15 Hours to Think About Tigers

We had a 15 hour bus journey into Zambia on Tuesday, during which I finished Life of Pi. And it’s a brilliant book and I would recommend it highly. I won’t ruin it for you but it’s beautiful because it ends with a huge question mark, and that’s always better than simply a full stop.  Although it’s somehow unsatisfying at the same time. Anyway, I had a long time to think about it and it really did get me thinking. The book says a lot of interesting stuff about tigers, but I was most interested in what it says about doubt and faith. There’s a beautiful quote near the end – when Pi tells some officials his story and they tell him it’s not really believable – he says this:

“If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? ... Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”

They reply, “We’re just being reasonable.”

“So am I! Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit, Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.”

I love that line. Which is funny because I’m a huge fan of reason, and I’m constantly attempting to explain to people how reasonable faith is - how much evidence there is for Jesus, how much God makes sense. But if I’m honest, that line about the bathwater has really got a point. When you get to the really big things, the glorious things – the existence of life, the experience of love, a relationship with God – reason is just not a big enough tool box. Maybe God created life and love and beauty and cares about us creatures; maybe we are an utterly marvellous cosmic accident, a one in a million – who knows maybe there are a million other universes out there failing to contain such glorious flukes; or maybe we do have a creator, we do have a purpose, but no one bothered to tell us who or what that is. Reason charges boldly towards the canyon and then skids desperately to a halt, scrambling backwards and gasping for breath as rocks and earth tumble into the profound abyss of maybe.

And so each of us has a life. And we have a choice between staying in doubt, or moving from doubt to faith. Of course if we choose the leap of faith there are many places we may try to leap to – including atheism – but the first choice is whether we are going to leap anywhere at all. The book has another awesome bit about doubt:

“Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the Garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Corss, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

Agnosticism, doubt, uncertainty, is a kind of paralysis. Deciding that we’ll never know what the purpose of life is, is like building a house at a fork in the road. People pass by on their way and ask why you have built a house in the middle of nothingness – and you tell them that you couldn’t decide which road to take – “So you decided to stay here at the fork, forever?” – “It seemed the only reasonable solution.”

On a deeper level than just quotes (which I won’t explain because it would be boring and would completely ruin the book for you), Life of Pi is all about the choice between imagination and “dry, yeastless factuality”, that refuses to see higher, further, differently. I’m not an expert on literature (yet) but I think basically the message is that it’s better to imagine a life worth living than settle for one that isn’t. But on this one, I’ve got a better idea. I would recommend to you not imagination, but hope.

There’s a difference. Someone once said that, “Faith can move mountains. Even if sometimes God hands you a shovel.” Imagination is the gift of seeing the world differently to how it really is. And hope does that too – it has a vision of a different world. But hope picks up a shovel. Hope does not ignore the real world, it changes the real world. Faith does not leap out into nothingness and enjoy the fall into oblivion. Faith jumps for the other side, and discovers a whole new land. A question mark is a beautiful thing, but it doesn’t have to be the end because this life turns out to be a dialogue. God speaks. I’m not saying we should pretend that life has a purpose, that love and beauty and peace are more than illusions or animal instincts, I’m saying we can believe that it really is true. There’s a a bit in the Bible that says, “I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air”. I love that. Me and my family, Rachael, my church, my mate risking his life in China - we are not shadow boxing. We’re not wasting our lives on a pleasant, admirable fantasy. We’ve made the leap, and we’ve landed on solid ground, and I just want to tell you that it’s beautiful over here.  

A question for you

The exams have been taken, the mad rush by the teachers to mark about 600 papers (6 subjects, 100 students) and then rank them and fill out their school reports has been completed just about successfully, and Term 2 is over. We’re officially half way through our teaching here. Which feels quite strange to say.

And now we are on our way to Lilongwe, and from Lilongwe, Zambia, and from Zambia, the world! Or possibly Tanzania. I did think about writing a profound post about how going travelling with no set plan or certain destination is like training for following Jesus, not knowing where he’ll lead you, but knowing it will be awesome in some way you didn’t really ask for, but I can’t be bothered. So I’ll just quickly share with you my current dilemma instead and ask for your prayers or possibly even your advice.

So the dates for the school holidays were always going to be from the 22^nd of March to the 22^nd of April, a nice round month, plenty of time to see Victoria Falls and then continue on into Tanzania or Botswana – whichever takes your fancy – and visit a game reserve or something like that. However, yesterday, just before we left our school we were informed that the government has changed the dates – nationally – and Term 3 will start on April the 8^th. That’s a two week holiday instead of four.

So my partner Michael is part of a group of volunteers who have rented a car for the month, and he’s talked to his fellow teachers and they are happy for him to stay away for the whole month of the original holiday, which he’s keen to do so as not to waste his money and to enjoy the opportunity to travel as much as he can, which is fair enough. However, for me things are not so simple. My fellow Standard 6 teacher, Miss Chakola, has been granted her request to transfer to another school, so is leaving and is supposed to be replaced by a new teacher for next term. So I’m not sure how acceptable it would be to ask this new person to teach my subjects for two weeks and then take them off him/her again. Perhaps more importantly, I also teach about 4 hours a week of English to the Standard 8s, who are taking their primary school leaving exams in mid-May. They are massively important for their future, and 40% of the English exam is writing compositions and making sentences, which they struggle with massively, and I have been helping with. (Or, to be more precise, trying to help with.) So two weeks of lessons for them is quite a big deal.

So now the question is – where does God want me? I was introduced to an awesome bit of the bible the other day, from 1 Corinthians 15:

“Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.”

So I’m determined to stand firm and let nothing move me – but the problem is, which ‘work of the Lord’ should I give myself to fully for those two weeks?

God has been so good so far in giving me awesome conversations and relationships with the other volunteers – I’ve made some great friends and even had the chance to help one guy really rediscover a faith that he had started to lose, which is definitely in my mind one of the most worthwhile things I have been able to do in Malawi. I love chatting to people about Jesus, and everything that following him has done to change my life, and how much awesome stuff he’s done for me, and in the people that I know. I genuinely love it – and I sometimes God uses my life as a way to tap someone on the shoulder and let him know that he’s there. And that’s pretty much the greatest privilege I could ever have! So I have no doubt that travelling with my mates is the work of the Lord, God loves them and he loves it when me and the other Christians care for each other and encourage each other to love him more, and he loves it when we introduce other people to him.

But…

Obviously teaching kids to speak English better and hopefully get into secondary school, then get a job and help their families and countries to develop – that’s God’s work too. He loves that. And he loves me spending time with the other teachers, and receiving so much awesomeness and generosity from him through them.

So what should I do? I’ve got a week or so to pray and think and work it out. So if you could ask God to give me wisdom, and then courage to stand firm, that’d be awesome. And if you have any advice that’d be great too!

I have five nipples (and 9 other things you might find interesting)

1.      I have five nipples at the moment. At a time and location unknown, 
actuated by motives that remain unclear, a mosquito has bitten me
three times in a neat line across my chest. It’s beautiful.
2.      We cooked African cake with our deputy headmistress a couple of
weeks ago – it’s quite easy, you mush up bananas into baby food, add
maize flour, and deep fry – but she gave us some freshly cooked
‘mandas’ – basically deep fried sugary bread – and they were
absolutely incredible. Unfortunately Michael (my hilarious partner)
managed to convince me that the mystery liquid in a bottle in the hut
was golden syrup. I dipped and ate. He laughed. I swallowed,
unimpressed and slightly confused by the taste. He gleefully informed
me that it was pork fat. From a week ago. Yum.
3.      I took a ride on an ox cart the other day. Michael drove it for a
while – but was quite ineffective – it turned out this was because the
driver encourages the oxen by prodding their private parts with his
foot.
4.      Cooking in a rural Malawian kitchen – mud oven thing inside mud hut
with no chimney, in which you burn firewood – is more challenging than
I had imagined. I tried to cook some eggs there because I couldn’t be
bothered to start our fire – and found myself coughing uncontrollably
and completely blinded by the smoke! Brian told me to sit down on the
floor or just let his niece do it – this worked well. Never let a
stupid westerner use Malawian technology.
5.      A big thunderstorm blasted a lot of whitewash off one of our walls
the other week (we were lucky, one teacher’s fence collapsed and
another watched his whole kitchen hut as it was dislodged by the wind
and thrown into his house – the house survived intact, the kitchen not
so much). It’s now been resurfaced, but they had no whitewash so it’s
mud grey. So our house has now got quite a funky art-deco feature-wall
look. Some students from the school also ‘resmeared’ our mud floor,
which is great, it just raised the floor level a bit, which meant I
had to scrape away some of it with the back of a fork to allow the
door to actually open!
6.      I climbed a tree at school the other day, and I’m pretty sure I
could see for 10 or 20 miles across the savannah to the mountains. I’m
getting strangely accustomed to spectacular beauty.
7.      Last week fellow teacher and general legend Mr Robins Kamanga came
into my class and asked if he could have some of my learners who had
missed the manual work after school yesterday. I wasn’t a big fan of
them missing lessons, but I supposed if a few of them had tried to
skive, they should have to do it like everyone else. He said something
in Chichewa and my class promptly dropped in size from 70 to 15.
8.      This morning we drove back from Mua to Mtunthama, leaving at
4 in the morning. The main road for this route includes driving through
a game reserve. This meant we were treated to the sight of a whole family
of baboons on the road, including a couple mating. Not the sort of thing you 
usually see on your morning commute.
9.      This Sunday I am doing the talk at the evening church service of
Kamuzu Academy student chapel. I was going to talk to them about how
they should not be stupid and western like me, but I think now I’m not
going to try and tell them what to do, I’m just going to read the
parable of the lost son, and tell them how incredibly, personally, and
permanently their Dad in heaven loves them. So please, if you pray,
ask God to calm some of my nervousnesses about that and to speak to
them through what I say.
10.     Finally, I’d like to boast about how manly I am now. The other day
a little kid thought it’d be funny to throw a live caterpillar through
the window into my classroom! There was some commotion, I established
the cause of it, took a deep breath, walked through to the back where
it was, picked it up, and threw it right back at them. MAN.

Rejection - the dementor of the muggle world - and the only true patronus

Rejection might just be the most painful thing we experience as human beings – setting aside gallstones and giving birth. To be unwanted, unchosen unloved. Like a dementor, it seems to suck some part of your soul out through your ribs and leaves you feeling utterly and unbearably empty.

But at the same time, it is, in a way, what makes being human possible. Because without the other person having a real choice, it means nothing to be chosen. We wouldn’t understand what it was to be ‘wanted’ in a world where ‘unwanted’ didn’t exist. Love cannot exist without unlove.

And it’s more than that – maybe without rejection, God couldn’t be God. Why do I say that? I was reading John’s first letter in the bible recently, and there’s a bit where I honestly weep sometimes when I read it. (It’s 1 John 4:7-12 if you care about such things.) First it says that God is love. That’s who God is. And then it defines love: ‘This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ Sin, basically, is when we reject God. So love is God’s response to rejection. That is what true love is. And it’s the very fibre of God’s being.

Jesus once asked his disciples, “Why is it written that the Son of Man must suffer much and be rejected?” Well I think Jesus had to “suffer much and be rejected” to be truly like God. Because to be God is to suffer much and be rejected. And for us to become like God – to be children truly like our Dad – we too must be rejected. In order for us to truly love. And this rejected love is not that of the stalker – the hand snatching what it can from that which it ‘loves’ – it is the love of the father, sitting up all night, waiting for his runaway daughter to come home. ‘Jesus, how many nights should I wait for her? A week?’  - ‘I tell you, not seven night but seventy seven nights.’ Do not stop waiting. Do not stop loving. Because every night you will know more what it feels like to be God. The father who sits, and waits, and weeps, and knows that some of his children are never going to come home.

My mate Fatsani

The other day I’d set my Standard 6 class some work to do and I was sat on my chair watching them do it. So a few of them have started talking a bit, so I look around for who it is. I notice at the front Fatsani Munkhondya talking to the girl next to him. Fatsani is pretty small, not up to my shoulders, ridiculously enthusiastic, and has the most happy-making smile in existence. And I just watched him chatting away, grinning like he does and making this little tiny girl laugh, and in the end when he saw me looking and thought I was going to tell him to be quiet, I just smiled.

Now I just think about that moment – the two of them laughing together about something in Chichewa that I didn’t understand – and I think, God is a good creator. I mean – laughter – who thought of that? Imagine the kind of person that invents laughter. Dostoevsky once said that if God knew he was creating a world where one child would weep desperately for its lost mother he should have chosen not to create anything at all. And that’s a beautiful thing to say. But why let suffering triumph over joy? Why not say that if God knew that just once, in a little village in the middle of Africa, Fatsani Munkhondya was going to smile like that and make the little girl next to him laugh, then everything was worth it.

What if the long hard journey home was worth it not just for the warmth of the embrace on the doorstep, but for the moments of bizarre beauty and joy that sprung up like wildflowers along the way? Maybe it’s an act of faith – maybe it’s just a good idea – to lift our eyes from the brokenness to the beauty long enough to start cultivating joy in the burnt and barren fields of the world.

I’m not saying we ignore suffering – that would be as far from being like Jesus as it’s possible to get. I’m just saying that when I come out here to the back porch to pray or write, I don’t look that often at our rubbish pit, and think about the kids I saw searching through it once. I look at the mountains on the horizon. And the sun glittering on the morning dew. And the chickens wandering around in their own weird way. And I think about our Dad, our Creator, the one who invented the chicken and the sunrise and I think about how he knows my name. How my name is carved onto the palm of his hand. And it means that when I get up, I can walk past those kids I saw in our rubbish pit, and when they shout ‘Kuvina!’ – that’s dance in Chichewa – I can do a little, stupid dance with a genuine smile on my face and enjoy it when they laugh at me. I can choose joy. Just like Fatsani does.