My heart went ahead of me.
There is no substitute for a home. There is a substitute for a house and a car and all the other wonderful and stupid things money can buy, but there is no substitute for a home and no substitute for the friends and family that truly know who you are. When I arrived in Durban airport I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw the two casual looking cops sitting in the entrance with their hats propped up above their heads, neither of them in great shape [the cops I mean, not their hats]. I wondered if they had worked out that it is possible to adjust caps so that they fit properly on your head instead of resting on top of your head. I put it down to local fashion, perhaps I was the unenlightened one. My mind flashed back to a time a couple weeks prior where someone asked me if I wanted to be a cop in South Africa. A cop? I almost asked them if they wanted to be a banana. I figured they also needed to be asked a dum question. But, the truth is I am probably more naive about their country and culture than they are about mine, so I held my tongue and simple said, ‘no’. I grabbed my luggage from the conveyer belt and waited for the sniffer dogs to check that I had left all my drugs behind in France. My parents took a while to arrive, but when they did they arrived with two of my best mates, Chloe and Luke. It is strange how familiar you become with some people. When I saw them it felt as if I hadn’t left at all. It was nice to not have to ask their names or where they came from. It was nice to already know these things. It was nice to not need to ask how they were doing because I could see it in their faces and I hoped they could see it in mine. It was even nicer to have the opportunity to ask how they were anyway.
My friend Dani gave me a card before I left. It has a picture of myself, her and our friend Tam on it and has these colourful buttons stuck around the picture. On the back it says that I must remember that I have friends at home that will miss me and are praying for me. I carried that card for three months in my flipfile as a reminder that I had friends at home that cared about my life. I carried it around until the buttons started falling off it because it reminded me of home. It’s amazing. We are SO civilised. SO progressive. We have honours, masters and doctorate degrees. We have philosophy and Psychology and we have it all figured out, right? And yet when you strip away the intellect we all just long for the same thing – community. I have some friends that are introverts, but even introverts need friends and family. We join country clubs and become locals at bars, we join internet chat forums and spend hours on facebook but we have the universe ‘figured out’, right? …Right? Then, when all the travelling and fussing is done, we spend two minutes in the presence of the ones we truly love and the ones that truly love us and the entire universe dissolves into the background, our entire lives seem to make perfect sense and the questions of our futures seem immediately resolved even though they are not. Meaning. Purpose. Clarity. Direction.
I am so incredibly blessed to have the family and friends that I do. I often wondered why Christianity is so set on the church. Why God chooses the church to fulfill his purposes, why his entire design is the church. Why he calls the church his ‘bride’, the bride of Christ. God is committed and sold out to perfecting us in the context of local community and chooses it as the place where our love is perfected. C.S. Lewis in his book The Scew Tape Letters speaks about our preoccupation with asking the wrong sorts of questions. Our preoccupations with fashions and trends in writing and history and all these things that direct our attention away from the real questions that we should be asking. Questions like ‘Is it Rightious?’ Like I said, we have it all figured out – We have ALL the answers. All the answers to the wrong questions. I have many complex questions, but for the first time in a while I paused to ask a simple one, perhaps a better, more real one. I asked myself where I belong and the answer at that moment was as clear as day: ‘right here’. Because ‘right here’ is where I learn to ask the right questions about life and rightiousness. ‘Right here’ is where I see things clearly, right here in community. My travelling is not over and things didn’t work out this time, but I learned that my relationships are one of the greatest gifts that I have been given and I learned that I have far too much material ‘stuff’ tying me down. I learned these things when I picked up my luggage from that conveyor belt, and found that one parcel was not there. One parcel went ahead of me.
A journey of a thousand miles... 