These few weeks have been a plunge pool. 2013 looked set to end in the thicket of the wild, gloomy and restless, and desperately dry. Then there was Kunming.
In many ways it was an awakening, a celebration, a revival. Returning after 7 years, I had no idea what to expect: of a team that was foreign to me and unusually diverse, of a land I remembered to be backward and rural, with faces in my memory that had faded into a type of fossil. Fossils are a sign of life that once was, encapsulated in a singular distant object - its solidity in the centre of your palm is a cold, hard thing. Rather like distance solidified. My old kunming adventures were retold over and over again, until the details rolled off my tongue like oiled marbles. With each recount the stories drifted further, a bright spot in my life that became more exotic, more implausible.
A friend I had not met in 1 year asked me to join her on a journey to 'find God', and I agreed. Perhaps what she sought to do intentionally caught me along unawares, but some time in the middle of that journey I discovered that was what I had to do, too. Find God. I had lost him without realizing it - the way one has no idea which direction one is going because auto-pilot is on, cruising along so faultlessly. I had mistakenly believed myself into complacency - that the growth of the former times was growth enough. That I was 'just fine'.
The diverse foreigns became, in 9 days, family to me. I had new brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers. As we did the common everyday things together, they became fuel for the supernatural, divine things. We sang, we prayed, we ate & travelled. We sought God in the dim hotel rooms, and in the chilly air of the church courtyard. We bounced along mountainous dirt roads en route to villages, singing the silliest songs in rhythm to the tires. And now & then, there would be a flash of something brilliant - that stirred our hearts up for more. A deaf woman would hear. A villager's story would reduce us to tears. A sick elderly man would smile as we put the leather jacket and some hope into his hands. A wheelchair bound man would get up and walk. A lady who suffered a stroke and couldn't open her right hand would see her fingers spreading out. A woman with cataracts could read the fine print in a songbook. The truth just leapt, and leapt, like a flame coming alive.
Places have a kind of magic. It is that feeling that rushes over you when your senses quicken to something familiar. "I've been here before!", you exclaim. "That was the lane we turned into, where there was a coffee house with a long wooden table, where everyone sat together to eat." In that moment when the old catches up with the new, or rather, the new catches up with the old, there is an inkling that anything can happen. There is a sense of divine fitness & purpose. Your heart says, "I'm in the right place. I'm meant to be here."
That is why people travel, perhaps. As we keep our eyes and ears, hearts and noses peeled for adventure, for newness, we find something within us as well. We discover anew what it feels like to be curious, to have questions. To respond to the stimulus of the unfamiliar, and turn our minds around fresh challenges. We question our limits, and dismiss our comforts. In all the denying of our selves we unearth fresh soil for our dreams. We let strange family into our selves - and the empty rooms of our hearts are occupied with newfound hope.
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What is God saying, now? Could it be that the word he last spoke has expired, and he calls us into something new? A new facet of his being, a new clue to solving an old puzzle? (It's been 6 months, he said. Really? I flip to this blog and discovered, indeed. 6 months since July.) It's cloudy with a chance of fresh manna fall.
