Where is White River?

That's really the most common question I get. Luckily, most of my friends are geographically savvy enough to know where South Africa is because you know, it's in Africa, and it's in the south. So, there's that. But when it comes to White River, folks really want to know where it is. I've taken 4 screenshots of Google Maps showing the location of Ten Thousand Homes down to the basic setup of the local campus. See if these help at all:

If I can take a moment to stretch a metaphor and make the kind of tortured segue lots of preachers (not my local pastor, obviously) make, location isn't just about GPS coordinates and what Google Maps can show. What really matters, when the map is focused in as far as it will go, is home. Home is where we live and work and play and build relationships. Sure, we travel (to South Africa in my case) and have special experiences that lead us closer to an understanding of ourselves and God, but we live at home and it is the place with which we are most familiar.

Sitting in this chair in this house with this blog open, I'm comfortable and working and I know there are people who care for me, care about me. Those whom we will serve don't necessarily have those things. From the "Our Story" page of the Ten Thousand Homes website, the founders started assisting orphans in the best way they knew how--building houses. Quickly, however they realized "home is so much more than four walls and a roof [and] began to create home by building and supporting community care centers."

That's more home than a house. I like that. Jesus likes that.

There are photos like this:

But there are also photos like this: 

It's much more easy to raise funds for the former than the latter. We (especially Americans) want something we can touch and point to and say, "I did that. We did that. We built that house. Look at what we have done." Mostly, there's nothing wrong with that. Mostly, it's an awesome thing to provide for the physical needs of such a vulnerable population. Ten Thousand Homes does that in multiple ways. There are the brick and mortar homes. There are feeding centers. There is jobs training. The physical and the spiritual are inextricably linked, but let us not focus on the physical and neglect the spiritual. Let us not focus on brick and mortar to the exclusion of hearts and minds (if that conjures a foreign policy connotation, I apologize for not knowing a better way to express myself). 

"Us" is an easy for for me to say. It helps to avoid using "me." Going forward, with one week left to raise funds, my prayer is not for us, or for you exclusively. All pronouns are welcome. But I want my heart and hands to do the right work in the right way for the right reason. 

Join me. Join the team. When you do, you don't have to pray for "those going" or "them." You're part of it, too. Use "us." Use "we." Pray that we would all be one in mission, the mission to love on the unloved and to support those already on the ground building relationships every day, earning the right to express the love of Christ.

www.gofundme.com/stevenoell

Unless otherwise noted, photos are courtesy of Ten Thousand Homes.