About Us & Book Excerpt
Purchase Lessons from Afar
For the latest news about Hope and Resurrection Secondary, visit the website of the non-profit organization, Hope for Humanity, that funds the school: hopeforhumanityinc.org
About the Author
Mary Higbee and her husband Jim served as missionaries in South Sudan and helped to open Hope and Resurrection Secondary in 2008.
If you have ever wondered what life in the mission field is like, this book will let you sample some of the experiences of a missionary couple, although Lessons is more than a memoir. At the end of each chapter, the questions and activity invite you to consider how trust, humility, vulnerability, gratitude, and perseverance are reflected in your life circumstances. The invitation includes discovering possible ways you can reflect on how prayer, actions, and attitudes support your spiritual growth and perhaps reveal God’s unique call to you.
Enjoy an excerpt from the book below.
Book Excerpt
Dear Reader, I share the introduction of Lessons from Afar with you.
New experiences and difficult challenges often result in the development and growth of spiritual maturity. Lessons from Afar is about such experiences and challenges and what I learned when my husband Jim and I served nine months as missionaries in Southern Sudan. Our work in the rural village of Atiaba was to open a newly built school named Hope and Resurrection Secondary.
We lived for a school year in Southern Sudan in 2008 during the small window of time just after the end of a twenty-three-year long civil war. That relative peace ended with violence and civil unrest that began in December 2013. Jim and I are among a limited number of foreign visitors who experienced this hopeful period, and for that reason, our stories of Southern Sudan need telling. To judge the value of this culture by the horrific news stories of the last few years is not to know the whole truth of people who love their families, want progress, and long for leadership that is not corrupt.
My missionary experiences do not always make pretty stories. As ready and committed as I believed I was when Jim and I boarded the plane for Africa, I often stumbled as I tried to live out the mission to help begin a secondary school. Through my stumbling, I learned to think and live in ways that were not about my comfort and convenience but were about how to develop the resilience to fall and, with God’s help, to get up again.
In the first months after Jim and I returned to the United States from Southern Sudan, I found it difficult to know how to explain the complexity of all that had occurred in my head and heart. It was not until we visited a rainforest exhibit at the National Academy of Sciences in San Francisco that I found a precise metaphor that eloquently expressed my transformation.
The rainforest exhibit provided information about light gaps. A light gap occurs in a rainforest when a large canopy tree dies and falls, and in the tree’s absence, shafts of light penetrate deep into the interior of the forest floor where limited light has been. The light gap facilitates a hothouse of new life, as plants compete for the nutrients provided by the fallen tree and take advantage of the possibilities for growth that the light offers.
Standing in the Academy of Sciences Museum, I repeatedly re-read the light gap information, seeing the similarities between the natural world and my internal landscape of thoughts and feelings while in Southern Sudan. Many of my preconceived notions of missionary life and some long-held judgments perished in the same way the fallen canopy tree dies in the rainforest. The people I met and the things I learned on the other side of the world served as my “light gap” by providing opportunities for discovery and understanding about myself, others, and God.
In Lessons from Afar, I relate my stories through the lenses of the many life lessons that awaited me in Southern Sudan. These life lessons were not new to me. They had been with me in all kinds of circumstances, yet I had not always integrated what I learned into my life in a lasting way. Living and working in a culture that was not my own made the lessons about trust, vulnerability, humility, perseverance, and non-judgment immediate and necessary for my emotional and spiritual well-being.
I invite you to accompany me as I recount my experiences in Southern Sudan in Lessons from Afar. I look forward to introducing you to some of the first class of Hope and Resurrection Secondary students and letting you glimpse the culture of the newest country in the world. This invitation includes the opportunity to pursue your spiritual understanding by reflecting on the events of your life and Scripture passages.
On the other side of the world, amid scarcity and need, I experienced God’s generosity and a life-affirming purpose for me. This brings us to the question at the center of this book: Can the lessons taught to me by God and the Dinka people of Southern Sudan be brought home to the United States for a more abundant and generous life? Please join me in seeking answers to that question.