Love at the Speed of Email (14 page)

“And I reckon you do, too.
 

“Looking back now (with all the wisdom of
a 31-year-old who’s acquired some bruises in the school of hard knocks in life
and faith) I see that I used to view the world as black and white.
Subconsciously and quite arrogantly, I believed that faith and life were like a
series of formulas and ‘best practices’ and that if you followed the formulas
and best practices, then everything would work out okay for you.

“Fuck.
Fuuuuck
.
 

“If only it were like that.
 

“Part of me has (truly) come to celebrate that life and
faith aren’t confined to formulas. Part of me celebrates the mystery and magic
of life.

“And part of me says, ‘Damn, it’s frustrating’ and deep down
wishes that the world would just behave the way I thought it did back when I
was in my 20s and I had it all figured out.
 

“So what do you think about faith? How have your ideas about
faith changed over the past 10ish years? How have your ideas about faith
expanded and contracted as you’ve
come
face-to-faith
with tragedies of human existence and as you’ve encountered people from
different cultures and worldviews and faith walks?

“And how do you keep that historical baggage stuff from
depressing you about faith? I struggle. I think as I get older (and perhaps a
bit softer, or perhaps a bit less edgy in my anger about injustice, or perhaps
a bit more graceful???) I find myself reacting less strongly than I used to. I
still feel ashamed and angry and confused about how people who were sincerely
trying to adhere to the same faith to which I’m trying to adhere could have
enslaved Africans and shipped them off to deepest darkest America, for
instance.
 
But then, perhaps future
generations will come to places like Vanuatu and Ghana and Afghanistan and
judge us harshly for our neocolonialism in all our good-natured aid and
development work.

“So my last point, because I need to get out of the office
as they’re closing in two minutes. And it’s a question, one that I trust you’ll
answer truthfully and straightforwardly. So what do you think of me trying to
come down to Australia sometime between Jan 10 and Feb 6 while you’re there?
I’d like to try. If you think that would be okay.”

33,000
feet

A week later I was on the plane to Vancouver and lucky to be
there. I hadn’t banked on the pouring rain that greeted me when I got up at
3:30 a.m. to head to the airport for my six o’clock flight. That was an
understandable miscalculation – a deluge like that in L.A. is a once-a-year
event, if that. What was not so understandable was forgetting that the city of
Vancouver lived in an entirely separate country. When I rushed into the airport
at 5:13, damp and frazzled and handed my passport to the woman behind the desk
she was not at all impressed.

“This is an international flight,” she said sharply.
“Another two minutes and the system wouldn’t have let me check you in even if I
wanted to.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said lamely. “Sorry. I forgot.”

This earned me a look of complete scorn, but she checked me
in.

In addition to forgetting that Canada was a sovereign
nation, I’d also forgotten to pack a book. So takeoff found me with nothing to
do but stare at the back of the seat in front of me and think about the
interview I’d give that afternoon and about Mike and his questions.

Not the question he’d asked about whether I’d like him to
come to Australia in six weeks –
that
one had been
easy to answer. I had emailed him back immediately, carefully light.

“I think that would be a lot of fun if it worked out,” I had
said.

No, it was the other questions he’d asked that I was still
stuck on.

“What do you think about faith? How have your ideas about
faith changed over the past decade as you’ve
come
face-to-faith with tragedies of human existence and as you’ve encountered
people from different worldviews and faith walks?”

“How do you keep that historical baggage stuff from
depressing you about faith?”

“What do you do when you feel parts of your faith are
becoming more aspartame than sugar?”

How could I travel around the world running workshops on the
intersection of humanitarian work and spirituality – how could I be flying up
to sit for an interview on national television about this stuff – and still not
have a clear answer to these questions?

* * *

In my first novel, I wrote about the spiritual struggles of
a narrator named Cori – a teen who finds herself caught up in a civil war in
Indonesia:

Church probably came
first – that’s as far back as I can remember. Whether we were in Australia or
Kenya, Sunday morning found the five of us in church and afterward in an ice
cream shop. Given that African church services regularly go for more than two
hours, Tanya, Luke and I earned every bite.

Sweet
bribery aside, God was a constant centering force in a kaleidoscope of
airports, cultures, and friends.
I was baptized at our church in Nairobi when I was fourteen.
In
the middle of winter.
In an unheated baptismal pool.
Outdoors.

That’s how important
God was to me.

I guess I wasn’t quite
holy enough not to feel the cold that day. But I also felt something else: a
deep surety, as warm as touch, that my life was an important piece in the huge
cosmic puzzle. That God loved me.
That I had purpose.

Even before this
summer, that was what I felt slipping away.

I was baptized at sixteen in Zimbabwe, but those two minor
details aside, this part of Cori’s story is all mine. I donated it to her and
cloaked it in fiction, but I can claim it as truth right down to the cold
water, the two siblings, and the post-church ice cream.

Actually, in terms of home anchored in place, church
probably outranks even airports. Church is there as far back as I can
remember.
 

In Bangladesh we went to church in a simple cement building,
with poverty crouched just outside the door. I can dredge up glimpses of fans
slowly stirring the heavy heat, worn hymnals with cracked spines, a
clinky
and out-of-tune piano, and the Australian
missionaries making jokes at the New Zealanders’ expense.
 

It all stood in rather stark contrast with our next church
home in the United States, with its hyper-
adrenalinated
children’s program stocked with summer camps, ski trips, Thanksgiving skits
involving stuffed toy turkeys and real chain saws, and much talk of the
rapture.

For those of you who didn’t grow up going to church in the
United States during the 1980s,
the
rapture
is the phrase generally used to refer the moment when Jesus will
return to earth, pick up all the Christians, and take them off to hang out in
heaven.

Many theories abounded about when the rapture would occur
and what, exactly, would happen. Most of my Sunday-school teachers seemed to
believe that all the Christians would be suddenly whisked up to heaven sometime
during seven years of suffering and tribulation that was destined to befall the
earth during the “end times”. And in the face of a bleak economic forecast and
the specter of the Soviet Union as the great evil of the modern world, many
also believed that the end times were upon us
right then
.

The rapture would probably occur within the next five years
or so, these people generally posited, and on that wonderful day Jesus would
float down from the clouds to the great and glorious sound of angelic trumpets
and all the true Christians would rise up to greet him in a midair reunion.

There were other theories about the rapture.
Lots of other theories.
 

I think the main point of all this rapture talk was to impel
us to convince all our friends of their need to be saved before the imminent
arrival of the big day with its attendant and eternal separation of the sheep
and the goats. But I didn’t have many friends to preach to at eleven. I just
had plenty of time to research the rapture the way I researched most other
things in life, by reading novels.

Long before the popular
Left
Behind
series, there were a slew of other stories about the end times, most
of which I ferreted out and devoured. In retrospect, I doubt that this was
entirely healthy fuel for an already-feverish imagination. I spent far too much
time wondering what would happen to me if the rapture occurred while I was
changing clothes or, horrors, sitting on the toilet. Would I be sucked into the
sky
naked
? On at least one occasion I
got out of the shower to the sound of silence, a palpable atmospheric emptiness
that triggered a sudden and visceral certainty that I was completely alone in
the house and probably in the world. Had everyone I knew and loved gone off to
meet Jesus without me?

When Mum and Dad sat us down one day when I was twelve and
asked us what we thought of moving to Africa, I figured that if Jesus were
coming back within the next five years anyway, Africa was as good a place as
any to go and have an adventure in the meantime.

Which took me to church in Zimbabwe.

Harare,
Zimbabwe

Church in Zimbabwe was long.
Looooong
.
During the first
couple of years we were there, I had limited patience for the sermons that
often went for an hour without any chain saw-based entertainment at all. Mum
played music for the service and Dad taught one of the adult Sunday school classes.
That meant that we were at church on Sundays from eight in the morning until
almost one in the afternoon.

Looooong
.

By sixteen, however, I wasn’t going to church just on Sunday
mornings. I was also heading back there voluntarily on Sunday nights for the
evening service.

Part of me would like to be able to claim that this newfound
interest in all things church was solely the result of an inner awakening to
the sacred, a deep personal spiritual fervor.

It wasn’t.

Not unless a budding teenage awareness of the divine mystery
posed by the opposite sex counts as spiritual fervor.
 

Yes.
Boys.
The youth group went out
for coffee after the evening service. This was a big deal. I went to an
all-girls school, and opportunities for hanging out with boys were limited.
Church was the center of my social life, and the friends I made there, the
first real friends I’d ever had, introduced me to all sorts of things,
including how to drive a car, ride a motorcycle, and drink vodka.

But my friends in Zimbabwe served as guides for much more
than the odd and relatively tame foray into the adventures of vodka and
lemonade. They also taught me how to dance and to laugh, and just as the
concept of friendship came alive for me during that time, so did the concept of
God. However mixed my motivations for embracing church, I eventually found more
than boys there.

The pastor at our church in Harare was a man named Peter
Griffith. A decade before I walked into his church, Peter had been living with
his family and thirteen others at
Elim
Mission in the
north of the country. In 1978, during the civil war that transformed Rhodesia
into Zimbabwe, guerrillas armed with machetes crossed the border with
Mozambique, entered the mission compound, and murdered everyone there: nine
adults and four children, including a three-week-old baby. Peter and his family
survived only because they were in England at the time.

The Griffith family returned to Africa, where Peter accepted
a senior position in the education department of the newly formed Zimbabwean
government. In a society collectively wounded by years of fighting – trying to
find a way out of the devastation and plagued by ongoing controversy about how
to see justice done – Peter consistently maintained that forgiveness was the
right path to healing.

Shortly after becoming senior pastor of a church in Harare,
this public mantra was put to the test. A decade after the massacre, the
youngest member of the party that had attacked
Elim
Mission sought Peter out and confessed his role in the killings. He’d been
fourteen at the time, a youth fighting under the name “War Devil,” and he’d
risen to become the youngest platoon leader of the insurgency. Shortly after
the war, this young man said, he’d seen a vision of the hand of God coming in
judgment against him. It must have been some vision – he’d become a Christian
on the spot, left the militia, and enrolled in Bible College.

In addition to his forgiveness, Peter offered this man a job
as the guard and groundskeeper for our church.
 

This story didn’t seem so extraordinary to me the first time
I heard it. The war had been over for only eight years. The scars and the
stories were numerous and still fresh – more than one of my friends had lost
their fathers in the fighting. But over time that story started to sink in. It
came to symbolize some of the strength and optimism that marked the Zimbabwe I
knew and loved during the four years we lived there. Against the dark backdrop
of injustice and violence, with storm clouds of coming hardship still distant on
the horizon, it lit up the present with hope.

I could not have put it like this then. Then, I was only
starting to discern what faith meant to me. Then, the question for me wasn’t
whether God existed. As a teen, the existence of God was as self-evident to me
as the need to breathe to live; my struggles with this foundation would come
later. Instead, what was at stake was more the basic orientation and flavor of
my faith.

Did I, could I, and would I believe in a God who loves us
and intends good and right despite what I knew of all the wrongs – from
meanness to murder – that people are capable of?

It was in Zimbabwe that I really answered yes to that
question for the first time.

That yes wasn’t a sudden and inexplicable inner flood of
divinely inspired certainty. It was a cumulative yes, born from the
intersection of multiple tributaries feeding into my life. It came from
discovering the sweetness and security of friendship love for the first time.
From thousands of small positive triumphs by others – smiles, joy, kindness –
in defiance of pain or need. From slowly, so slowly, waking up to right and
wrong. From the stories I read in the Bible and lived by those like Peter
Griffiths.
Stories that called me toward higher ground.

I was baptized at sixteen, just months before we left. I had
known from the first that we would be staying in Zimbabwe for only four years.
What I hadn’t expected was that by the time we had to leave I would feel that I
belonged
in Africa. In the months
leading up to that final farewell I begged my parents to leave me behind in
Harare.

I could live with my best friend, Angie, for the next two
years, I argued, and finish high school with my friends. I would come to visit
my family twice a year. Clearly it was a sensible plan.

Angie’s parents, I do believe, would have gone for it. Mine
didn’t. Even then the writing was on the wall for Zimbabwe. The last year we
were there, there was a drought. Food was scarcer on the shelves, and butter,
meat, and even toilet paper were rationed in stores. At times we had
electricity for only five or six hours a day, and on those evenings I studied
by candlelight. Inflation and the HIV infection rate in the country had started
an upward spiral.