A life worthy

"Put your Bible on your head to show how much you love Jesus...everyone must daaance!"

If I heard that coming from any western worship leader, I would be a little shocked, to say the least.  Here, most of the congregation yelled enthusiastically in response, and put everything from Bibles to purses and large rocks on their heads.  I retrieved my Bible out of my purse and looked at it a little uncertainly.  Up until now the worship style had involved a lot of hallelujahs and amens and foot stomping and arm swinging and butt shaking.  I wasn't sure my Bible would stay on my head through all of that.

It's been almost two years since I've been to the fishing village church.  My fond memories involved beach chairs, a wooden-pole church without walls, a few goats wandering through the non-road, and a lot of sand.  We've progressed to bare concrete walls with a variety of holes (ventilation?), wooden benches, and rubber hoses hanging through the ceiling at strategic spots.  The children were just as friendly as ever, willing to enthusiastically greet us and explore hairstyles, watches, water bottles, and Bibles as a variety of service entertainment.  As I tried to communicate with them, my words came out in a jumble of Ewe and Krio and French and Indonesian and English, with a little pantomime thrown in for good measure. 

And so we sang in Ewe, and I sang along in my jumble of languages; and we danced to the shekere and drums, along the aisles and in the front of the church and next to our bench seats. And the Bible stayed on (mostly) through the end of worship.  The sermon was on unity, but a section from the main text reached out off the pages and into my heart.

As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Eph 4:1-2

Right now the calling is surgical wards aboard a little white hospital ship: faces and legs and hands and eyes and lives and souls. The calling is training nurses with humility and gentleness and patience, reaching out to the needy, being the face and hands and heart of Christ.  The calling is to live a life of radical love.

And a life worthy of that calling would be dancing, dancing...sometimes with a Bible on my head, and sometimes with a baby drooling down my back, and sometimes with tears running down my face.  A life worthy of this trust would indeed be a wild and radical and difficult and wonderful life.  Lord, give me the strength and the patience and joy to live a life worthy of this calling.  To live with only You as the audience, as Your love saturates until it spills out of the cracks and overflows uncontrollably into life...

Urban airport camping

My day started yesterday at 4 pm and stretched out and out through an extra 7 hours of time change backwards and oozed into the little holes on the long benches of the Accra arrivals area.  I tossed and turned for a while, hoping the holes wouldn’t be permanently imprinted on my hip, and wondered at the intensity of the animatedly loud and heated conversation of the 20 people apparently upset at the vending machine to my right.  On the next bench over, an airline worker is stretched out napping, with his bright yellow neon and retro-reflective vest crumpled over his chest.  Another conversation at the bottom of my bench seems to inspire a lot of gesticulating and bench-banging, and my I-pod music is almost completely drowned out despite the headphones as my makeshift bed rattles and shakes with the conversation’s punctuation.

My amazing campsite, complete with bedding

For reasons that all seemed very good and logical at the time, I’ll be spending the better part of a day in the Ghana airport.  And by better, I mean pretty much all.  The movie The Terminal has never been a completely far-fetched oddity for me – I have lived it in pieces, over and over again, sleeping on benches and floors and wandering in shops and washing my hair in the bathroom sink at 3 am when the whole airport belongs to me.  Although I have to say, a 23-hour layover is one of the longest I can claim to date.  It’s only been 5 hours so far, and already I’ve met an amazing amount of people, from the friendly Egyptian engineer behind me in the looooong immigration line, to one of our Togolese translators who came over to say hi when he simultaneously recognized me and my flamboyantly orange Mercy Ships water-bottle, to a little brown girl who shyly wandered over when I forgot I was in West Africa and waved at her.   Here, a side-to-side wave means a friendly hello, while a down-wards wave means “come here.”  Just as I was starting to get back into Indonesian mannerisms…time to remember the African ones again!

All in all – it may shape up to be a relatively comfortable layover.  After all, the benches don’t have intermittent armrests, so far no one is smoking indoors, and the baggage people thoughtfully agreed to keep my checked bag (although it could have made a very comfy pillow).  The only main problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a bathroom in this particular part of the airport.  Maybe I’ll walk over to Departures to find one…just in case I need to wash my hair tonight.

Explore

These last few weeks it’s been a blessing to explore Indonesia again.  To hike the volcanoes and rainforests with my brothers and sisters and friends.  To see my world as it was when I was 10, and 15, and 17, and now again through fresh eyes; to enjoy the tastes and sounds and sights and smells with a new sense of wonder.

Just after Christmas we headed down as a family to meet friends for a few days of vacation in a little villa by the ocean.  The sunsets are just as majestically colorful as I remembered, dotted here and there with the black kites of hopeful bat fishermen.  If I listen hard enough I can hear the peaceful twilight of 10 years ago shattered by high-pitched shrieks on the night the bat fishermen brought down a fruit bat tangled in the hooks and broken glass along the kite strings, piled sand on the majestic 6-foot wings, and grilled the bat meat over a driftwood fire on the beach.  If I squint I can see the “tribe” children I grew up with building sand forts on the beach, and my mother and aunt coming back from a walk with their hands full of sand dollars.  If I walk a mile or two, I can find the place I learned that driving a motorcycle along the rice paddies and down unpaved roads can be dangerous.   A few things have changed since the tsunami in 2006 – restaurants missing, and tsunami evacuation route signs everywhere, but the wide stretch of ocean is unchanged.

 

One of my favorite adventures is fast becoming a popular tourist attraction.  A river runs through Green Canyon to the sea, banks filled to overflowing from the constant rain and overhung with dripping vines dangling from the canopy above.  The real fun begins after a short boat ride upriver to a small waterfall.  We’ve done it before – the swim against the current, pulling ourselves up hand over hand and climbing over rocks to try and reach the source, only to ride the rapids back down to the beginning.  This time the river was high and our guides cautious, and we didn’t make it up as far as we had hoped.  But it was still gorgeous and wet and green and amazingly fun.

A day later we wound our way through the buses of Indonesian tourists to the forest preserve for a hike along trails well off of the marked routes.  I’m pretty sure it’s not just called rainforest because of the precipitation frequency.  The other reason became immediately clear only 30 minutes into our hike through the caves and up to a cliff top overlooking the ocean.  Sweat dripped down my face, into the tank top and bathing suit underneath, and soaking into the backpack straps.  It really wasn’t that hot – a cloudily cool day to hike through the teak and rattan and up across quietly bubbling streambeds.  There was simply nowhere else for the sweat to go in an atmosphere almost 100% saturated with water already.

 

Just looking down at the ground I could have believed I was on a hike in Northern Pennsylvania.  Leaves and dirt and mold and roots often look the same anywhere.  It was the little things that gave it away: the brightly colored tree frog watching us pass, the large ant nest on a branch above, the thick vines and soaring green treetops and breathtaking view from a small pool we swam in at the top of the cliff.  It was the rafflesia blossoms and buds sprouting out along the ground and decaying fallen trees.  It was the monkeys cautiously watching us from the brush, and the young teak leaves we crushed to try as lipstick.  It was the scattered openings of limestone caves hollowed out in the hillsides by chisel during the Japanese occupation in 1942, waiting to be explored by headlamp.  

All photos are borrowed from siblings and friends who carry their cameras much more often than I do :-)

I'll be home for Christmas

There are some that dream and sing of a white Christmas, of fires and sleighs and hot chocolate.  My Christmas this year involved none of these.  And yet, I am home.

Gamelan music blares from a mosque loudspeaker, echoing across the rice fields and red tile roofs and banana trees to the white tile-and-concrete open porch on top of our house.   The street sellers call out advertising their wares, and we can hear neighborhood conversations and passing motorcycles as clearly as if they were in the house with us.  The clouds announce rain soon, as they have almost every day, and promise a glorious show for tonight – colorful tropical sunset drowning behind the mountains in the maghrib call to prayer.  These last two weeks our family has been together in a country we moved to over 18 years ago, where I haven’t visited in a long time and my sisters-in-law are getting to experience for the first time.

It’s been six years since I’ve been to Indonesia.  I flew into Jakarta in darkness, blind to the scattered green-blue of the islands and ocean below.  I approached the immigration desk in the Jakarta airport ready to fall back on English if I needed, and found myself chatting casually with the officials in fluent Indonesian as passing tourists shot me strange glances out of the corners of their eyes.  I don’t look like someone who is coming home.  My white skin and blond hair bleached lighter by the African sun stand out among the creamy brown skin and black hair of everyone else.  I am at least a foot taller than every Indonesian woman in the airport.  And yet, the language and culture, even the accent, have come back easily from somewhere I had stored them away after high school.  In another week I’ll store them back again, in a rattan and batik treasure chest in the back of my brain, and pull out the bright and flamboyant bits of Togolese culture and gutteral Ewe I’ve learned so far.

I told Immigration I was pulang kampung (returning home to my village for a visit).  It’s been more true than they could have guessed, and than I could have known.  This time has been an amazing mish-mash of time with family, classic Indonesian-style adventures, incredible food that always somehow seems to involve white rice and coconut milk and ginger, childhood memories, and soaking in the beauty of the island.  Even as my definitions of home shift and shift again and I realize I may never again be able to call Java home, I can say with full confidence that it is good to be home for Christmas.