The Perfect Pearl

Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Saviour and my God.

Jesus told a short story – a really short story – about a man and some buried treasure. He says there’s a guy, and somehow – who knows what he was up to – he finds hidden treasure in someone else’s field. Obviously he’s over the moon – this is the greatest find imaginable, he’s set for life – and he puts the treasure back where he found it, runs home, sells everything he has and scrapes together the cash to buy the field. And he gets the field and the treasure. And everyone lived happily ever after, except possibly the original owner of the field, when he notices that the poor guy he sold that field to is suddenly some kind of dancing-for-joy, lottery-rollover millionaire.

Anyway, straight away Jesus told another two-liner story. He said there was a merchant looking for fine pearls, and then one day he came across one of immense value – a lot like that guy in Toy Story 2 when he finds Woody in the jumble sale – and just like the other guy he runs home, sells everything, absolutely everything, and buys that pearl.

And Jesus said that the kingdom of God is like that treasure, and that pearl.

And my favourite bit is where it says – about the buried treasure guy – “in his joy he went and sold everything he had”. Just imagine selling all your stuff. Imagine selling your fridge – complete with a few carrots and some yoghurt – your kitchen table, your phone, your favourite clothes, that thing you’ve had since you were in primary school, your mattress, your bed, your house. Imagine watching the boxes go out the door and into the van and off to auction. Imagine the hammer falling again and again as memory after memory, useful tool after beautiful thing goes for some amount or another.

Now try to imagine doing that, joyfully. Imagine running to greet the van and skipping a bit as you run back to grave the first box of stuff; imagine grinning inanely at all the people as they walk out holding your phone and your ipod and just bursting our laughing when you hear them whispering to each other, trying to work our if you’re crazy or you just racked up a lot of gambling debts. Imagine striding up to the auctioneer as the last person leaves, taking his hammer and having a go at banging it yourself, laughing with him and giving him a massive hug. And it’s not as if you hated your stuff, it’s just that you’re not really thinking about it – you’re thinking about what you’re about to get. And every time you do the temptation to woop or clap is overwhelming.

That is how good God is. He’s that good. And if we could just grasp how high and wide and long and deep Jesus’ love is – we would burst out into some ridiculous dance, or just lie down and laugh for hours, or run and hug everyone in sight. Every moment of beauty we’ve known, every burst of joy, every overwhelming surge of love for another human being is just a shadown, a tiny glimpse of this ultimate beauty, this perfect pearl.

And I say all this because this week I’ve been a bit like the original owner of that field. Woefully oblivious to the awesome, awesome, awesome thing that I’ve had all along. I realised today that I’ve thanked God for plenty of things this week – he’s given me real joy in my teaching, some genuine Malawian friends, a great relationship with the other Standard 6 teacher, a brilliant day-after-Valentine’s Day, a lovely chat with my parents and all sorts of little things – but it all felt a bit weird, a bit empty, a bit hollow. Because I forgot to thank him for him. I forgot to praise him. I took my eyes off how beautiful Jesus is. I ended up thiking his goodness consisted of the stuff he does for me, but this goodness is way, way bigger than that. He’s the one who moulded the galaxies between his fingertips, and invented the dragonfly. He’s the brains behind smiling, and the touch of someone else’s skin, and that feeling when you’re out in the open air at night, and B flat minor.

He’s the Dad who’s so desperate to have us home that when we come crawling back he tells us to forget about the money we stole and the crap we spent it on because he’s invited the whole neighbourhood over for a party. He’s the shepherd who picked his way through the dangers of the night to try and find us wherever we’ve wandered off, because he won’t let us go through it alone. He’s the one who took on death and won.

He’s worth selling everything for. Easily. He’s worth giving up Rachael for. Easily. He’s worth giving up my family for. Easily. And that’s far too easy to forget, but when I remember it – I know it sounds pretentious but I think the only way to say it is – then I am alive.

Malawian Match Day

Fairly ordinary day to start with – picking ants off bread for breakfast (admittedly this is a new low in food hygiene), failing to wash (again), walking for an hour and a half to town, and indulging my penchant for ten kwacha roadside baked goods (today a kind of chewy potato/tomato/onion maize flour fritter, and then a donut that is more like nice bread really, but on the plus side, is a bit like nice bread). Also taking a bike taxi over some slightly soggy dirt roads.

But then it got interesting – it was the day of the big match, the first round of the national primary school football and netball cup, the winning of which is worth 1.6 million kwacha (it’s 500 kwacha to the pound so you can work out how much that is if you want). We were up against Chidampa at Ergo ground. Ergo football pitch is half sand and half thick grass, thistles and all. We were there just before kick-off time, 2:00pm. The opponents were nowhere to be seen. Then it started raining torrentially, for the second time that day. Our players and the smaller supporters who had tagged along found what shelter they could but got extremely wet and cold in their shorts and t-shirts. To keep warm they did some singing and dancing which any English choir would have been proud, or possibly incapable, of. And then the rain calmed down after an hour or so, and some Chidampo people arrived, and, to my astonishment, we actually started playing.

The sheer Malawianess of the occasion is impossible to describe – a kid wearing a hat woven from some grass and sticks, along with our team’s kit – a random goalie shirt, then 9 identical ‘SAHA’ Man U kits in a bring yellow that Man U have never even contemplated wearing, and for the captain an Arsenal shirt with ‘FABREGAS’ on it, in the same unimaginable yellow. The girls play netball in skirts and even faker Arsenal shirts. There are no visible sidelines so older kids patrol the edges of the pitch wielding big branches and smashing them down occasionally to discourage anyone from standing where they are just about to be, and thus fend off the inward creep of the crowd. The aforementioned crowd continues to shiver in the occasional showers and bitingly cold wind – and it does cross my mind that this is supposed to be Africa. A large group are keeping warm by dancing around the edges of the pitch (in fact on the pitch at all points other than the actual goals), chanting and clapping something that seems to have some relevance to the game. And then we score. And there is a huge pitch invasion – mainly conducted by five to ten year old kids about four foot tall – and I even see a giant doll – about the size of the kid holding it – that seems to be our rather inexplicable team mascot.

This happens after each of our four goals. It’s quite a comedic game of football – players slipping and sliding wildly over the pitch (it’s pretty tough playing football in a bog when no one has studs and in fact, only about half are wearing shoes). It is, I must admit, even funnier when the netballers slip over. And then it’s all over – 16-1 in the netball, 4-0 in the football. So our fellow teacher and avid dictionary reader Mr Robins Kamanga informs us that we have ‘clobbered them’ (he refrains from adding, as he likes to, ‘in grand style’) and Brian, the head coach, is so happy he gets us all some roasted maize for the walk home. Which is a lot better when it is hot and you are cold.

When we get home all is back to normal, and we cook rice, egg and tomatoes on our charcoal burner, as we do about every other night, and eat it with lots of salt and some orange squash. Then couple of

(delicious) Malawian toffee bar things, some chat, some use of the greatly anticipated toilet roll which we got yesterday, and brushing my teeth on the front porch (spitting anywhere because it just soaks into the ground). Then change, brush the roof-dust off the mattress and the sleeping bag (pyjamas and beautiful new pillow have been cunningly stashed inside the sleeping bag so are largely dust free) and then write this, and go to sleep.

And that was match day. Malawi-style. I’m really quite enjoying this now.

One month down, or possibly up, or sideways.

I left England on the 3^rd of January so it’s now 33 days since I was at home.

Which makes it 33 days since my feet were actually clean for over a minute; 33 days since a day of my life passed without ants featuring heavily; 33 days without seeing a potato, or real milk; and 33 days since I had a proper hug.

Those who know my love (some would say obsession) for Coco Pops and milk will be surprised to learn that the milk thing hasn’t bothered me too much. And actually anyone who knew me before I was 14ish will understand the joy of the news that we’ve found peanut butter in a nearby town! (Which, on inspection, claims to provide 25% of my daily fat intake in one serving. Just how I like it.)

Anyway, most of the time nothing is really getting to me, apart from the hugs thing. Before this trip I maintained a cool-guy stance of never really missing people – I have now thoroughly abandoned this stance. If you’ve ever given me a proper hug, I probably miss you. And in fact, of all the things I thought God might teach me in this time, I never expected that it would be to love and appreciate my grannies more! But sure enough, this he has done.

So anyway, I said last time about God humbling me, and he is still doing that (Including the way that the other Michael is consistently battering me at bananagrams AND ligretto), but he is not in any way being nasty to me. He is being spectacularly kind – so here are a few things that, if you pray, you are welcome to thank God for with me.

1)      The invention of the Kindle and setting me up with a teacher who should really be doing English at Cambridge instead of me!

The Standard 6 teacher who I’m helping, Martha Chakola, was looking through a book I was using in a lesson and asked me if I’d brought any more, so I ended up teaching her to use my Kindle and lending it to her. At first she said she’d give it back when she’d finished all the books on it, ‘so maybe tomorrow or the day after’! But while I explained that was a little bit optimistic, she’s getting through them at a crazy pace – I especially enjoyed getting it back and finding it set to huge font – she explained afterwards she had been trying to read in the dark!

So that’s just awesome, especially because she’s really getting into some of the books about God I’ve got on there, so it’s giving her a chance to explore her faith as well I think.

2)      Food. I have never meant ‘Thank you for this food’ so deeply as I do at the moment. Cooking Malawian beans for 3 hours has really taugh me to appreciate my dinner like never before (this works especially well if you didn’t realise and you started cooking at half 6!). And the other day I went and helped my mate Brian and his family fertilise their ‘garden’. I was imagining a little vegetable patch kind of garden, out the back of the house. In fact, Brian has  little hole next to every maize plant with a stick, and us putting a spoonful of pellets into each one. After the first 100 plants, with 1000 or so to go, this gets – in Brian’s words – ‘tiresome’. In this country, generosity has a real cost, and it really, really matters whether it rains. And yet their kindness and open-handedness, and their trust in God, is genuinely inspirational. And quite challenging.

3)      Creating. We camped at Kasungu National Park last weekend, which used to be amazing apparently, but has been thoroughly poached so that now it’s pretty much just hippo, and some awesome, awesome views. You might have read about the guy who made the six foot valentines card for the girl he liked – and how he thinks waterfalls and sunsets are a bit like God doing the same thing for us. Well, I honestly got out of my tent on Saturday night, looked up at the stars and said, out loud, “I love you too”. I know I’m a bit weird. But God is a bit awesome too.

PS. Here’s something you didn’t know. A perk of having a mud/charcoal floor, is that if – hypothetically of course – you had managed to spill a whole bucket of water into your living room/kitchen the other day, the floor would simply have absorbed the water by now. No sweeping or bailing required. Nice.