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.