Nine Awesome Things About Africa

1) We waste time with people, not with technology. And wasting time with your mates, or with little kids, or even with random strangers that want to talk to the white people, is infinitely more satisfying, more surprising, more delightful than any of the electronic alternatives. (Of course you can combine technology and people, and I’m a bigger fan than ever of watching Toy Story together on a sleepy Sunday morning, or messing around together on Sims 3 than ever before.

2) Normal people are normally friendly and welcoming. Hospitality is a simple but beautiful thing, and talking to strangers is not creepy here, it’s kind.

3) Something strange or exciting or new happens pretty much every day. It’s properly refreshing to stumble across something every day that lures us out of our routines, and our automatic self-obsession.

4) Things are basic and cheap. If you are willing to accept less than luxury – whether that’s little greasy African donuts out of a bucket, or sharing a dorm with some strangers – you can live very happily without wasting too much money on yourself. This leaves us free to be utterly delighted by a Twix, or a hot shower, and free to be generous. Both of which are a thousand times more fun than being ‘accustomed’ to a life of luxury.

5) We have a bunch of mates (the other volunteers) who love us, and who we love, and who could not care less about how recently we showered. Because we are all together doing exciting things in strange places, we have abandoned almost all social conventions, and we can confirm that they were all a waste of space. Loving people is more fun than judging them.

6) We talk about stuff that matters. A lot of us came out here to some extent looking for some answers to the big questions – or maybe just one big question – what’s the point of our lives? And because of this, we actually talk about that. We chat about how we feel, argue about what we believe, share what we’ve learnt. We have realised that things that matter are a lot more interesting than things that don’t.

7) We appreciate the world around us. I remember my mate Jenny getting excited as soon as we got off the plane, on the bus ride into Lilongwe, about “how GREEN everything is!” Being in a different place reminds us to look out of the window, and smile. If you want a sample of the ‘African experience’, brush your teeth outside under the stars tonight. Look around you. Listen. Take a few minutes. Or climb a tree. Or go for a walk somewhere that you love. Enjoy what is in front of you.

8) The circumstances demand creativity. Lara sewed a purse out of a tablecloth last night. And honestly I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her happier.

9) Finally, Jesus. You probably could guess by now that I can’t go a whole blog without mentioning the J-dawg. But honestly, out in a strange and challenging place, without all of the people I normally rely on – family, friends, Rachael – I have discovered so much more that Jesus really is my best friend. In a real-life, not a cliché, not wishful thinking kind of a way.

A story about climbing a mountain

FEEL FREE TO SKIP STRAIGHT TO THE STORY.

This story is about the journey to faith. A lot of the friends I’ve grown to love on this trip have said things to me a bit like my mate Lara said today: “You’ve talked about having an amazing experience of God when you got baptised – I think if something like that happened to me, maybe I could have faith like you do. But I’m not the kind of person who could convince myself of something like that, unless something happened to me like what happened to you.” The basic idea is that my faith is a consequence of my big supernatural experiences of God, and for someone to believe, God has to give them that sort of experience. As if faith is a desert island, separated from the mainland of uncertainty by a mile or so of shark infested water, and the only way to get to it is to be carried across by divine airlift. I can absolutely see where this idea comes from, and I need to explain my journey to faith better – but, as you’ve probably guessed, I don’t really think it works like that. Faith is not an airlift; it’s a pilgrimage.

What follows is an attempt to describe how it’s worked for me and the people I know – in the form of a story.


The Journey

Anna lived at the foot of Too-Tall Mountain. She lived in a little town on the flat ground in the shadow of the mountain, and it was the whole wide world. To Anna, its cobbled main street was the great Silk Road, its old well was the ocean, and its people were the human race. The only other thing was the mountain.

One day a little boy, about Anna’s age, nine or perhaps ten, wandered up to her as she was mending her raggedy doll on the back step of her little house. He introduced himself as Cescu. She told him her name was Anna, and then suddenly, as if there was no time for small talk, he rushed up beside her and whispered something in her ear. And what he whispered was a rumour. But not your average every-day nasty rumour. This was a beautiful rumour. A glittering rumour that made her heart leap and her eyes grow wide and her toes wiggle. He whispered that he had met a man – a strange and wonderful man – who claimed to be from the top of the Too-Tall Mountain. Not only that, but he said that he had not been alone up there, that at the very top of the Too-Tall Mountain, above the clouds of fog, there was a great city of gold. A shining city, where the people laughed and danced and feasted, where their faces almost seemed to reflect the light of the sun. And as the whispers poured into her head like a sparkling stream they seemed to awaken a startling array of dreams and hopes and hungers that somehow she knew had been there inside her all along. It was as if the whispered words were the first songs of spring, and now a hundred tiny creatures of her heart, that had been in hibernation for a winter that stretched back as long as she could remember, were stretching their dewy limbs and joining in the chorus. Yes – they sung – there might be a city beyond the clouds! There could be a land where the sun was warmer, and the soil was deeper, and even the tears were brighter! There should be. But then a new thought loomed up on her like a big, dark cloud.

“It must be a very long journey to the top of the mountain. Far too long. We’ll never make it.” But then another thought, “Maybe this man you met could carry us? He must know the way. Maybe he could carry us up the mountain while we sleep – I’m sure we couldn’t make it by ourselves!”

The little boy looked puzzled for a moment, but he slowly shook his head. The strange man had spoken about the way up the mountain. He said that to reach the city – to truly reach it – a person had to walk. Even a person with little legs. He said that in the days long ago some people had been carried to the city in their sleep, but when they awoke something was always wrong. The richly coloured streets and houses seemed dull to them, almost translucent, and they could never bring themselves to sit, or lean, or lie down to rest on anything in the city for fear that they would fall right through. He said the only way was to walk the mountain.

She wondered, rather loudly and with a troubled frown, how on earth, if they were not to be carried, they would ever find the way.

But Cescu remembered what the strange man had said about that as well. He said that the way to the city was easy to recognise. The path that leads to the city, he had said, is the steepest, narrowest path, and also the most beautiful. If you find yourself on a path that is easy, or wide, or ugly, you have taken a wrong turn.

Now Anna was not sure she liked the sound of that at all, but as she looked up at the Too-Tall Mountain, she found herself unable to stem the awful flood of hope that gushed through her chest and into the tips of her toes.

She looked at Cescu.

“Well,” she said, “I still don’t think we’ll make it.” She thrust her grubby hands into her pockets and grinned. “But it looks like we have to try.”

Now, to tell the tale of all their twists and turns, of all their bruises and blisters, would take many more words than I am prepared to write, or you are prepared to read, and perhaps will serve to make a tale of its own one day. So for now we will hear of just the greatest incident of the long, steep road.

The two young travellers had begun to notice, as they passed out of the foothills and into the real mountain, that more and more they swore they saw distant glimpses of the strange man on the path ahead of them, and although it seemed improbable, they began to stumble across marvellous gifts – sometimes big and sometimes small – piles of refreshing wild-fruits for them to eat, or little shelters of branches and leaves for them to rest in. And this strange and unexpected kindness came and went until one day they found a note, carved into the sticks of a shelter they had found:

SOON COMES THE CREVASSE.
YOU MUST NOT LEAP TOO SOON.
BUT YOU MUST SURELY LEAP.

Now this message both confused and worried the young pilgrims. So much so that they carried the engraved sticks with them as they continued in hopes of deciphering the mystery as they journeyed. And indeed they did, when the path brought them to a great divide in the mountain. The rock they were walking on suddenly plunged away in front of them, and only emerged again what must have been nearly ten metres away. Lying flat their two little bodies put together couldn’t have bridged the divide. They edged fearfully up to the brink, and peered down into the deep, terrifying darkness of the crevasse. They quickly stepped back and stared at each other, eyes wide and hearts pounding. Anna looked down at the stick she was holding.

“You must not leap too soon,” she said, calming a little.

“But you must surely leap,” said Cescu, fear heavy in his unbroken voice.

After a moment though his eyes wandered past Anna’s to what lay behind her. A rocky path along the edge of the crevasse, littered with boulders and uncertainty. As Anna’s eyes turned to follow his they both knew what they had to do. This path was harder work than any they had travelled so far, and they lived in constant fear of losing their footing and tumbling into the abyss that never strayed from the left-hand edge of their vision. But they balled up their courage and they kept their eyes on the obstacles ahead. They clambered and they crawled and they kept, anxiously, moving. And as they did, it seemed to them that the crevasse beside them was growing thinner. The far edge was creeping closer and closer until, after many days, many nights, many bumps, many scrapes, many scares and many dares, they looked to their left and saw a gap that looked – though their hearts hammered harder and harder – small enough to jump.

They knew that this gulf – once so utterly impassable – was now small enough for even their little legs. Their eyes and their brains knew this. Their legs and their hearts were less certain. Their knees shook and their hearts raced like the knees and the hearts of the heroes in their mothers old legends. Anna felt dizzy. Cescu felt sick. The abyss of uncertainty that had been threatening to swallow them up for days now stood before them – smaller now, weaker, but still utterly terrifying. They looked across to the other side. They saw the new path – still steep, still narrow – leading up and up to the city. To the city of gold. To the rumour of the city of gold. The strange man was nowhere to be seen. The fruits, the shelters, they seemed somehow foolish. They might have been made by animals. They might have been anything. They looked at the note on the sticks in their hands. It might have been a joke. It might have been a trick.

YOU MUST NOT LEAP TOO SOON.
BUT YOU MUST SURELY LEAP.

Anna felt dizzy. Cescu felt sick. They held hands. Tightly. They fixed their eyes on the solid ground beyond the darkness.



***

The Adventurer

So I was praying for some of my mates out here the other day, and I started praying about adventures. We pretty much all came here looking for an adventure. Something bigger, and better, and more epic and more exciting than whatever we had at home. The verb, to adventure, apparently means: “to engage in hazardous and exciting activity, especially the exploration of unknown territory”. And that’s definitely what we’re doing – an unknown continent, so much excitement, and much more hazardousness than I tell my mum about. And it is immensely good fun. Because fear and excitement, difficulty and satisfaction, disappointment and glory, stick to each other like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Every single surprise, stab of pain or flood of joy, makes us a little bit more alive. “Hazardous and exciting activity in unknown territory” – isn’t that what life is?

Anyway, I wasn’t praying about adventure because of that, because of where we are or what we came for or what we’ve got. I was praying about adventure because of the hunger. Because I can feel in the friends out here with me the hunger for something epic. For an adventure big enough to make being alive worth living for. And I was praying because I’ve stumbled across that adventure, fallen down that rabbit hole.

I was looking at this bit at the start of John’s biography of Jesus where he’s ‘calling’ his first followers. I’d read it a couple of weeks ago but I’d ignored the awesomeness because I was reading it like “THE BIBLE” and not like a book, or a film script. But I read it again and I realised how cool Jesus is. These two guys come up to him, and ask him where he’s staying. He just says, “Come, and you will see.” And a bit of me just imagines him grinning, turning on his heels and sprinting, and them chasing after him like Simba chasing Rafiki in that jungle in the Lion King. And then, like he did loads more times, Jesus comes across this guy, Phillip, just minding his own business, probably fishing, and says, “Follow me.” No explanation, no details, no indication of a plan or dinner or a bed, just the promise of an adventure. And Phillip is so excited somehow by the sheer charisma, the sheer presence of this Adventurer, that he runs off to get his mate Nathaniel. And when he’s walking towards Jesus, Jesus starts telling him things about him that there’s no way he could possibly know, he just casually drops in where he was standing when Phillip found him, and Nathaniel is gobsmacked. And Jesus, not satisfied to impress him with stuff he understands, says pretty much, “You think that’s awesome? You will see things much greater than that. You know what? You will see heaven open and the angels of God rising and falling on the Son of Man.” And then, I reckon, “Confused? Thought so. Come on.”

Jesus just turns up out of nowhere, and says, “I’m going on an adventure, you coming?”  He’s like Sherlock, or actually more like Doctor Who, he’s talking about stuff and it’s amazing but you don’t understand, and you don’t know the plan, and it doesn’t make any sense to you; but you trust him that whatever it’s going to be, it’s going to be good. He stands in front of you like Neo in the Matrix and says, “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” He doesn’t tell you it’s going to be safe, or easy. He assures you that you might die. That it might hurt. That you might have to leave everything you’ve ever had and everything you’ve ever known. He tells you that to go where he’s going, you’ll have to hand over the steering wheel to him. And the accelerator, and the brake. But there’s something inside telling you that being in total control is not that different to being dead. Something telling you to drop everything, and obey the whisper, “Hold on tight.”

And so you take the red pill. You step into the tardis. You jump down the rabbit hole.

And the adventure begins.

The Feast

We had two feasts in a row last week. We decided to throw a goodbye party for all the teachers and our friends on Thursday night, and they decided to throw a goodbye party for us on Friday night! And they were two of the best nights of my life. Kicking a football around in the dusk-light, laughing and dancing with the women who were helping us cook the dinner on about 6 different fires, sitting around an open fire chatting and listening to a hilarious mixture of African pop, Christian songs I used to sing in church when I was ten, and Malawian marriage songs – “I can’t wait to marry you, my laaa-ooove.”, “I am never ever going to change my mind”, and many other delightful and encouraging lyrics. 

There was an entertaining moment (or infuriating, depending on your level of commitment to the feminist cause) when we declared that the meal was self-service. The men sat, looking confused. I was thinking – ‘Usually they’re dead keen for the food, why aren’t they going for it like mad?’ – but then they started saying, “Are the ladies not going to serve us?”. They seriously couldn’t deal with the idea that they weren’t going to have the food brought to them! Kamanga just kept saying “Self-service... self-service... self-service...” as if he was chewing the concept over to make it a little more digestible. But when we did manage to encourage them up from their places and towards the food, we discovered the reason for this social convention. A couple of the teachers – who shall not be named – took a big portion of rice, then a heap of meat, which they then attempted to hide with another huge mountain of rice, until the tower looked fairly precarious to me. Luckily we had over-catered on the rice, so we didn’t run out, but they did end up throwing away a lot of food! “Wastage of resources...” as they like to say.

Slightly laughable sexism aside, it was a fantastic night. We laughed, and we danced, and we tried to convince Mr Chunga to dance, failed, carried on dancing anyway, and I did not stop smiling for hours. It turns out that sober Malawians dance as hilariously as spectacularly drunken Westerners. And the night sky studded with stars, dark enough to see the star clouds made by the edge of the Milky Way, makes the whole thing somehow epic, somehow profound, somehow glorious.

And the whole thing got me thinking about the Great Feast, the wedding feast of the Lamb – which is the way Jesus talked about heaven.  Jesus and us, his bride, having a massive, beautiful, joyous party. Because I realised that here I was, at a party, without alcohol. At a feast. And that made me think of the bit in the bible which says about getting drunk on the Holy Spirit – and how ridiculous that always sounded to me. But Thursday night made me think that maybe our whole drinking culture is part of a thirst for something, a hunger for a kind of party that we can’t quite imagine.

We drink to forget our worries.
                In the kingdom of God there will be nothing, nothing left to worry about.

We drink to give us self=confidence we don’t really have.
                At the feast of God, we will know, for absolute certain, right in our heart of hearts and out into our lips and our fingertips, that we are loved, loved by the Beautiful One, the Awesome One, the Only One. We will be able to see his face, and we will be able to see for ourselves that when he looks at us, he laughs in delight. His beaming grin at being with his children, being with his bride, will be so bright there will be no need for the sun any more. And how could we, looking into that face, dancing in that love, be short of confidence, be short on absolute, glorious freedom?

We drink to remove our inhibitions.
                At the feast, we will have no inhibitions. We will not need to worry about ourselves or our lives or our images or anything at all – there will be no one to mock us to sneer at us, no one to humiliate us. Just a big bunch of people that love us, laugh with us, dance stupid dances with us.

We drink to make everything seem better, funnier, more exciting.
                At the feast, we will need no illusion. The feast of God will be infinitely better, funnier, more exciting than anything we’ve ever known. We will not need to fake it any longer. Every one of our deep and beautiful desires will be thoroughly, thoroughly fulfilled.

We drink to lose self-control, so we’ll do exactly what we want to do.
                At the feast, we will do exactly what we want to do. There will be no internal conflict, no temptation, no confusion. St Augustine said, “If you love God, you can do what you want,” and it’s true. We will love God and we will love our brothers and our sisters with our whole hearts – and I can’t even begin to imagine how good that will feel. Absolute, self-giving, Jesus-style love will flow like a great river out of our hearts in perfect, unstoppable freedom.

I had the tiniest foretaste, the most beautiful appetizer for this feast last night, and I tell you what – even though I can’t really imagine this feast, I can’t wrap my head even a little bit of the way round a hope so huge, I honestly cannot wait.

Other Other People

Just to set the scene for you: I'm sitting in my hut, listening to the scuffling of the mouse that we think has been cohabiting with us for about two weeks. And I am ready now to fill the huge gap I left a week or so in my blog about other people - the Malawians. 

There are now 12 teachers at Chimbowe L.E.A Primary School, if you include me and Mike, and the other 10 have been an absolutely, unforgettably glorious part of our last six months. I've already told you a fair bit about Brian Mkanda, so here are some other highlights for you...

Abel Chunga is the grandfather of the staff - and a kindly, wise, noble grandfather too. He has been teaching for 40 years, and has something like 13 children, with countless grandchildren. He is a round, friendly, slightly teddy-bear-esque man, who cycles to school every day, and is literally addicted to nsima. He says if he came to England he would have to bring some maize flour in his suitcase because man cannot live on rice/potatoes/bread alone. Interestingly he also told us the other day that he's trying to stop eating mouse and pork because they are against the Jewish food laws in Leviticus - me and Mr Bwanali had a good go at explaining that we are free from those laws now, in fact we live by faith and by grace, not by the law at all - I'm not sure if he was convinced!

I am constantly amazed by how similar Macdonald Chimangeni is to Michael. He is incredibly casual in his attitude to life (and to his job!) but seems to be quite good at both anyway! He loves reggae, and also enjoys showing other teachers utterly horrific videos off the internet on his phone. I am deeply glad to have missed out on the execution and disembowelment videos that he's treated Michael to following the challenge, "Are you brave enough to watch this?" He is, interestingly, also a very good netball coach. He is always happy when we see him, and he got so excited about making musical instruments in Expressive Arts that he did it three weeks early!

Faeton Thaulo (I think I spelt his name right...) is lovely, with remarkably big and expressive eyes, and a hilarious line in acting things out to illustrate his point - there is a certain resemblance to Rowan Atkinson if you look hard enough. Sadly though, Thaulo has a problem with drinking. Spectacularly for this country he is the only one of the 10 for whom this is a problem, and it must be said that he is nothing like as bad as a huge number of the men around. He did however spend a night in jail this weekend for turning up to his MSCE exam (lots of teachers retake the end of school exams to boost their mark) drunk. Happily he was released in time to take the rest of the exams, and he has been allowed to keep his job.

Robins Doctor Rabson Kamanga, or as we like to call him in honour of his obsession with football (in general) and Manchester United (in particular), Robins Van Persie has to take the prize for the most hilarious of the bunch. I cannot possibly convey to you the entertainment value of this man. He comes out with the greatest lines, from the unforgettable (and inexplicable) "He who brings coconut, brings life!" to his glorious borrowing of phrases from sports commentary - "We have clobbered them in grand style, in their own backyard!" When he had malaria he asked the doctor to give him the required bottom injection through his trousers, and explained this request with a reference to Shakespeare that I still don't understand! He absolutely loves Lord of the Flies, and the Merchant of Venice. When somebody goes to the toilet he will remark that they have been "taken short, like Sam'n'Eric", and when Mr Msiska turns up of an evening in his thick jacket he will describe it, every time, as a "Jewish gaberdine". Honestly, I wish I could remember and explain the tiniest fraction of this man's genius - but you will all just have to come here and meet him. Ah, Robins. You will be greatly missed.

Luke Msiska is a fierce disciplinarian, who once argued on and off all morning with the head and deputy head because he refused to allow some Standard Eight kids who had come late into class. He is the 'workmaster' of the school, so you can usually find him overseeing some learners at work sweeping or carrying or cleaning. He has a love of debating, and in meetings there is a little, foxy sort of grin that emerges on his face when he's about to raise an objection and start an enjoyable argument that is now one of my all time favourite facial expressions.

Thanks to the confusing practice of using women's married and maiden names interchangeably, I though that our Deputy Headmistress, Triphonia Chiwambo/Gidala was two different people for quite a while at the start - and to be fair she's got enough personality for any normal two human beings. She's your classic, Ladies Detective Agency style African matriarch, big, ever-changing hair (my favourite style actually is her red and white striped wooly hat) and an air of being incredibly welcoming and caring, but at the same time not to be messed with. She taught us to cook African cakes, cooked a guinea fowl from flapping to frying before our very eyes, and would be an eminently sensible choice for President of the World.

Perhaps the only better choice for that position would be the Headmaster himself, 'The Big Man' as we like to call him - Joseph Bwanali. He has been running this school for 16 years, is part way through a correspondence degree in Theology, and we reckon he'd make an incredible CEO for anything at all. Michael likes to call him 'The Malawian Jesus' - and while he says this partly to annoy me, he has actually got a point. He is one of the most Jesus-like people I have ever met. He is gentle, and quiet, and self-sacrificial. He spends all his time it seems thinking about the needs of others - whether that's the kids, us, or his elderly mother who lives half an hour's walk away in Kalenga, and whom I think he visits every day. He is humble enough to lead the way Jesus led - by serving others not by being served. He doesn't assert his authority, he simply has it. I sincerely doubt there is anyone who knows him who doesn't respect him. He is tactful and gloriously polite - he has perfected the art of sincere gratitude. Not once has he asked me or Michael for anything, he even tries to stop us being included when all the teachers contribute money for something. When my aunt helped us to build some desks, he wrote her a beautiful and heartfelt letter of thanks and asked me for her address so he could send it to England. The man loves God and he loves other people. He has a heart that has been thoroughly warme and transformed by the love of Jesus. It is an honour to have become his friend.

In fact, it's not just Mr Bwanali. I can honestly say that it has been a delight and an honour to live amongst these people. And I'm not allowed to bring any of them home...

The Joys of Marking

Here's an assortment of the most delightful things I've come across while marking 250 Standard Six end of year exams:

1) Marking 9 papers in a row, all but one by someone who's surname is 'Banda'.

Top 5 names:

5 - Happy Gwinya

4 - Loveness Khumwenda

3 - Chimwemwe Nthumbidwa

2 - Binku Mtengowagwa

1 - Mwaiwawo Mwale

English:

Question - Add a question tag, eg. You are joking, aren't you?

                 Andrea is dead,                    ?

Answer -   Andrea is dead, play football?

Question - Fill in the verb in this sentence:
                Andrea               football.
Answer -   Andrea I am iting nsima football.

Question - Give the opposite of 'uncomfortable'.

Answer -   ununcomfortable

Science and Technology:

Question - Give 3 ways of cleaning the home.

Answer -   i) Goat      ii) Chicken    iii) Bat

And finally the most gloriously Malawian answer of all ...

Question - What are the 3 states of matter?
Answer -   i) fish      ii) maize      iii) water




P.S. I feel I should also share with you a couple of the difficulties of doing exams at Chimbowe Primary School. Firstly, there isn't enough room in the classroom for them to spread out at all, so they have to sit next to each other on the floor, which makes it obviously very easy to copy. Thus all you can do is stop them talking. However this is also tricky because there are 80something of them, and so when you hear someone talking it's really hard to work out who it is. Especially since there is no door and the windows are gaps in the wall so you can always hear kids talking outside. So you have to look really intently at everyone to see if they are talking. But, alas, this doesn't work. Because everyone's lips are moving, even when it's completely silent. Because they can't read without moving their mouths.

Let Go

I was deeply, inexplicably anxious today. For some reason I felt tense and worried and impatient. But things are improving. Partly because I asked Nadine to pray for me. I think that learning to rely on God begins with relying on other people – you just have to get started with the relying.

Faith never promises to free us from sorrow, from pain, from anger even. But it does promise to free us, eventually, from worry. It is a slow, hard discipline, but surely we can learn to “instead of worrying, pray”. To put our lives in the hands of our Caring Father. Here’s a thought: to give someone something, you have to let go of it. If you ask for the ketchup, and I pick it up and hold it near you, you will not consider your request granted. I have to let go. To give it to you I have to let go. How many films have that moment where they have to let go of the sinking ship to be pulled onto the lifeboat? That’s faith. That’s trust. I have to let go.

But it’s more than letting go, and that image of the lifeboat has just reminded me. Rob Bell tells a story of a day at the beach: his young son was running about, gleefully collecting shells and showing them to his Mum and Dad, when suddenly he spots a huge, awesome starfish floating within paddling range. His family urge him on – “It’s yours, go get it!” Excited, he splashes out to sea, right up to the pointy prize. But then he turns and runs back. “Go on! You can get it! You were right there!” cheer the family, so he turns and goes out again, splashing determinedly. But once again, he turns back with no starfish.
“What’s wrong? Why can’t you get it?” his Dad asks. He replies, with tears in his eyes:
“Because my hands are full of shells.”

When we let go of our worries, our plans, our treasures, our ‘values’, our lives – we become free to take hold of something far, far better. Our empty hands can take His hand. We can obey the gentle whisper, Father to son, Mother to daughter, at the start of a great adventure –

“Hold on tight.”

P.S. I write this blog not as a teacher, but as a student who’s not doing too well in class but just got what the Teacher has been trying to say and excitedly shoves his hand in the air and has a go. Hopefully I will manage to learn what I’ve just said a bit more in the next few weeks, months, and years.

Other People

As I write I am sitting on a concrete road sign, waiting for a minibus to emerge from the heat haze on the horizon. And I have realised that all my blogs so far have been largely about myself, which I suppose is understandable, but regardless I’d like to rectify that.

I’ve just been staying with my New Zealander friend Nadine for a few days. She is a glorious human being. She is kind in the most profound sense of the word, she is clever, self-forgetful, funny. She has the sort of deep courage and love that are only forged in the furnace of pain. She gives awesome hugs, and cooks great corn fritters. She currently has her hair braided in a funky, African kind of way – she doesn’t like it but whenever a bit comes out the kids at her school helpfully re-plait it for her! She’s teaching at a deaf school and you can see instantly how much she actually loves her kids. She wants to work overseas for the Red Cross – and she’d be awesome at it.

I’ve been living for 6 months now with another New Zealander, Michael Wilkie. He is one of the funniest people I have ever met. He is incredibly irritating about 80% of the time, but you find yourself a day later telling people about how he annoyed you as an anecdote, and it’s really really funny. He loves sport way too much, and celebrates goals in football matches with 4 year olds as if he’s just won the World Cup. While drunk. He knows the words to an insane amount of hip hop, and unexpectedly, country music. He sings these songs in his bed every morning and then in spells throughout the day. He loves teaching the kids. He works hard. He embraces problems with a spectacularly carefree attitude, that can only be described as ‘swagger’. He has broken a bucket, a door handle, and his bed while we’ve been here. He has climbed a 1000 meter mountain, with no path, wearing trainers with holes in and no grip on the bottom. He loves, really loves, to snuggle.

Rachael Leeson is currently in France, no doubt speaking impressively good French, having just finished a week of acting for a pro Christian theatre company at Spring Harvest France – a bit Christian holiday festival. She wrote some really beautiful stuff for it. She has an incredible face, which is genuinely fun to watch whether she’s performing or not. She is faithful and funny and talented and brave. Her boyfriend has been away for six months and they’re still together. She is wise, and she listens. She listens to people, and she listens to God. She is selfless and joyful. She makes people happy.

My Dad got ordained on Sunday. He is a legend. Wise like an owl, gentle, loving. He’s genuinely brilliant with kids, including myself. He invents games that we mock but secretly love. He talks about Jesus with passion and integrity and insight. He gets excited about the bits of the bible he’s studying at college and explains them to me, just like he used to explain how gears worked, or surface tension. He loves Athletic Bilbao a lot. He loves Pringles because they are neat. He is my Dad and I am proud of him.



And these people, and many, many others, are the reason I will be sad to leave in a month’s time, and the reason I will be glad to be home.