Welcome candlesSeptember 6, 2015

Last night we lit candles. The sky flashed as the rain disturbed the hot dust and thunder rolled from somewhere unseen. The flickering lights would protect us from electricity outages that the storms so often bring. By the time my boys had fallen to sleep one lone flicker remained, a refuge in a dark house. Across Europe thousands of candles flickered in windows, candles of hope and refuge, candles of warmth and welcome to the thousands more who would spend their nights without homes. It was a protest of welcome.

We welcome you, weary soul, frightened heart and fragile footed. We open our doors and invite you in. Your presence scares us, stretches our hospitality, disturbs our feeling of security and forces us to adapt. We welcome you when it’s easy and when it’s not. The ramparts of our home are secure, let us offer you their protection even if it’s only for a moment. Let our kitchen sustain you, our warmth dry out your damp clothes, come wash your dusty bones in our stream and have the freedom to rebuild yourselves a home.

We invite you to stand in our crowds not of desperation but celebration. Come and sit upon our sofas and talk of need and plenty, watch your children run for toys and giggle with friends. Let us shed tears with you for your loss and delight in your achievements. We welcome you from homelessness into community, this is our home, become part of the ‘our’, take ownership of it, for we offer it to you as a gift.

Hidden from the sunSeptember 1, 2015

Call me a wimp but some days are just too hot. August loved hitting the top thirties, topping over the brink of 40 occasionally and can still be pretty unbearable once the sun has departed. Nights are a gaggle of sweaty bodies and kicked off covers. Opening the door to a live oven is quite simply horrible. On days like today, of which we get a good handful every year, thee are only 3 options – boil, sweat or hide. Those brave enough to boil try to head for the beach or gather by shaded fans and sip ice drinks, those who need to sweat usually do so in work clothes, but mostly we hide.

These are the days we worship the white boxes on our walls. If your location sports an air conditioning unit you’ve hit jackpot, and they are everywhere, even in tiny kiosks. You see people linger and debate how low you can set them, others beg you to put them off as their body is shocked from going in and out of temperature fluctuations. These white boxes provide room to breathe, space to work, a cocoon from the reality of reddened faces and sticky skin. They are our shelter, allowing us to pretend.

And we like to pretend, to hide from that which scorches us, to travel away and dream that the world is pastel and pretty, not marred in mud and grime, darkened by death and broken by lack of simple kindness. We shut out the knowledge that less than 2 hours south families take what shelter they can in city parks before continuing their long pilgrimage from terror to safety. We rephrase the exodus and call it a migration rather than civilian forced retreat, a cacophony of war battered souls looking for refuge. We forget our refuge centres still have people living in their rooms from the last conflict, more than a decade of displacement under their belts. We pretend because we want to believe in better, we want to feel safe and secure, we want to feel a little less helpless.

So the white box beeps and I stand under it’s cool breeze. I breathe in and release the breath and wonder if there is anything I can really do, if I can venture into that oven or if my place is really in this cocoon? I lay in bed at nights ashamed at my inaction and yet clear in the knowledge that even a 20 minute travel stretches my physical abilities. There is no simple solution but my heart still yearns to find one. Soon the sun will dip again, soon the rain will come, the cool of autumn and the danger of winter, when will we stop hiding?

that we should call it homeAugust 19, 2015

It’s three weeks since we left this little corner of the globe for our holiday, if that word rightly applies. Having been ‘back’ a few days now, got my head around the change, the return, the messing up of schedules and the run-off of trinkets with new homes to be found, I’m sitting again in the familiar chair pondering what I learnt, how I moved, and how much was my soul watered and relaxed by the break.

It’s a missionaries prerogative to return home and yet not really know where that is. Mission work does that, it waters down the notion of home, condenses it into a suitcase and all the while expands it’s borders. It’s a addictive feeling, something I can only faintly liken to having a long distance relationship, the pull of the other always carried while the weight of the present feels comfortably right. It splits you, breaks you, and mends you in a way that leaves your feet itching and heart wild. And it should be addictive, it should be painful, and it should be mundanely wonderful every time your feet hit that new soil.

The addictive nature of it can tempt our independent lives to play the ‘until the next time’ game, can leave mission open-ended in the wrong sort of manner. All mission should be open ended, relationships and support should not die as the flight leaves the runway, interdependence should not be left hanging, but equally long term mission is a very different thing to missionary as a lifestyle. Long term mission is a commitment as binding as the vows given upon our wedding day. It’s a decision made by definite choice, a choice that demands to be, gladly or painfully, renewed every morning. It’s writing the end date in the sand and being open to the wind blowing it away, that security gone, there is no ‘next time’ any-more, it’s just time.

Going ‘home’ becomes a sort of bitter sweet holiday, ties are reconnected and shredded once again, promises of connection renewed to fade as days pass, stories exchanged, pleasantries uttered, occasional truths leaked.

Going ‘home’ gives glimpses of the other life we could have had, the one we turned down, dangled like carrots in our faces.

Home churches become sending churches and every second in them feels bitter sweet. As I stood in the final church service singing my heart out to ‘when I was lost’ I recognised that this was my survival food, my rations for the journey. It wouldn’t matter if the journey was off to university, out to the daily grind of work or off around the globe. This was my travel pack, my inner child’s teddy bear, it was that thing held tightly and only set down at a place designated home. This faith gave me a constant travel companion, and while my home may move His home remained in me.