What I Learnt From Dropping My Passport In A Waterfall

I’ve been trying to work out what God has been teaching me with the whole losing my passport twice in two days thing. And, on reflection, I reckon he’s been teaching me how to say, ‘Hosanna’. I apologise for the pretentiousness of that introduction – but to explain what I mean I’ll give you something I wrote in my notebook at probably the rubbishiest point of the whole experience. Picture the scene: I’ve been walking around a hot, smoky Lusaka for 2 days on ridiculously blistered feet, trying to get my emergency passport sorted out, and now I’m sat on a bus that was scheduled to leave for the border at 12.30, and it’s 3.30 now and we have not moved. And it’s hot, and I’m sweaty, and very, very tired. And we’re not moving. So I take my mind off it by thinking, and here's what I think:

I am learning now; in these long days and anxious moments, in the aches for certainty and for home that bring me to the brink of tears but never quite make it over the edge, in this weakness; I am learning how to cry ‘Hosanna!’.

On the banks of Victoria Falls, just before all this started, I had reached Palm Sunday in Mark’s Gospel. And I saw a note that explained that ‘Hosanna!’ literally means ‘Save!’ and was used as a shout of praise. I think I understand that now. I used to praise God simply by admiring him – telling him all the great things I knew about him, who he was, what he’d done for me. But to cry out to him again and again:

“SAVE!”

is something deeper. It is to sit, on this bus, in my powerlessness, and my impatience and my fear – and declare, proclaim with everything in me, my dependence. My soul shouts aloud that I am not OK, I am not strong, or independent, or calm and composed, I am in need. I need my God. I need to be rescued. I live my whole life convincing myself that I am in control, that I am self-sufficient in whatever way, but I realise now, honestly, that I’M NOT.

Only God is sufficient for me.

Only Jesus is enough.

“My heart and my flesh may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart
and my portion forever.”

My heart and my flesh may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart 

and my portion forever.

Hosanna.

To truly praise God I have to admit that I need him. He is necessary. God is not some unnecessary addition to the universe – some added extra – he is before all things and in him all things hold together. He is not a delightful bonus in my life. It’s in him that I trust. It’s in him that the whole thing holds together.

If God wasn’t real, my whole life would fall apart. I really mean that. And so I cry, ‘Hosanna’, I shout out ‘Save!’ and I declare not just God’s beauty, his kindness, his forgiveness, his brilliance, but also his necessity.

I admit it, I need Jesus. And I can feel that now, more profoundly and more acutely than ever.

There was an amazing quote in a book called ‘What’s so amazing about grace?’ (an incredible, incredible book by the way, I cried many times) from C.S. Lewis. He said this:

“We are mirrors, whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us. Surely, we think, we must have a little – however little – native luminosity? Surely we can’t be quite creatures?... Grace gives us instead a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence. We become ‘jolly beggars’.”

And this thing about dependence, about weakness, about admitting that I just can’t do it by myself, is a thing that I’m very glad that God has taught me. Because I was thinking about it, and we live in a world full of independent people. Independent people who are desperate to reciprocate as soon as we receive any kindness because we can’t stand the feeling of being indebted to anyone. We always find ourselves saying, ‘Oh no, that’s too kind’ – because somehow there is actually a level of kindness that makes us feel uncomfortable. We are so determined not to be a burden to anybody that we refuse to ever put our burdens down, and we carry them around all day until we are exhausted, and the only time we really relax is when we lie down at night and close our eyes. We are so independent it hurts. But it seems to me now that independent is not something we were ever made to be. We were made to be children, who need each other, and who need our Dad.

I’ve had no choice but to live this way recently – at the placement I am utterly reliant on the community for all the ways they look after us, and in the last few days I’ve had no access to money except from the generosity and trust of my friends – and I’ve got to say, I’m loving it. Malawians say “Feel free!” a lot. I feel free right now.

I read somewhere, “I feel like I am living in a story that I am not writing.” I feel like that. And the thing about the story that I am not writing, is that I don’t know what’s going to happen next. But I do know that the writer is a good writer, and the story is a good story.