Colorado Springs, a sprawling suburbia at the eastern feet of the staggering Rocky Mountains strikes as an image of a modern America which has robbed itself of community by worshipping privacy, space and the automobile. And yet, with a paradox which also rings true in a country which plays home to the incredibly relational, generous and visionary people that I have met in kitchens, overseas, on public transport and spread over the pages of paperbacks, it is a place where, for a short time, I found real community, love, grace, inspiration, support, reality and the stuff of a broken humanity all too often hidden from view by the space between us.As I left Africa I revisited a thought which had been important to me as I left Ireland. God does not change. He is the same everywhere and so the One who has always proved to be reliable would and will continue to be so, no matter where I find myself. The richness of his person and the reach of his influence would not diminish. I thought about that as I lamented leaving a place where I had been inspired almost every day by a story or a child or an event or a landscape. I was struck by the subtle difference between two thoughts:
1 - "You have changed my life" A phrase so often repeated by departing visitors to our children. Massah you have changed who I am. Mary you have ensured that I will never be the same. Phillo you have altered me. Samuel you have made an indelible mark on my heart.
2 - "God has used you to change my life" A phrase less commonly uttered though perhaps implied. Ngardy, by introducing me to you God has inspired me to a different life. Angie, through our relationship God has called me to a changed way of being. Musu, God has used you to get to my core and go to work.
The difference is subtle but utter. Because if my children were the ones who affected a change in my life, that influence would lessen with every day we spend apart. But if that difference was instigated by an omnipresent Father who works through the people, things and situations around us, then the process does not have to ease off. There is no ending. There is just a journey. Because no destination has been reached and what was important was not left behind.
At a conference in America recently some of the great minds of American Christendom were asked to sum up the Christian experience in one word. This is kind of a futile exercise given the complexity of the experience to be described but it is food for thought at the very least and the word that they came up with was 'Wilderness'. It is a great word to suggest, albeit limited in the way that any single word must be, with a big problem being that it fails to speak to the 'abundance' of a life with God. What is sums up perfectly however is this reality - we are sojourners who have trouble in a world we are in but not of, stumbling in the darkness of our journey home with a fragment of the light. The Son of Man has no-where to lay his head. The journey continues.
In Colorado God made it clear that he has a whole lot more to show me and many more questions to pose. I feel like I have always been someone who is comfortable with the questions which drift around our heads and our hearts, whether acknowledged or not. Indeed I can quickly be uncomfortable in the midst of people with too many answers. Colorado was a place of true fellowship, a word which the church has reduced to mean pot luck dinners, cinema trips and 'fun' of a shallower type, but which here looked liked people sharing the brokenness of their souls, the depth of their questions and the loneliness of their wilderness. Sharing and laughing and rejoicing and encouraging and crying together in a way which the Church has always had the capacity to do. It was the Church with its masks torn off and what was underneath was painfully beautiful. Being a part of that for a few days has left me with a dull ache for all that we could be.
When my friend talks about two year old Hawa the edges of his eyes redden. He talks of how he sat with her and her mother, how he prayed for them and how he desperately hoped that the care she was receiving would save her from the illness which had seen her tiny body all but completely shut down. He might also continue to explain that he thinks that maybe he avoided checking on Hawa on the morning of her death because of how uncomfortable that proximity to death made him feel. I wondered the same thing about myself earlier this year as I tried to comfort another friend as she wept after the death of a three year old girl called Fati.
Fati’s mother was not getting her daughter enough protein and when this happens a child’s body basically falls apart from the inside out. It is amazing to me how long a child seems to be able to last on so little nutrition but there is a point when they pass the point of no return. I was there when Fati died. I heard the wails of her mother who, in her despair, ran out the door of our clinic and up the road, howling. I watched as a man came for her body, putting her in a small cardboard box and securing it on the back of his bicycle before peddling off to the village where she would be buried. The whole scene was incredibly upsetting but I was struck by how uninvolved I had been in the story of this little family. Fati and her mother had been in our malnutrition clinic for weeks but I had not spent very much time with them at all. I had just been busy with other things but I also wondered if I had been on some level avoiding the malnutrition clinic because I was worried about being beaten down by the sadness of seeing babies in such a condition. I wondered, as my friend would later, if I was simply uncomfortable with the proximity of death.
I decided on that day that I would get ‘involved’ with whoever would come to the malnutrition clinic next. That I would spend time with them, encourage them if I could. That I would simply ‘be’ with them as they struggled together for life. I did not have to wait very long before I met Alice. She was two years old and arrived with her mother wearing what once would have been a pretty yellow dress. Uncle Charles invited me as he regularly did to come and take Alice’s picture for the clinic’s records and I obliged. As her mother undressed her, Uncle Charles and I saw Alice’s little body properly for the first time and my emotions took a deep breath. Uncle Charles’ face betrayed the slenderness of his hope as he went about the business of doing all he could. Alice sat there, her beautiful big eyes watching us without really seeming to see us, as we sat with her mother and tried to piece together some of the details of their story.
If I am remembering things properly, a day passed when I didn’t get a chance to check on Alice and so the first thing I did the following morning was go to the clinic. When I got there Uncle Charles was visibly upset and a little green cloth bundle lay on the bed beside his table. When a child is as malnourished as Alice, I was told, it's really important that she is kept warm. This had been explained to Alice’s mother, I was told, but when they were checked on that morning Alice was lying on the bed without covers and was dreadfully cold. I leaned forward to look at the bundle that was Alice. Her face was a pale, purple colour and I couldn’t get over how tiny she looked. Like she had been folded in half with her head shrunk to fit. After a moment or too Uncle Charles stepped out to see Alice’s mother and another patient and I was left alone with Alice. I brought my face close to hers and, as delicately as I could manage, stroked her cheek and a tiny hand with the back of my finger. She was deathly cold. I sat with her and prayed and watched her take the smallest of breaths.
