This is such a simple principle, and those are always the ones which captivate me.
I am listening to wind howl around the trees outside my window, and watching the lights of the town flicker as the branches move in and out of their light. It takes me back to a time when I was miles about the ground, dumbstruck flying over Africa. We'd been passing over the desert for hours. Yes, as when you fly over the ocean to get from the United States to Europe, except that vast expanse that stretched below me was brown and tan and formless, rather than blue and sparkly.
I was spellbound because for all of that time, all of those many miles, I had seen barely any civilization. One might expect even a military base or some type of shelter, maybe the proverbial and then literal oasis; but there was just nothing out there.
It grew dark, and then it was easier to distinguish life on this foreign tundra... you could see the lights. Granted, they were sparse and very few collectively, but at least there was something down there, right? I'd never been afraid of crashing in a plane over water, mainly because everyone knows you get in your life boats and land is never too far off. This was totally different. I was quite sure if we went down anywhere around here, there wasn't much to hope for.
Anyway, we began to approach our stop, Addis Ababa, the capitol city of Ethiopia. Now, as an American, I'm conditioned to think "big," "busy," and so on when I see a capitol of a country. I think that is generally standard for the Western European nations as well. This was completely different. The amount of total lights twinkling in the dark was much like the little window I have here in Virginia. Not a ton. Not even a lot. It was like Nowheresville in Ohio.
I was so baffled, and to be honest, I was thinking something like, "what have I gotten myself into?" If that was all the electricity they had to work with, how were they going to feed us for a month?!
Well, fortunately my time spent there did not result in anyone starving, but it was absolutely a cut back from my lifestyle here in the States. I leaned things from those people that have been with me for the past four years and I'm sure will never leave. They had nothing. I've been to Jamaica and I've seen poor places on this earth, but these people had nothing. Nothing! The Missionaries of Charity seemed the most well-off, and they own two tunics. They wash one every other day, alternating. Their food is provided by God, through donation. They care for all their sick, all those dying from malaria at their gate, they educate all those orphaned children and give them food each day through donation. So what does that say about everyone else?
I have never seen so many sick people in my life. I did not speak with one native Ethiopian that I can recall who had not lost at least one family member to disease in their lifetime. Not one. I thought it was horrifying when I discovered one of our guides had lost one or both parents and at least one sibling to malaria, and he himself had nearly died of it as a child. I came to discover nearly everyone else had the same story. If it wasn't malaria it was the common cold. You wanted to say their immune systems couldn't be so poor, most weren't HIV positive. Yet, undernourishment goes a long way, or rather, proper nourishment makes all the difference. Every day that we left the Missionaries compound to go to the village or to buy food, we'd be guaranteed to return to another person lying outside their gate, nearly dead or already dead, and just hoping the sisters would pick him up and ease him out of this world.
I did not have the stomach for it at first. I couldn't conceive of these people surviving. How, with so much sorrow and pain, were they able to function. I've seen a bit of loss myself, and by God's grace I endured, but if the coals kept on being heaped upon my head I just don't know if I would have kept fighting. Yet, so many were! Not only fighting, they were grateful.
This came as a cultural surprise to many of us on our first days there, but in their culture men will hold hands. Now, what does that instantly cause us to assume? Of course. Not for these people, however. In their culture, men who are friends hold hands walking through the streets just like eight year old girls here would. It means nothing more than, 'You are my friend and brother.' But it does mean more than that, at least I believed it did. It meant, 'We have only today to show that we love and are thankful. Tomorrow you or I might be gone. So let us be thankful.' It was highly entertaining to watch the men who came with me on mission initially recoil from the Ethiopian hands thrown over their shoulders as if they were a tired bird finally reaching its nest. It did not take them too long, however, to adapt. Even through their initial discomfort they made the effort, and by the time we left it was hugs and hand holding and arm tossing left and right. It was actually beautiful. To me, that was the most obvious sign of our inner transformation from these people. We came, Americans on a mission to serve and love. We left, Americans on a mission to serve and love. We thought we meant to help the Ethiopians, but they informed us we needed to go back and help our own culture! How little we understand the shortness of life, the nearness of death, the possibility of taking such joy from every moment of every day!
I recently watched Avatar, and I am not going into how I felt because that's a can of worms for another day, but I will say this - when they refer to how soft muscles become in space, I thought of how we, the Western culture with all of our conveniences and pleasures, are the epitome of that experience. Most often, I think we get soft. Things become routine, we rarely have to fight too hard for anything, and we can deal with it when things don't go our way so we never bother to make changes. I sat in class today drawing pictures, mentally traveling to who knows where, plotting out the rest of my afternoon, writing notes to my classmate, and occasionally writing something down from the class. I was dying to get out, itching to move. I like that class and it's content (it's Christology), but I was just not ready to sit still.
Seriously? I couldn't pause to rejoice that while I met so many people in one country who had not the luxury of education to the extent that they did not even know the national language because they'd never gone to school, there I was partaking in a Masters course? I can afford to expand my mind because I'm not just trying to survive. That is a gift! I'm certainly not always fond of our laziness here, but I'm also not trying to detract from our great nation either! We have so much potential - potential to make the world better for the millions who do not have the opportunities that we do. Yet, we cannot for a moment think that because we have clothes and they do not, because we can read and write and they can't, that we do not have anything to learn from them. That would be our great mistake. They understand life and death. They see a big picture we have a hard time finding. They understand how to make every moment and every person count.
I pray that we can all find quiet places to hear the wind whistle and watch the world outside and consider just how small we are. That wind may have blown over my family just hours before. It may travel across the ocean. And here I am, staring out the window. I pray we can be thankful, no matter where we are or what our circumstances. Gratitude was the lifestyle of Christ. In Scriptures Jesus is always "giving thanks" to our Father in Heaven. This is how we find life, true alive-ness in our daily activities. When we're bored and sitting in an hour of traffic, we rejoice. We delight because this life has one goal, and that is to come to know and love the Father, and He has given us the gift of living.
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