When the Strength Goes

Thirty-seven years indoors

In 1941 Nsibambi's health broke. Joe Church, who knew him well, described the illness only as a weakness; no better diagnosis has come down to us. From then until his death in 1978 he lived largely confined to his home near Namirembe Cathedral, an invalid.

Do the arithmetic, because it is easy to read past. He was about forty-four when he fell ill. He was eighty-one when he died. The man remembered as a father of the East African Revival spent roughly thirty-seven years — the larger part of his adult life, by a wide margin — unable to do the thing he had given up everything to do.

He did not stop the street preaching because he had finished. He stopped because his body would not carry him out of the house.

What was happening outside the house

And the movement did not pause for him.

Through the 1940s and 1950s the revival ran on through the Anglican and Protestant churches of Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi. Its marks were the ones set on that hillside: repentance, confession of sin out loud, what the balokole called walking in the light — open honesty before God and before each other — and the singing of Tukutendereza Yesu wherever they gathered. It cut across tribe and across the line between missionary and African, which in colonial East Africa was not a small thing to cut across.

It produced people. Erica Sabiti, who would become the first African archbishop of Uganda. Festo Kivengere, the evangelist who would preach alongside Billy Graham and who, after Idi Amin murdered his archbishop, wrote a book called I Love Idi Amin. And Janani Luwum himself, killed in 1977 for standing up to that regime.

Nsibambi was in a room the whole time, on his knees, receiving whoever climbed the hill to see him. He outlived Luwum by a year.

Refusing the tidy version

There is a way of telling this that makes it comfortable, and it is worth naming so that we can decline it. The comfortable version says: God withdrew him from public work so that he could pray, and prayer was the greater ministry, so nothing was lost.

The second half of that is true. The first half is a guess, and the last clause is not true at all.

Something was lost. A man who loved to stop people on the road could not go out to the road. A man whose great gift was face-to-face with strangers was reduced to whoever could climb the hill to see him. We should not smooth that over. The Bible does not; it is full of people who wanted to do more than they were permitted to do, and it does not always explain why.

What we can say is what he did with it, and that is the only part of this that is ours to imitate anyway.

What he did with it

He prayed, and he received whoever came.

That is a short sentence for thirty-seven years, and it is worth holding it next to the paragraphs above. Everything in them — the five countries, the archbishops, the hymn going up in churches he would never see — was happening to a movement whose root was a man in a room, on his knees, watching almost none of it.

Whether he heard of Luwum's murder, and what he prayed when he did, nobody wrote down. It is exactly the kind of detail that would make this chapter more moving, and exactly the kind we are not entitled to invent.

For anyone whose strength has gone

You may be reading this from inside a version of the same thing. Illness that did not lift. Age that took the work away. A season of caring for someone else that has swallowed everything you used to be able to give. Something has closed, and you are still here, and the arithmetic of your usefulness looks bad to you.

Two things are worth saying, and the order matters.

The first is that your grief about it is not unbelief. Nowhere does Scripture require you to pretend the loss is not a loss. Paul asked three times for the thorn to be removed; the asking was not held against him. Whatever peace is available here is not the peace of deciding you never wanted the other thing.

The second is that the room is not a waiting area. This is the part the tidy version gets right even though it arrives there too cheaply. Nsibambi's thirty-seven years were not the epilogue to his ministry. On the evidence, they were most of it — longer than the street preaching, longer than the health office, longer than everything before them put together.

The parable in it

There is something fitting in how it turned out, and it is not a coincidence anyone arranged.

The movement Nsibambi lit was never really about platforms. Its convictions were repentance, confession, walking in the light, and prayer — none of which need a crowd, and all of which can be done by a man in a single room. That its father should spend his last decades unseen, doing precisely those four things, is not an irony. It is the movement's own message, demonstrated by the one person best placed to demonstrate it.

He had already given it the only thing that mattered: a hunger for holiness and a habit of prayer. He went on giving both from a place where nobody could see him do it.

If you are in such a place, you are not out of the story. You may be nearer the centre of it than the people outside who are visibly busy.

A prayer

Lord, when my strength goes, do not let me believe I have gone with it. Teach me that a closed door is not an ending, and let me grieve honestly without concluding that You have finished with me. Make the small room a place of intercession. Amen.