flows up through Sudan and finally to Egypt and into the Mediterranean, it becomes more and more polluted. It is so polluted, in fact, that visitors to Egypt are told that under no circumstances are they to allow the waters of the Nile to touch their skin. Wading in the Nile in Egypt is not an option. Looking at the pyramids while standing ankle deep in this mythical river is simply not possible. But here, in Uganda, at the very source of the Nile, I can enjoy the cool Ugandan breeze on my face as it plays over the water; I can hum along to African jazz as it plays in the café behind me; I can enjoy the gentle sway of the banana trees across the river; and I can do it all with my feet in clear, clean river water. It isn’t the Nile I imagined, but it is unexpectedly and infinitely better. I never expected the story of my feet in the Nile to go quite like it does. And I never expected the story of my life to look quite like it does. But the more I let go of my puny imagination and get swept up in His, the more and more I find myself standing in a Nile River I never imagined--standing right in the river instead of on its banks.