A year has passed since I first
stepped off a plane onto South African soil, carrying my granddad’s red leather
suitcase, a tatty old Bible, 3 sets of sunglasses and a fedora that only in
hindsight can I admit looked ridiculous. I was every inch a missionary, with 12
months to kill. Now, those months are gone and with them the fedora, suitcase
and sunnies (lost, bust and stolen), though my Bible’s with me still and
tattier than ever. And against all plans and priorities to the contrary, I’m
still here. I don’t remember some pivotal or decisive moment, I only know that at
some point, and I don’t think I could tell you when, I realised that I wasn’t
quite ready to leave. That’s how I find myself sitting in the living room of
the Zambian farmhouse I’ve come to call home, batting the flies away from my
face on a long and a stinking hot Friday, wondering for the life of me what
happened.
I know how I got here; that much
at least is definite. It was a heart for adventure, a longing for discovery,
that ancient appeal of the obscure that compels you to experiment in life in
another culture. It was the allure of the bizarre that got me eating bat wings
that I only later found out was just misnamed beef. The law of trying
everything once that threw me off a cliff face over a hundred metre gorge (or
the person tied to the same cord as me that dragged us both off.) It was the
mystery of a calling written on my heart, the longing to discover why God would
lead me to such a place at such a time as this. But now the problem I’m faced
with is what to make of this time and place when it becomes more than just an
experience, when it demands more of me than I at first planned to give. Because
it’s still adventure that drives me. A life with Christ, no matter where that
life finds you, is nothing if not the most impossible adventure. But I’ve since
been met by something deeper.
You see, experience fades like
the photos in which you try to capture it or the memory with which you long to keep
it. The great unknown becomes the commonplace. The sights, sounds and smells
that at first serve the exotic unfamiliarity of it all become familiar, and you
find yourself reclining into normality in what ought to be the most abnormal of
places. The stench of the dried market-fish with the glamorous name becomes
unobtrusive, and the fish itself becomes just ‘dinner.’
And there is a part of you,
perhaps the part that drew you here in the first place, that calls it tragic. The
explorer in you mourns. But for those longing to truly dig deep into the heart
of a strange place, it’s the greatest discovery there is. Discovering that more
than the holiday encounter of this exotic, beautiful, fierce, untamed place, there
is something deeper. Discovering the heart of why you were ever here in the
first place. Discovering the heart of the Father from which that calling first
compelled you, the depths of why Christ
bids you here, for such a time as this. Discovering in the midst of obscurity a
sense of belonging. In other words: Discovering home.
And so I ask again: What
happened? The only answer I can hope to give, in the most fitting words I can
hope to give it, is that somehow I ended up here, and by ways higher than mine it so happens that here is just where Jesus wants me. Before
I left the UK, heading out for the first time on this African adventure, I was barraged
by words of advice, many wise, many more not so wise. But few went so deep or have
gone with me so long as those of an old housemate of mine. He told me that
wherever you find yourself, that is your home. That wherever Christ leads you,
whether for a moment or a lifetime, at least for such a time as this, it is exactly where you are supposed to be,
and the place and the time in which you find yourself deserve everything that
you have. Home is where your rump rests, they say.
That’s answer enough for why I’m
here, in the scorching October of Central Africa. There are so many other places
I could have been. So many other adventures I could have lived. But the only one
worth my life is the reckless and radical adventure of a life spent with God.
Above and beyond every longing of my own, it was Him who brought me here. And
so here I am, just where I’m supposed to be, for such a time as this,
dumbfounded by His ways, and at home.
