Parting Words

A few days ago I boarded a plane, as I have countless times these three years in Africa; the same old suitcase in tow (though wearing a few more dents and bruises than it once did); the same old passport and immigration rigmarole; the same old stifling musk of too many anxious passengers crammed into a Zambian departure lounge. Same old, yet different; same old, yet somehow new. Because for the first time in three long years my ticket was one-way. Yep. I tore off the tarmac of the runway, bound for South Africa and eventually, a week later, home.

Three years at its end. I knew it was coming, but that makes it no easier. I knew the time I had left to finish things up, but it's never time enough. The end drew near faster than it should have. It always does.

That is how my last morning prayer meeting at Kachele Farm, that haven of love and peace I've come to call home these three years, found me before I had half realised it was coming. The night before, I had knelt there in my room praying over what I would say, a parting word of encouragement or challenge or blessing worthy of this dear family of mine. Yet kneeling there, scanning my heart, I found myself unable to say anything at all, even to God.

                                                                                                                                         

- In the silence of the heart, God speaks -

Mother Teresa

Silent, speechless, undone, but for one thing. Bubbling up and out of me like water spluttering over the sides of a pan, I found myself saying...

Thank You. Thank You.

It was all I could say. Thank You, Dad. Thank You, Jesus. Thank You, Spirit, for ever being with me.

No other words seemed right. No other words could have been any harder.

So when the following morning did appear, I fumbled in my mind over the words to say and settled on a few. But when I was called upon to bring my parting word, a deeper and truer part of me interrupted my practiced composure and all I found myself saying, through tears and chokes, was

Thank You.

That is my parting word.

For all that is gone before,

for every face etched on my heart,

for every tear that testified to the indwelling heart of God,

for every moment this family bore me up over ragged rocks too hard for me,

and for every moment they threw me from my snug boat out into open water,

for the company,

for the unexpected shafts of the miraculous brightening a dull way,

and for the every-day much comforting ordinariness too,

for Tawonga, the funniest and free-est three year old I've ever known,

for every mistake, mishap, misfortune and moment of mayhem (and there were a few),

for every child and Gogo I had eyes to notice and ears to listen to, and for all the ones I missed,

for being interrupted by love,

for finding what I didn't expect to find, one with whom I can share all my days,

but above all for grace,

that mad grace that led me here and ever bears me on,

Thank You.

The Missionary

One day during my time at University, by a rare turn of opportunity and not a little persuasive charm on my side, I managed to gain access to the archives of Canterbury Cathedral. It was the fascination of every theology student, this mysterious catalogue of ancient books locked behind Access Only glass doors in the crypts of the cathedral. Masquerading as a research assistant for a PhD student, I passed an afternoon in there with no company but my friend, a few thousand books and a wheelie ladder. Amidst leather-lined volumes that have passed more winters than some of the world's nations (one dated 1604!), I came upon something fascinating.

Diaries. The diaries of Britain's first missionaries, handwritten as they had walked the plains and wilds of Africa. History in my hands. At this point I had no idea, could not have imagined, that I would one day walk those wilds myself. Still I picked one up, flicked through the taut, discoloured pages. It was penned in the archaic elegance of all old handwriting, with that characteristic tilt and flourish. I imagined the author, sitting against a tree, his diary perched in his knees as the setting sun throws a dark orange hue across its pages. He looks about him. The haze of dust and smoke drifting across the horizon reminds him of the city smog of home. But he is a world away. He wants to make note of everything: the wildlife, the smell of the soil; he wants to scratch all he can into that journal and take a palmful of Africa home with him. He wants his friends and his family to catch what he longs to share with them, wants his world to meet with a world it hasn't known. It is all he can bring.

And so he writes what he can. He writes of how the ears of African elephants are shaped like Africa, of how smoke breaking through the thatched roofs of mud huts makes them look like giant cooking pots, of how shadows cast by the setting sun span the ground like a zebra's stripes, and of how all of it plays its part to make a vast, complex and boundless symphony One.

But that is the unimportant stuff.

He writes of the people, for a land is nothing without its people. They are difficult to know, like Africa itself, impossible to hedge or characterise. Just when you think you have plumbed the depths of their culture and character you find you have only run a spoon along the surface. He calls them savage, not with that kind of carnivorous and primitive savagery, but savage as synonym for passion. They bear their heart and emotions boldly and loudly and do not wrap them in a cloak of sophistication. So when they grieve it is loud and bitter, when they celebrate it is fierce, when they laugh it is as if it bubbles up from the very depths of heart and soul.

He writes of their resilience, it is his favourite thing about them. Many live a hard life, inexpressibly hard, yet no matter what depth of pain or poverty they are steeped in their capacity for faith and hope seems incorruptible. They continue on, through the seasons, undefeated.

Our missionary wants his world to encounter and be transformed by this, by the heart of a land and its people. He wants to tell of it, he must, but trying to define Africa, even that tiny patch of it he has come to know so well, beggars language. And at the end of his journal, though not an inch of its pages remains unmarked, he knows he has written nothing. Nothing he could put to words would truly tell of the fierce, beautiful, warm, unpredictable, chaotic, ancient and endless place they call Africa.

For the Dark Continent is not so dark after all, he writes, but vibrant with colours that cannot be imagined or described. You have to see them for yourself.

This is our missionary's final word. Laying against his tree, the sun set but for a last vestige of dying red on the horizon, he closes his journal in his lap. He hopes only that his words will do enough to inspire those who read them to come and see for themselves, even a boy two hundred years his younger passing a summer's afternoon amidst dusty forgotten archives.

Advice for an Aspiring Missionary

On top of my wardrobe is a red leather suitcase; it was my granddad's. It is now beyond use - the leather worn, the zip stuck and the handle all squeaky. But it was with this suitcase in my hand and an utterly ridiculous fedora on my head that I arrived in Africa two and a half years ago, looking every bit the part. Today, two and a half years older (and if the loss of the fedora is anything to go by, two and a half years wiser), I wonder: what would I say to that younger Adam? Were I to travel back and accost that bright-eyed fedora'ed explorer, what would I say? If I could take the seat beside him on that Boeing 707 at Heathrow, Terminal 5, as he waits apprehensively for the plane to jolt into life, what advice might I give him in the few short hours before he steps out onto the tarmac and into this new adventure?

With a little thought I've settled upon these few snippets of advice, most of them learnt on the other side of an embarrassing mistake, all of them the fruit of an experience which never fails to remind me how much I have yet to learn.

#1. Lone wolfs are for cowboy movies. Depend on people. Be immodestly vulnerable, and you'll give others permission to be the same.

#2. Be a part of creating real, authentic community. There are no easy steps for it, but a good start is to always be the last person to leave the dinner table.

#3. Dwell deeply in the Word of God. The Bible comes alive in an amazing way when you read it amidst the poor and powerless.

#4. Culture shock is real, and it hurts. A dose of chocolate, coffee, British films and a decent book makes for a good pain-killer, but the only real remedy when it comes is talking to people. See item 1.

#5. Know that when things are hardest God does his best work, both in and through you. Challenge creates dependency, dependency fosters faith, and God knows that.

#6. Keep your head up, literally. You never know what you'll miss if you walk with your eyes to the ground.

#7. Never make 'spending time with God' an excuse for not spending time with people.

#8. You will think you are 100% unequivocally unalterably undeniably sold out for the vision. But that will be tested by disappointment and frustration. When your enthusiasm wavers, stand firm; on the other side is something immeasurably more enduring and worthwhile - Commitment.

#9. In time you will realise just how unqualified, inexperienced and ill-fitted you are for this job. In those moments remember that you did not choose to do this work for God, God chose to do this work through you.

#10. Don't be a hero. Drink bottled water, take your malaria pills and if you see a snake, don't stamp it to death with your boot. That's ill-advised.

#11. Eventually the people and the potholes will get you down. Don't feel guilty about it, but don't let cynicism take root in your heart. Once it does, it's very hard to pull out.

#12. You might as well just get used to the staring.

#13. And finally:

Listen before you speak.

Learn before you teach.

Love, long before you try to lead.

And so here I am, back in the cold dawn of September 6th 2011, stepping onto a Boeing 707 at Heathrow airport, Terminal 5. In amidst the crowd of passengers I spot an animated young mzungu waiting for the plane to take off, his grandfather's suitcase stowed above him and an utterly unbefitting fedora perched on his head. I look down at my list. I take it, tear it up slowly and pocket the pieces.

Because of course, had I the chance, I wouldn't tell him a single one of these things. I wouldn't afford him a bypass for all those embarrassments, cultural faux pas's, mishaps, mistakes and misfortunes that would litter his way. No. If I were to say anything at all, it would probably be:

You will make mistakes. You'll eat an entire family's dinner because you don't want to offend anyone by not finishing your food. You'll run over a dog thinking that those people are waving at you, not telling you to watch where you're driving. You'll accidentally curse at someone in a bid to show off your mastery of the local language. You will make mistakes and that without doubt. You can, if you choose, learn from them.

For whatever became of that bright-eyed explorer, whatever he went on to discover about God, about the world, about himself, cannot be weighed against the immeasurable value of the discovery itself. The lesson learnt by owning your mistakes sticks deeper and longer than any learnt by listening to the mistakes of others.

That is what I would tell him. Or perhaps, had I the chance, I would simply walk past him to another seat, watch as he cocks his fedora slightly to the side for effect, and allow him to find out in his own time and way what a mistake that thing really is.

Facing Your Prejudice

- Written in Sept 2013 -

I never wrote about what happened to me in May on my last thwarted attempt to visit DRC; I never considered it right to. It seemed irresponsible and dangerous to offer a story to public readership that holds every chance of solidifying the tragic prejudiced assumptions many people already hold about the place. Besides, I had put that horrible event behind me, moved on; forgiven, forgotten, hadn't I? Truly, I believed I had. And yet these past three weeks, re-entering Congo for the first time since all that took place in May, I discovered something in my heart, something deep and disturbing that had its roots way back in that day. Now, it has always been a point of great pride for me that no matter how much time I spend in Congo and no matter how often I am exposed or made subject to the corruption at the heart of the culture, I have never lost the love or passion that I had for these beautiful and wounded people. From the moment I stepped foot in Africa, and every moment since, Congo has been etched on my heart. It lingers, a love and a grief over a place at once so beautiful and so broken. Yet this time, something was different. I couldn't explain it; I didn't even recognise it right away. I was frustrated, irritable, unyieldingly so. The blackmail and bribery I have to deal with, once a mild inconvenience, had become a source of overwhelming aggravation. I found myself searching always for the hidden agenda behind people's niceties, friends or strangers. Police officers and men in uniforms would wish me good morning with a civil tip of the hat and I would walk on without regarding them. Something was different, some deep wrongness in my heart, and it took time to recognise it for what it was.

It is not necessary to put to words all that happened that day in May. Suffice it to say that travelling through one of the Congo's major cities a friend and I had an extremely intense encounter with a group of corrupt police officials in which we found ourselves very vulnerable and at great risk. We came out of it unscathed, the physical threat assuaged, and travelled safely home to Zambia the following day, albeit with lighter wallets and fewer belongings. Little more detail than that is needed, what is more important is all that followed. Though the physical threat was assuaged, the threat to my heart remained. Today, recognising the effect that this had on me as I returned to Congo these past three weeks, I am so aware that what I discovered in my heart is something that takes a hold of many of us, maybe all of us, who live outside of our own culture and people, a thorn that takes the foot of many a man and woman walking the rough and often trying road of a missionary life. It is a thing that we cannot afford to keep hidden or unchecked, for the threat it holds for our work, no less than for our hearts. I want to talk about prejudice.

Arriving home in Zambia after what our eventful encounter in May, my friend and I discussed all that had passed. We prayed much, and much was healed. We encouraged and challenged one another. I told my friend and told myself that these kinds of things can stay like a wound in your heart. They can make you sick, turn rotten and gangrenous, infecting your perspective on the place and the people that have caused you this trouble. Though you think of it afterwards as little more than an anecdote to pull out over the dinner table back home, one of an arsenal of stories to regale your friends about a missionary's life in Africa, it actually stays with you, buried in your heart. Over time what you put to the recesses of memory comes out of you afresh, very much alive, taking you unawares in the moment you discover that all this time you were oblivious to a little wound festering quietly into something much more fierce, dangerous, and disgusting. That is the moment you discover your prejudice.

Prejudice is a constant threat to the missionary walking every day in a culture and a people not his own. Like many others who come to volunteer in Africa I considered myself immune to such things simply by virtue of choosing to leave home and give my life to the work here. And yet it starts so naturally, so innocently as to be almost imperceptible. It is in the comparisons you make between your own culture and the one to which you're exposed. Such comparisons are fun and make for good conversation, but they can reveal prejudice like little else. It happens most keenly when you use the values of your own culture as the line against which you measure other cultures. You see the slow pace and rhythm of life in Africa. When you measure that against a Western ethic, you risk prejudice, thinking Africans lazy and slow. And of course, if the task-oriented Western ethic was a given, you would call anyone lazy who doesn't match up to it. But then Africans are not task-oriented, they are relationship-oriented. In that regard, Africans must think Westerners tremendously lazy.

Prejudice also darkens your vision. The thing you dislike in the few, you see in the many. Like having a thorn stuck in your foot yet believing that the reason you feel sharp pain at every step is because the ground is covered in bramble; the problem is not out there but in yourself. Prejudice is often born of fear, such as mine. More often and posing a far greater threat to the missionary or the volunteer is prejudice born simply of over-exposure. Walking daily in a culture and amidst a people not your own, having little respite or 'tastes of home' can harden your receptivity to the experiences around you. I suppose it is a kind of defence, a guard ensuring that no matter what, you remain inalterably you. I am learning that we must be so alert. We must never trust in the resilience of our hearts, never sit secure in the illusion that this "could never happen to me." I am also learning that it does not become easier the longer you are here; it actually becomes more and more a risk. We must hold one another accountable, point out when and where we see it as soon as we see it. We must be ruthless where we find it, both with ourselves and with others. Better to offend than indulge, better to tear it violently out of our hearts than to massage the wound.

It is a devastating thing to discover prejudice in your own heart, like finding a lump on your body where before there was none. As followers of Christ especially, we must understand that this hurts God's heart like little else. I think it was Dorothy Day who said you only love God as much as you love the person you love the least. My mind goes to Jesus' story about the sheep and the goats. I see myself on the last day, chin up and chest puffed out, ready to receive the verdict as I anticipate which orphaned kids God will parade before me, which street children and homeless alcoholics that I have loved and cared for in my better moments. I watch my face drop, my heart jolt, as in their place God leads out a large Congolese policeman in a blue uniform. I've seen him before. He has a cigarette perched between his snarling up-turned lips; a thick wad of my cash sticks out over the top of his pocket. Behind him walks a host of Congolese friends and strangers, innocents that I failed to love because where in their faces I should have seen Christ, I saw the round, red, arrogant face of a Congo police officer, stealing my money. Because truly, it is not only the poor and the wounded and the dying who will give testimony of our lives to God, but the many difficult ones that are hard to love, the trying ones on the other side of our prejudice that ought to pity us for drawing a line that, but for Christ, we would never have crossed.

But the good news is of course that that line can be crossed. That black stain of the heart can be healed; healed of the wounds left open to fester in the darker and deeper recesses of our hearts. For me, the moment that the veil lifted and I discovered that black spot of prejudice on my heart led me to my knees, drained me dry of tears and for one of those rare and precious moments, taught me the blessed depth of what God in Christ has done for me.

Because your heart was responsive

 and you humbled yourself before God when you heard

what He spoke against you,

and because you humbled yourself before Me

and tore your robes and wept in My presence,

I have heard you.

- 2 Chronicles 34 -

Annie

I was tired when we arrived, hot, ill-tempered and now all the more irritated at our tardiness in getting back to the car. "Just one more home visit," said one of the ladies I was walking with, a local volunteer serving the children in this village. I resigned my irritation to a sigh and said, "It'll have to be a quick one." I knew I wasn't at my best, walking between the mud walled straw roofed huts that characterise all these Malawian villages. I pictured the team of Americans I was hosting waiting by the car in the sweltering heat, checking their wristwatches as they ate through the crumbs of their packed lunches. Still, I pulled myself together as best I could and we reached our destination, a hut that had all but collapsed, the roof in tatters and the door off its hinges. I had to step over a young man stretched out drunk on the ground outside, some filthy rag steeped across his face to protect him in his stupor. One of the ladies uttered a sad but kindly 'tut' that seemed more maternal than judgmental. At the entrance to the home there was a brief exchange I didn't understand with a very aged woman who appeared to live there. She cast me confused and not overly welcoming glances as she spoke, after which the care worker turned to tell me that the girl we came to visit was not around. I took that as signal to leave, but I was wrong. The care workers indicated that I sit down whilst they bounded off to fetch the absentee girl. Thirty minutes passed in awkward tedium as children appeared tentatively to view the out of place 'mzungu' (white man), a spectacle I always think must be as bizarre as finding a baboon in an English garden. With each minute I grew more anxious and irritable until, at last, the care workers appeared. I saw at once the cause of their delay, and with it my agitation turned to shame. In their arms they supported a girl no more than fifteen, crippled in both legs and unable to bear the weight of her body as she slumped herself beside me. Her name was Annie.

As we spoke her expression seemed etched in pain, her inner wounds lined like scars on her face. Perhaps she had cried so long and so hard that in time she had simply adopted a countenance of agony. It didn't take long to understand why. Annie had no one. The inhospitable old lady that had eyed me upon our arrival was Annie's grandmother, with whom she shared a mat and a thin blanket, and the young man in the drunken stupor outside was her brother. I was told that regularly he would beat Annie (I wondered if her invalidity was his work), and the grandmother does little to stop him, other than forcing him to sleep outside. "Tell me about your life," I brought myself to ask. With that pained expression not permitted to lift for an instant, Annie told me her story. At sunrise every morning Annie gets up and drags herself on crippled legs to a mango tree three kilometres from her home. There in the shade of the mango tree she sits until the sun sets, eating the fruit that falls to the ground, weeping and praying. That is Annie's day; day after day. This day, when I met Annie, mango season was all but over, and I asked her what she would eat when the fruit stopped falling. She wept.

I glimpsed something that day that I hope to never forget. At some point I said something I don't recall and, for the briefest moment, a smile swept her face. It was the most beautiful smile I'd ever seen, beautiful for its rarity. And then she smiled again, and again, every one lasting only a second before it was stolen away, as if she was ashamed of it as her face returned again to pain. That day I told Annie that we were going to make a deal. I would promise to pray for her every day, and she had to promise to smile, once at least, every day. I told her that to rob the world of her smile would be a great injustice. I told her that now she had a brother, albeit a white one. She laughed. And I told her that I would see her again.

3 months passed before I returned to Malawi and, as soon as the opportunity arose, made my way to Annie's village. Something was different. The customary attention I received walking amidst a village white feet rarely tread was not the same as usual. I never heard the word 'mzungu'. In fact, people were calling to me by name, children whispering 'Adam' as they peered tentatively at me from their doorways. I exchanged puzzled pleasantries with the market sellers as they greeted me by name, like I was only another villager making the daily hike home. Others repeated some indistinct ChiChewa phrase I didn't recognise. Asking the care workers I walked with what they were saying, they laughed; "Here everyone knows who you are. They are calling you 'the brother of Annie'." With a growing crowd in our wake we arrived at Annie's home, and once again she wasn't there. But this time she appeared instantly, as did her smile. As we spoke she told me through tears that she had since tried to throw herself in the river, but her care worker had rescued her before she had the chance to jump. I asked her what would ever push her to do such a thing. She told me that people had come to her home to encourage her to kill herself, telling her that she had nobody and nobody would miss her, that she was more a burden than a blessing. As we prayed together a grin once again swept her face and she told me through that gorgeous smile, "I have prayed for a brother for so long, and God gave me you." I spent hours at Annie's home that day. I asked her if she had kept her side of the deal, as I had kept mine. She only smiled. We laughed and prayed and blessed one another and then, for the second time, with an aching heart, I left.

The brother of Annie. It dawns on me as I rattle down the dirt track out of Annie's village that this is at once the highest honour, and the greatest responsibility, I have ever received. The highest honour, because beneath Annie's mango tree a crippled and lonely young girl prayed through tears for a family, or a brother at least, and God in his wild and incalculable ways sent her me. A responsibility, because all that is demanded of family, all the love and care and commitment that makes it the most prized and precious gift, God demanded of an ill-tempered and irritated mzungu when walking around a corner he discovered Annie. The most catastrophic story, the bearer of the most beautiful smile, my friend and by God's design, my sister.

You are God's answer to the prayer of a broken world.

Searching for Grace

Grace, in April 2010 and April 2013

April 2010. 5 very white people step off a steamy bus and into the blazing African sun. The place - Mulenga, a brawling slum of tin roofs and taverns housing 30,000 of Zambia's poorest; the people - 5 intrepid travellers, church goers from East England looking to partner with an African charity which they at this point know little about. And amongst them, me. That was the day I first walked in Africa.

Then a 20 year old theology student, I was the youngest of the group. Africa had presented itself as a happy opportunity - two weeks in the sun and an experience to take back to the halls in which I studied and the homeless shelters in which I worked. I had never intended nor imagined, then or after, that I would come to call the place home. And yet, a year later, I would find myself on this red soil again. What happened that first day, and what followed after, is the story of why I came back. Looking over it I can see that it all began in that moment, stepping off a bus for the first time into the African sun, when a small hand wrapped itself in mine and turning around I laid eyes on a beautiful little creature in a blue dress.

Her name was Grace.

She was lost in the crowd, nothing particular to set her apart from the sea of smiling faces. Yet hers was the face that left the deepest imprint upon my heart. It was funny really, I knew nothing about her. Over 3 or 4 days I heard her say little more than her name, yet for the time I spent in Mulenga slum, I spent every moment I could with her. Frantic to know more than only this little creature's name, I asked anyone and everyone I could if they knew anything about her, but none did. It was for her that God had brought me to Africa those 2 weeks, of that I was sure. Or I can say, it was for me to meet her that God had brought me. I didn't ask myself why, I understood well enough. God will not expect you to weep for the world. But he will bring you the world; one story, one face at a time. And I never knew compassion until I met Grace. That was why he brought me to her, and her to me.

So that two weeks passed, and with it, my precious time with Grace. Leaving her behind, in just the same state in which I'd found her, I left for home.

April 2011 and I was absorbed in my studies, my final year of University drawing to a close. The future lay before me; continuing to work with the UK's homeless and dispossessed was all I could think or dream about. And then something began to stir inside me. A restless doubt, was the path set before me the one God would have me walk? I longed that God would have me in London, working with the homeless there as I had done the past couple of years. Yet in my secret and sincerest prayers, I knew that God was bidding me elsewhere. I didn't understand it; after all, I'd never had a heart for Africa. Africa, and all that I had known of it, had faded to me. And yet I was restless, and in the depth of myself I wrestled and fought with the disarming truth of it - that the face of a 7 year old girl in the crowd had never left me. Grace followed me, and with her a call to come back.

'You may not have a heart for Africa, but you do have a heart for Grace. There are many more Graces I want to show you, many more stories and faces; but you will never know or hear, unless you go back.'

And so I lost the fight. In September 2011 I arrived for the second time in Africa, set to discover what God wanted to do in and through me in this wild place, with one great goal in the thread of it all: to find her again. It was her that brought me back, and so her story was every bit entwined in mine. I told many people both in Africa and at home that I'd try to find her. And so, when I was sent to Zambia in late 2011, my first stop was the tin roofs of Mulenga compound. I met many of the people I'd known before, and throughout regular visits built a great relationship with the care workers (local volunteers) that live in Mulenga, providing parental care and support to the slum's most vulnerable children. I walked with them from home to home amidst the vast bustle of 30,000 people, the one photo I had of Grace in hand, searching for her. I never found her.

Months later, a good friend of mine was volunteering in the area with Hands at Work. She knew my deep desire to find Grace, and so took to searching herself, walking around the homes asking after her. She didn't find her either, but she was able to track down her mother's phone number and a family that knew of 'Mwaka' - Grace's Bemba name (the local language of northern Zambia). They had bad news. Grace had moved with her mother to Makululu slum, 160km south of Mulenga and the largest single community in Zambia, boasting a population of over 80,000 people. But there was hope yet. Makululu, whilst enormous, was a community in which Hands at Work operates, supporting local care workers to care for children just like in Mulenga. They are served by one of Hands' local offices, operating out of the nearest town - Kabwe.

I met with the opportunity to spend some time with our team in Kabwe. Jumping on a bus and heading down, I came equipped with a photograph of Grace, asking tentatively, if they had the time or chance, to ask the care workers if they knew the little girl. They did more than I asked. 30 care workers in Zambia's largest slum began to walk from home to home, asking after Grace.

160km north, I had since made my home at Kachele Farm, the base of operations for Hands at Work in the region and happily just down the road from Mulenga itself. Night after night I would call Grace's mother on the number my friend had tracked down for me. No one ever picked up. After a few months, the phone was answered by a seemingly intoxicated man who spoke little English and had no idea who or what I wanted. As it turned out, it was, it had always been, the wrong number. It was shortly after that that I got an update from the head of our work in Kabwe. The care workers had been unable to track down Grace. I don't know if I ever expected they would.

More months passed and while the search seemed futile, my hope didn't fade for an instant. It was 3 years since the day I first met her. I wondered if I'd even recognise her if I saw her. After all, I had only ever possessed one photo of her. I wondered if she'd recognise or remember me too. That didn't worry me too much though. I knew that I wanted to see her not in the vague hope that she would remember me, but because she had changed my life in the most real and resonant way that anyone ever could. And then, this week happened. I'd been hosting a team from my church in the UK, 'coincidentally' the same church that I'd come with in April 2010. It was their 4th visit since that time we first came to Africa, and one of them, Ken, was on the original team itself. He had been there the moment Grace first grabbed my hand and every day following. Few people knew as he did how deeply she had impacted my life, though just about everyone I know has heard her name since. And so this week I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of a 4 x 4, this time one of 6 very white people, inching our way down the ludicrous dirt tracks that map Mulenga community. Stopping to wave at a group of children I looked out my window and saw a familiar face. For an instant, my heart literally stopped. Turning to Ken in the driver's seat I said, "I think that's Grace." I dove out the car so quickly I startled the girl. Looking into her face and exchanging a smile, I brought her by the hand to one of the Zambian women we were working with. I told her the story, 5 words a second tumbling out one over the other, and having taken it all in she bent down and asked the little girl in their local language, translating for me as she did so,

"What is your name?"

"Mwaka," she replied.

"Do you know this man?"

"It's my friend Adam," she said.

"And how long have you been friends?"

"A long time."

I was lost for words, lost for thoughts. I didn't laugh or cry as I would have expected to.  I just hugged her, set her down again, took her hand, and we walked together. That morning I was scheduled to visit some of the homes of the children and patients we care for. But before I did, my first visit was to Grace's house. We met her aunty and her father, who had recently returned to Mulenga with Grace from Makululu. They sat silent and dumbfounded as I told them how and why I had searched for her. I wondered what Grace thought. She didn't respond much, only rested on me as we sat together, listening to the whole story. When we eventually had to leave, I asked Grace if I could come back to visit her again soon. She said she was free Wednesday. Laughing, I told her I'd try, and we left. But a few minutes later we found that she was following us, so putting my arm around her, we walked together. 3 hours we walked in and out of the homes of patients, orphans and grandmothers, listening to their stories. Every time I looked at Grace sitting silently beside me I could think of nothing but how impossible a thing it was that she was there, that we were there, together. She threw me shy smiles across the room whilst we sat in people's homes. Eventually the day drew to a close. We walked back to the car and for the second time I said goodbye to Grace. Her confused face was lost in the crowd of smiles as we drove away. But this time everything is different. This weekend I will go back and see her again. I don't know if there is anything more God would ask of me. I will not take it for granted. I know why Grace was such a gift to me then, and what compelled me to find her now. Because it was through her that I discovered not only the truth that, in His own time and in His own way, God will give you the desires of your heart, but more beautiful still - that God will lead you a long way until the one great desire of your heart becomes to follow the desires of His.

Malawi - Love That Costs A Life

Tam with Hands at Work member, Roy

I had been sitting outside their home, a hut in a rural Malawian community, for a few minutes, distracted by a boy opposite us playing with a toy of his own invention – a block of wood carved into a point at one end and a thin piece of rope tied to a stick, which he used to whip the block of wood and make it spin like a spinning top. That ingenious resourcefulness and creativity instilled in those born into poverty is never more perfectly put to use than by a child designing a toy to pass the hours. The toys these kids make out of milk cartons and maize husks never fail to captivate me.

There were a few of us sitting outside the home, watching the boy play with his spinning block; Hands at Work staff, a couple of international volunteers, some local ladies who care for the orphans and widows in the community, and them. Them: Layla, a 40-something woman sitting on the ground outside her house, and Tam, a silent and unsmiling boy huddled in her lap. Their hut was one amidst a thousand others, each seeming to tell as desperate a story as the next. But their story, and the hope of which it spoke, was not ordinary, and nor were this pair one amidst a thousand. They were extraordinary, uncommon, and precious – as precious as diamonds in the dust. Their story was about to bring me to silence.

I had arrived in Malawi a week before, my first step into the Warm Heart of Africa. It’s a far cry from the Congo, that place I’ve written so much about. There, poverty is born so much of humanity and of human greed. You see it in everything, from the government office to the grocery seller – a culture conceived in violence and corruption, “Africa’s broken heart.” But here, in her Warm Heart, what struck me as soon as I arrived was that the poverty feels of a different kind. A poverty almost born of the earth. The landscape isn’t marked by old and dilapidated buildings, the stripped skeletons of colonialism that overrun Congo’s cities. It is marked by beautiful mountains, by the shimmering great lake that gave Malawi her name, and everywhere by mud huts that seem more to rise out of the dirt than be built on top of it. A warm and a beautiful heart in every way, but so poor. People here have so little. I met children who sleep in the same windowless house as the family’s goats, suffocating in the unvented stench and huddled together by night under a roof with holes. I was brought so many times to silence.

And it was into that silence that Layla spoke her story. Better said – spoke their story, for you could no more tell the story of the boy in her lap without mentioning Layla than you could tell Layla’s without mentioning him. His name was Tam, and he was five years old. He had lost his mother shortly after he was born, and when his father abandoned the family, Tam’s older sisters were taken into the care of their aunt. When Layla met Tam for the first time, he was little more than a baby, stripped of his mother and therefore stripped of his world. Layla was a ‘care worker’ at the time – one of the local people visiting orphans and widows daily in their homes. Care workers are the foundation of all that we do in Hands at Work – serving and supporting them as best we can, creating relationship between them and people all across the world as they live to be mothers and fathers to those who have none, “beautiful feet bringing good news” to the poorest. But to become a mother, to become a father, most especially to children who have lost their own, is not an easy work. And never since being here and having the privilege of walking with such as these have I seen it so purely, so simply and sincerely, as in Layla. When Tam’s mother died and father left, Layla took him in as her own. In an instant, she went back 5, 10, 20 years to the time when she first became a mother. She had to work harder than ever to raise enough money to feed him whilst juggling the weight of caring for her own children, and all the while still continuing to visit other orphans and widows daily in their homes.

It would be so easy to miss the depth of pain and sacrifice it took for Layla to do what she did. Few of us will ever meet with a decision that demands so much of us. Few will ever know what it is to encounter such a crossroad; to see our plans, our aspirations, our dreams leading one way while someone else's desperate call for love lies the other. Layla changed everything in an instant, gave up her entire life, for Tam. I don’t know how that feels, but I imagine it is a crossroad reserved for everyone who truly understands, or is at least willing to discover, the depth of commitment that love demands of you. And that is just what Layla understood, or what she discovered. Call it what you will: the clutch of fate, the hidden hand of Providence, I only know that these things are not an accident. That in one instant the direction of your entire life will change when God invites you to discover the depth of what it truly means to love. As for me, I’m discovering more and more with every person I meet like Layla that love equals commitment, nothing more or less. Love is not charity, or sympathy, it is not pity or well-wishing. It isn’t throwing a coin to the beggar who asks you for one. Love is giving the very last coin you have to live on because you know that it belongs to them just as your entire life belongs to theirs. Love costs your life. Mother Teresa wrote of such a thing when she said “love is proved by deeds, the more they cost us the greater the proof of our love.” At the cost of her own life Layla paid for Tam’s. Her life is not her own. She doesn’t claim it for herself. At some point 5 years ago she gave it up, a gift to the silent and unsmiling boy in her lap who has since become in every way her son, she in every way his mother, the two of them the most extraordinary pair, and theirs a most impossible story of hope amidst a thousand unlike it. A precious and an extraordinary love. I hope I will meet such a crossroads and choose the road less traveled. It costs much, but Layla tells me that you have to walk the way of sacrifice to meet the joy at its end; joy akin to a mother gaining a son, and a son discovering his mother. 

Discovering Home

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.

Something is Rising (Or, a Really Good Party)

It was one of those days that you just know from the very beginning is going to be beautiful. And by the end, that was really the only word to describe it. Everything about it gave me a feeling as if this were a day God had crafted with extra special care and attention in the hopeful chance that someone, somewhere, might be taking notice. As it so happens, it fell not on any old box of the calendar, but on Congo Independence Day. And as it so happens, I was there! For just a week I was back on the red soil of DRC, and we squeezed so much into that short spell that it’s not worth me trying to recount the whole thing. But the highlight is easy to spot. It was leaving the house just as the sun rose over Congo Independence, it was getting back exhausted but exhilarated after the sun had set, and it was everything that happened in between. That day, deep in the bush, a party was coming together, a party in and for the most enchanting community I know.

Kisunka is a community comprised of five different villages built around a huge lake called Changalele (don’t worry about the pronunciation, I don’t). The few thousand people who have for centuries lived in this lost and untouched world are some of the poorest we support. They have so little. Many starve the whole year round, holding on only for the couple of months that mangoes grow on the otherwise fruitless trees rising up between their mud huts. The lake provides all their water with which they drink, wash, cook, clean, the lot. So you can imagine, sickness is rife. The nearest clinic (in the nearest town) is so far away that pregnant women end up giving birth by the roadside. Many more sick and weary people simply never finish the journey at all. I have stayed in the villages of Kisunka community a number of times and met some of the most beautiful, genuine, compassionate and caring people I’m ever likely to know. I’ve also met there in the shadows of those fruitless trees some of the most hopeless and helpless situations to which I’ve been exposed. I’ve found miracles there too, miracles born of broken and burnt out hearts infused with a most relentless and stubborn faith. An old man within an inch of death one day striding toward us the next pointing his finger to the sky and wearing a smile as if he’s about to burst into tears of laughter any moment. Babies whose lives were almost stolen before they had a chance to realise it had been given, growing happy, healthy and whole. Hearts healed, souls restored, and all that jazz! It was to celebrate the miracles happening in that lost and lonely place that we gathered on Congo Independence Day, 200 of us from across the communities; young, old, village chiefs and village prostitutes, the highest and the lowest and the most forgotten, all of us together to celebrate in the loud and proud way that the Congo do best what God is doing here. And not only what God is doing but what he is doing through these people. Because it is here in Kisunka that, with nothing more than a vision to make a difference, people arose and established the first schools the community has ever known. They’d never had a school before, now there’s one within a couple of kilometres of every orphan and vulnerable child supported by the care workers. It is here that out of the little they have the community started providing food, daily food, for the children that needed it the most. It was for such miracles as these that a party was coming together in the Congo bush, on the shores of that long lost lake. There I listened as the head of all the chiefs, the most respected and wealthy and important person within a 20 kilometre radius, looked at the leaders gathered and with pointed finger told them, “We think that we are at the top and the children are at the bottom. But they are the important ones, and we are their servants.” You hope that in your lifetime you’ll see one or two such miracles. If you don’t, you’ve probably been walking around with your eyes closed.

You see this place shows no memory of a more glorious, fruitful, prosperous, healthy time. Perhaps the village was born in ashes. But on that God-crafted, hot and humid Congo Independence Day we came together to sing and dance and speak and shout about one truth, with one voice: that it will not end in ashes. These children’s lives will not go up in flame. Something is rising. It’s really hard to put your finger on it. It’s hard to sum it up in nice words, as it always is when you’re talking about what God is doing, because he tends to do things that are so unexpected and impossible that the only reaction left for the world that watches is the one I had sitting in that chair watching that celebration take place; the unexpected tear in your eye, the commotion of nerves in your heart that tell you you’re seeing something breathtaking, unimaginable, indescribable and good. 

Loveness, The Story of a Friend

Three days staying in the home of a family deep in the Zambian bush; three days eating what they eat, sleeping where they sleep, doing whatever they do wherever they go to do it. I have stayed in communities just like this before, but this time was different. And it wasn’t because of the unusual size of the rats scuttling along the beams of the thatched roof above my head. It wasn’t that beautiful early morning frost or the unbearably hot sun that soon melted it. It wasn’t trying to squeeze down ground nut porridge and a guava after the ten lumps of nshema and cabbage they tried to feed me every meal. It was a ten year old girl named Loveness; and it was all of it the fruit of a moment two weeks before.

I’d been walking with some of our care workers in the community, a village marked by a single dirt track cutting its way 40 kilometres through the grass with everything else built around it. We saw her in the distance long before we came close enough to greet, strolling toward us in her tattered school uniform. She was with an older woman and the pair of them walked with the archetypal African pace, slow and without purpose. I’ve never liked walking slowly. I figure if you want to get somewhere might as well get there as quickly as you can. But I’ve long since learnt that here you’ll dehydrate quicker rushing to find shade than you will walking slowly, even in the blazing sun. Here people move so slowly you might have cause to think they’re not walking to any place in particular, as if they’re saying, “Why rush? It doesn’t matter what time we arrive.” What matters is the way you spend the time getting there. Because in Africa life isn’t the sum of its events but the space in between them. So a journey is not an arbitrary link between A and B, it’s an occasion for life to happen. Conversation, silence, sharing, laughing, talking; it’s not about “passing the time”, it’s about making of even the most insignificant time something sacred, because relationship is formed as much in the space between significant moments as in the moments themselves. So it was after walking toward each other for 10 minutes on that long dirt track that we finally met. Her name was Loveness. She was 10 years old. That’s as much as I’d been told when I walked over to her to say hello. She smiled at me shyly and took my hand and right then, in that passing moment, something strange happened. I was caught off guard; something from somewhere in my head or my heart telling me that I was going to have a real, deep connection with this girl. I didn’t know what to make of it, but it was so clear. It turned out the lady she was walking with was her grandmother and also a care worker in the community. The two of them turned around and walked with us the other way, back the few kilometres they had just crossed (which really made me wonder whether they had ever been going anywhere in the first place). Some of the team walked ahead of us, some behind, but Loveness and I walked together, hand in hand. Every now and then she’d let go, look at the glisten of sweat that has appeared on her palm, then show it to me with a disapproving expression before wiping it on her skirt, which embarrassed me every time. But then she would take my hand all over again anyway, until the next break. Every now and then as we walked she’d squeeze my hand more tightly for just a moment. Sometimes she would look up at me and say my name, to which I’d ask, ‘yes?’, before she would just turn back. All I could make of it was that she was checking, as often as she needed to, that I was still there. Perhaps checking that I wasn’t about to leave. I can’t read a lot from people’s behaviour, from first introductions, but I could have guessed at least a shadow of the story that her grandmother told me when I asked. I’ve heard stories just like it so many times now. Her father had died four or five years earlier after being bitten by a snake. Loveness and her sisters had been kept in her mother’s care, until she lost her mind and was unfit to keep them. Now, her sisters are scattered across the homes of various aunties and uncles, and Loveness is left with her grandmother. Despite that, the family remains closer than any I have ever met. Every one of them is the responsibility of them all. None of them claims anything for themselves. Perhaps that is why when, two weeks after meeting this mismatched pair, I turned up to invade their home for 3 days with nothing more than a bag of groceries and a backpack, I wasn’t a stranger but a son, a big brother, a friend of the kind that can leave for years and return as if only a day had passed since parting. As for Loveness and me, the language barrier was really no barrier at all. It turned out that she was, even without speaking English, one of the funniest girls of her age I’ve ever met. She took care of her younger and older sister beautifully. She took care of me too, making sure I was safe and well fed, taking my hand when we walked past groups of drunk teens. It all seemed pretty backwards. But then, in a village I don’t know amongst I people I don’t understand with a language I don’t speak, Loveness figured that of the two of us I was the more vulnerable.

Whatever measure you use to define genuine relationship, whatever it is that makes friends of people with nothing else in common but the tie that binds them, I made a friend in Loveness. As unlikely and unfounded a friendship as any I’m likely to have the privilege of knowing! And it was of such a friendship that the voice in my head and my heart spoke two weeks before. God brought us together, whether for her or for me I’m still not sure. But then that’s what makes friendship beautiful, it's the kind of relationship that has no more purpose than the relationship itself. God’s desire was that we meet, and no doubt that we keep meeting. That tells me nothing more than that God laughs when two strangers, across all the spatial and cultural distance that lies between them, become the most improbable of friends.

Building Upon Foundations

April 2012

Today I met Chatty for the very first time, and Godfrey for the second. Both of them four years old, both of them stripped too soon of the love and care and security of their parents, and both of them possessors of arrestingly disarming smiles, if not only because they are so rare a thing. It struck me as surreal to see these children face to face, to hold them as closely as I did, after knowing their stories so intimately and for so long. Since April of last year, when a team from our church in the UK returned from a short trip to Zambia having spent time in this community we support, Chatty and Godfrey have been spoken of much. The impact they made upon our team, Chatty upon my own Dad in particular, reached beyond the hearts of only those who met them in the flesh; upon the heart of a church and a family that miles and culture keep far distant from this place. Back then these two young men, both of them wounded in heart and memory, allowed not a corner of their lips the faintest flicker of a smile. But today I saw different children than those of whom I’d heard so much. Welcoming. Loving. Even happy. How fairer the countenance swept with a smile. I started thinking about the way we lay foundations in the lives of others. We first entered this little rural community, obscured deep in the Zambian bush, in 2010 to meet a crowd of children too afraid to approach us except to see the magic of bubbles blown from a little tub of soapy water. Now it’s difficult to walk for fear of trampling on children so happy and so proud to hold us as friends. And this time, Godfrey can be loved in his joy and in his healing, because once upon a time someone else loved him in his pain and poverty. Chatty, this misnamed child as my Dad called him a year before, can know something of safety and security in the presence of strangers such as us because he remembers a stranger who once upon a time walked into his home, and exited it all the same, only leaving behind him the faint aroma of deep and lasting love that can pierce the stench of loneliness, despair and death. We like to think of ourselves as independent and autonomous creatures, only affected by others in as much as we allow ourselves the vulnerability to be affected. I remember sitting in a pub in England listening to the fiery exchange between one woman and a much younger girl, apparently her granddaughter, who was bombarding the older lady with verbal and emotional abuse. Her reply to all of this was something about having very thick skin and not letting insults affect her, particularly from a snotty little brat who should know better. But I thought: what must have affected her in the past, and to what extent, that she would now not allow herself to be hurt by the sting of a well aimed insult, even from a voice as precious as that of her own granddaughter? And I realised, no matter how independent we like to think ourselves, no matter how we may like to believe that we live in a vacuum, only being affected by that which we allow close enough to affect us, the truth of the matter is: we are all of us architects of one another.

One lays the foundation, and another builds upon it. A mother speaks a cruel word to her little girl and the foundation is laid for a lifetime of cynicism and mistrust. Another child loses a father to alcohol and a chasm is ripped in that boy’s heart that no closeness or intimacy will ever be permitted to bridge. They stay with us like a foul taste stuck in the mouth, these bitter memories. But another child, with every reason to give up on life and the world and whichever god had the insanity to make that world and then the audacity to call it ‘good’, against all odds grows up into a happy and healthy child. Why? Because where once he knew only hurt and pain someone loved him into healing, and upon a broken and bent foundation something beautiful was raised. We have the choice, all of us, as to whether we let our past determine our future or allow our future to redeem the past. No pain is beyond redemption. Someone once said that every child comes with the message that God has not yet given up on the world. That must be followed shortly by the message that no child is born to be given up on. If only we could see how much of the healing power of God himself was embedded in our DNA when he gave us the capacity to love one another. Then the quiet word, the passing smile, the tear lent to someone who has used up all their own would never be underestimated in its might to heal. All of us are in either the business of construction or demolition, building trust, hope and love into the lives of those around us or tearing it down. In Godfrey, in that misnamed child Chatty too, people are continuing to build from a broken and a bent foundation something truly beautiful. And few things are as beautiful, few things at once so simple and yet so profound, as a face once etched with pain now swept with a smile.

Goma, How Deserted Lies the City

Three days ago, sometime on the 30 April, rebel troops under the command of former Congolese army general Bosco “Terminator” Ntaganda, marched upon the villages surrounding Goma, a large city in north-eastern Congo. The Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which Goma is the largest city, has played host to a dozen or more wars in only the last couple of decades and boasts history’s largest refugee camps, some numbering more than 1.5 million people. At the hands of warlords and forces descending upon Congo’s communities like starved locusts, the people of Kivu and its surrounding villages have become some of the poorest in the world. A billion people worldwide live on less than $1 a day; in Goma countless families live on less than $1 a week. In such an environment in which healthcare is so essential, it is missing; sanitation is simply not a facet of life. Every man, woman and child in Goma knows too familiarly the sound that heralds their exodus: marching on the mountains, gunfire in the hills, screaming in the homes. They know what it means to decide between fleeing into the bush with children slung over their back, where they will have no food, water, shelter or security, or staying where they are and waiting for the soldiers to arrive, young men with Kalashnikovs in hand, whose only wage is as much food as they can pillage, as many women as they can get their hands on. The troops always invade the villages first. This is life in Goma.

And so, when we hear that the soldiers are marching again, again, what are we to do? From the beautiful farmhouse in which I find myself in Zambia, gathered together with all my Hands at Work family for a time of celebration and thanking God and discovering His vision for what is next, what am I to do? It is difficult even to pray. But then, such are the occasions when prayer is most important. When it seems so trite as to be even a joke. This thing we do before we throw the first forkful of dinner into our mouths, and do more earnestly with clenched fists before an exam or interview, this thing we fall asleep doing as we lay our heads down at night, are we really to do that now? 1,000 kilometres away in Zambia, or 3,000 kilometres away in Europe, or 6,000 kilometres away in North America, what more can we do?

How deserted lies the city, once so full of people. Her children have gone into exile, captive before the foe. Our pursuers were swifter than eagles in the sky; they chased us over the mountains and lay in wait for us in the desert. Those who pursue us are at our heels; we are weary and find no rest.

- Lamentations -

Sometimes a broken heart isn’t enough. Walking amidst the smouldering ruins of the once great city he called home, the poet of Lamentations “pours out” his heart upon the ground. Broken, beat, smashed into little more than a puddle on the floor. A prayer like the one above rises from the devastation of a heart as spent as his. He can do no other. My heart is utterly sold out for the Congo. That’s no secret. When I heard about Goma, standing in our Zambian farmhouse as my friend recounts the news he has just received from one of our guys in Congo, I can only describe what I felt as something akin to getting a phone call telling you that your home has been hit by a bomb. And what could I do? Only pray, and pray more. I slept outside that night, because sometimes words aren’t as articulate a prayer as the actions that follow them, and it seemed wrong to crawl under my mosquito net into bed as I finish praying for the safety of thousands sleeping in the bush. I even had the audacity to be a little frightened of some of the sounds filling the night, birds and other unrecognisable animal calls. I was scared because I didn’t know which animals were making the noise. Gunfire is much more distinguishable a sound. And so this is me doing the little more that I can do: asking you to pray also. Even if you're not the kind of person to pray much or at all. Some things are more important than the theological standpoint in which you find yourself in this very moment. Please pray. We can do little more. And as you pray know that God has designs and dreams and visions and promises for Goma, that long forgotten city in some abstract corner of the African jungle. If you don’t know that, then your prayers will go little further than asking God how in His name or in the name of fate or destiny or bad luck or anything else something like this could happen in a world that for all intents and purposes would actually be pretty much perfect were it not for that great slip-up of His in making a creature with the capacity to ruin the place in ways so horrifying as to be unimaginable. Praying like that won’t get you or the children lost in the hills of Goma anywhere. That’s how my prayers seem to always start these days. But that mustn’t be where they end. Wading in an ocean of hearts unreservedly poured out for these children, these women, many of them pregnant, these grandfathers and grandmothers too tired to run again, let us take our lead from the poet, his heart wasted before him on the ground:

I remember my affliction and my wandering

the bitterness and the fall,

I well remember them,

and my soul is downcast within me.

Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed

for his compassions never fail.

- Lamentations -

Hard to look and listen, hard to turn away

Someone once wrote upon leaving the Congo, “Oh Congo, what a wreck. It’s hard to look and listen. It’s hard to turn away.” I can’t tell you how truly that resonates.

These last two months I have spent being touched by the lives and stories of children living in a nation the UN recognises as the least developing in all the world. The statistics are bleak; home to 4 and a half million orphans, host to a dozen international wars in only the last two decades, consequentially making it the world capital of rape, torture and war crimes. But statistics offer a distant and disaffected view of a situation that can only hope to be understood at a closer look; like standing back to view a whole work of art while missing the brushstrokes that make up its beauty. No matter how long I’ve been in Africa now, seeking His heart with everything I have and am, I never cease to be reminded that His heart is only found when you stand close enough to be caught by the story, and the face, of just one child.

Statistics will never show you what is going on beneath the surface. You have to come and see for yourself. You have to allow yourself the courage to see with the eyes of Jesus. He sees the depths of poverty and pain, as no one has ever seen or felt them before. But he sees, more deeply written into the lives of “the least of these” even than their pain and poverty, a true and a lasting hope. The Scriptures say, “Hope that is seen is no hope at all.” If that’s true, then God’s eyes are most attentively fixed upon the places in which nothing will change unless He is the One to change it. Sometimes it’s a whole region, like Goma in the eastern Congo; sometimes it’s just one person, like my friend Dancel dying alone, leprous and arthritic, in his sweltering and smelly mud hut. Encountering such people and places, it would be easy to give up hope, as do so many. It is their greatest loss, this dying hope. The human heart seems able to endure just about anything but that. Because the strength to endure is in knowing that there is yet a more beautiful future, so it is when that future is crushed beneath a numbed heart and a beat spirit that a life born of hope is lost. But we stand on a promise, written upon the heart of the nation and all the hearts of all God’s children in it;

...hope that is seen is no hope at all...

And there is hope. Of that I’m convinced.

As for me, I think I’ve been caught in the spell that the Congo casts over most people who visit it. It caught me before I ever stepped foot here, and has only gotten stronger the longer I’ve stayed. Only now it has a face. Actually lots of faces; kids who it’ll be tough to leave behind, some just because they’re great kids, others because I’ll leave them in just the same state in which I first met them. It’s hard to look and listen; it’s hard to turn away. Hard to turn away from people in whose stories I have had the honour of sharing; people with whom I’ve discovered a relationship strong enough to penetrate language, culture and background. It feels like I’m standing on an axis moment upon which my life is going to turn, one of those “there’s no going back after this” moments. I’ve seen and heard things that God won’t soon allow me to forget. Because Dancel is still laid up on the floor of his mud hut, dying and alone, and the thousand other faces burnt onto my heart are still bearing the same broken expressions, betraying the deep and lasting wounds they hold. It’s hard to turn away, even impossible, because to do that would be to miss not only the honour of sharing in the life of such as these, but the inexpressible privilege of playing a part in changing it.

...to make the hope that is unseen visible

...to afford freedom to those from whom it has been taken

...to reawaken life where it has been lost, more and better life than we ever dreamed of.

To let that pass me by would be to miss the gift for which God put me here. But I won’t let it pass. No way.

Answering the Cry of a Broken Heart

I made a thousand excuses. I was tired. I needed a break, some alone time, after one of those mornings where the simplest work feels like trudging through syrup. I’d just spent a weekend in the community – early mornings and late nights and everything in between physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting. My arsenal was loaded – “Here you are God, here’s a bunch of excuses, all of them as good as the next, pick one!” But it didn’t matter; the boy I walked past with nothing but a smiling glance was going to follow me whether I liked it or not. When I noticed he was tracking my steps I cast him the vague, polite pleasantries in the hope that it would be all he wanted from the token white man. But he kept following. Soon he was shoulder to shoulder with me, a cheeky but strikingly childlike smile stretching across his adolescent face. He started rambling to me in French, but the only thing I could translate was that whatever it was he was asking, he was genuinely interested in getting to know me. But I was tired, so I walked past and walked on. But he followed. When we came to some crossroads I asked him in slow, slightly elevated English which way he was going. He just smiled, and said he didn’t understand. So I carried on walking, as did he. Eventually, having trawled about town lying every time he asked if I spoke any French at all, we got to the bakery I was going to for lunch. Though he was clearly hungry, he didn’t ask for any food. It wasn’t what he wanted. Nevertheless I bought him a nice bit of bread and a bit for the boy begging on the street outside, to massage that pesky ache in my conscience. I continued to walk and he continued to talk. Approaching the little shop I was going into to buy a Coke I prepared to say a not-so-fond farewell to the young man, when I picked out a single word in his hurried French. Orphan. I felt like I’d been hit by a freight train. Not knowing what to do with myself, I invited him into the shop, sat him on a chair and bought him some proper lunch. We sat there in silence, him smiling that broad and beautiful grin, me feeling like Dr. Jekyll looking in the mirror and discovering that he’s Mr. Hyde. I asked him to pray for the food, but he was too shy and instead the lady who owned the shop came over and, placing her hands on our Cokes, thanked God. He was excited to discover that I was a Christian. What a tragedy that sometimes it is not our character that distinguishes us as Christians, but our little religiosities. He pulled out of his pocket a tattered little French Bible. It was the only thing he carried.  Throwing it open he clumsily thumbed through the pages then stopped and pushed it across the table to me. Pointing at a verse on the page he kept repeating: “my favourite”, and though I didn’t understand the language, I recognised the verse.

– Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you –

The train hit me for the second time. I thought, what if this morning when he got out of bed, this young boy asked of his Father in heaven that today, somehow, he would meet someone who cared? What if this morning he simply asked for his daily bread and as he did so, opened up that tattered little Bible and read the promise of Jesus: Ask and it will be given to you? What if today I was God’s messy, flesh-and-blood answer to the cry of a boy’s heart, longing for love? And I almost missed it. I almost missed Him – Jesus disguised in the face of an orphaned boy named Francois, walking the streets of Likasi in search of a smile. I thought: how often we walk past? How often in the noise of the madding crowd do we miss the Father’s voice, calling us to stop and look around? How often do we miss that little gift of God – that invitation to the inexplicable privilege of being the answer to someone’s prayer? Even today someone cries out to a God they aren’t sure they believe in and he says: I am coming; I am sending my son, my daughter, to be the light of life to you who are lost in darkness. And what shall we do? Walk on? Or stop and say ‘Yes’ to the invitation of Jesus, compelling us to give of ourselves. Such is the mystery of his presence in us, letters from Christ to a broken world, signed and sealed in love, not written on paper and with ink but on human hearts and with the blood of Jesus. Today God invites me to answer the cry of just one heart. And what does he ask of me? Only that I act justly, that I love mercy, and that I walk humbly with my God. Or perhaps you could say – only that I never carry on walking when God stoops down to touch a heart in love.