I sit at my desk in the early afternoon. Orange flowers like tall, slender ladies sway elegantly on the breeze just outside my window, tilting their ochre heads towards the sun. The ever steady sun. The tin roof crackles above me, contracting as a cloud blocks us momentarily from its view. Birds chatter in the distance.
I've spent the last few days settling in. Unpacking my bags and setting things out on my shelves, biking down to BNTC (Bishop Ngalamu Theological College) to greet the principal and my students, hugging and talking with all my friends in the market, singing with Sudanese brothers and sisters at Miṛi-Kälänga (my church), and just readjusting to life here - this life of earthy, unadorned existence.
It's harvest time. The end of rainy season approaches and everyone is out in their gardens pulling ground nuts, collecting maize, and preparing the ground for the last seed of the season: swift growing sorghum. Everywhere we go, we are gifted with bags of nuts and maize. Somehow, in past years, I never realized that they boil g-nuts here. But boil them they do, and they are DE-licious!! My new favorite snack.
Yesterday morning, Wani and I set off on our bicycles for Pastor Buniŋwa's compound across the Mori River. He's the head pastor of my church over at Miṛi-Kälänga, and on Monday, the brother that follows him died in Juba. It was the tragic case of an arm getting cut off in some large grain processing machine. For two months they dressed it and gave him medicine. But it didn't heal. An amputation was done, but it was too late, and the infection must have spread to his blood. Last night the body was brought from Juba, and the burial was set for this morning.
The coffin sat draped in an embroidered sheet at the center of the compound, surrounded with women singing and wailing. Drums sounded, and the men sat at a small distance, near the hole that had been dug for the body the previous day. A pastor eventually got up to officiate. The story of the man's death was explained. Verses were read, and songs were sung.
I was hit with the rawness of it all. The women, feet bare and dusty, hugging one another, crying, wailing, standing with tears streaming down their cheeks, arms raised to the heavens in a heart-rending 'why?!', calling aloud how sad and wrong it was. The coffin was a plain wooden box covered in black, slightly contoured to the shape of the body. On it lay a cotton shirt of the man's, and on top of that, his framed photograph. During the prayers, his wife and sisters sat around the coffin, arms draped around it. Afterwards, it was opened so that everyone could go and see the face one last time. I wondered if it smelled, unpreserved in a box in this heat for several days. And then hammers were brought and nails were beaten into the wood one after the other. The sound and sight of it was so final. So unlike the flowered, made-up funerals of the West where the lid of the casket is gently lowered shut. By someone else. Someone you don't even know. His sisters fanned the air around the coffin as the nails were thrust through, singing.
We all stood and walked with the body as it was carried to the grave. To the beat of drums and a rising chorus of singing and weeping, the box was lowered into the hole. We stopped long enough to say the Lord's prayer, and broke out again, as if our voices and the steady rhythm were driving the body to its home. Men lowered logs onto the coffin, covered them with wet mud, packed it down, and picked up shovels to fill in the hole. Clods of dirt flew in, stones spraying across the ground and raining into the hole along with streams of sweat from the men's faces. We all stood under the beating sun, watching.
We are dust. Our lives pass by ever so quickly, and we go back to the dust. I spend so much of my life oblivious to this, going about my daily activities, planning for the future. Or maybe not so oblivious. Deliberate perhaps. Ignoring. Foolishly . . . stubbornly thinking that this will last forever. But do I really understand that this life is finite? That my days are numbered? Do I live each of them as though they matter? Or do I think that just because I have traveled down a long string of them up to today, there remains still an endless line stretched out before me? The words of Ecclesiastes drift through my mind.
"Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth,
before the days of evil come and the years draw near of which you will say,
"I have no pleasure in them"...
the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it...
Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man..."
I don't understand all of this. But I think I need it. I think I need the unadorned rawness of life. The dust. The pulling of food out of the ground by the sweat of the brow. The clang of nails hammered into a coffin. Reality. Unanesthetized. I need to live it with the people around me. To feel the grief, to sing the songs, to remember what I am, and what my life is. To learn to live as a creature. Created, kept, and tended by the Good Shepherd.
Life's not about living forever. I know that sounds ridiculous. None of us really thinks we'll live forever. We know we all die. I know I will one day. And yet, I still manage to live most of my life as if this is it. Getting that great education. Or the perfect job. The house. The 2.5 children. The retirement fund. The comfortable existence. The pretty things. Or being settled. Financially stable. Well-rested. Successful. Productive. Fulfilled. Happy. We're glad when things go the way we think they should, and shattered when they don't. Always this teetering balance between managing things just right - and being happy - or being thrown the curve balls - and plummeting down that chute of misery. Anger, despair, grumbling. Dissatisfied and doing anything to get on the other side of things again. But what's the point? I think we should be responsible. We should work, strive for excellence, seek to use our skills to the best of our ability, enjoy the things God gave us, rest, create, attempt to improve things, grow, produce, provide, rejoice. But to what end? Just to say you did it and had it, and then die? Or worse yet, never to manage to do it or have it, and then die?
In team meeting this week, we looked at Ephesians 1.
"With all wisdom and understanding, He made known to us the mystery of His will...
to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ...
[the] redemption of those who are God's possession..."
Life is often confusing and messy to me, and I wonder what the point of it all is. Where does it lead? Even though I know the answers, I still wonder 'why?' Why it has to be this way. Why you work for things, but they don't last. Why health is a good thing, but you can't always get it. Why if you do things right, it doesn't ensure that things will go well for you. Why you strive to succeed, but instead you often fail. Why you try to make improvements, but things seem to get worse. I don't mean to be a pessimist. In fact, most of my life I've truly been an optimist. But the older I get, or the longer I choose to live my life in places where money can't clean up the mess, and a nice community can't hide it, the more deeply I question. Sometimes I'm angry. More often, it deflates me and leads to septic nihilism. I'll just be honest.
Why this personal struggle? I think it's because trying to teach me what life is about involves breaking the bones in order to re-set them. Today I had a glimmer. Not novel, I know, but helpful nonetheless. It's not the theology that I need so much as the reassuring reminders:
This is NOT the way things were meant to be. And as we muddle through, He is showing us what it was meant to be. What it means to love, and share, and live. What it is to be a creature, a person created by God. Loved. Filled. Animated by Him. What we can be when we He animates us. When we work together. When selfish ambition has no place. When Jesus is the true King on the throne. When His way of running things rules the day. When work is a joyful thing that brings together all of our unique skills and creativity for the common good, rather than for personal gain or comfort. When death and decay are wrong and sad . . . and one day will be no longer.
Sitting under the Lulu tree in the middle of a field of sesame, maize, and ground nuts today with Mama Viviana and her children and grandchildren, all talking and laughing as we picked ground nuts off their stalks, it was not hard to see what will be, or what we are becoming, or what the point is. It was so obvious. Three year old Asante snuggling in my lap with her wide eyes. All of us picking and peeling, sorting, and setting the nuts in the sun. Munching away on the fruit of the earth. Singing. Dissolving into fits of laughter about this funny story, or that comic thing that happened. God is bringing all things together, in heaven, and on earth, into His magnificent Kingdom, under His majestic rule. And it will be worth it.
"As a father has compassion on his children,
so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;
for He knows how we are formed,
He remembers that we are dust.
The life of mortals is like grass,
they flourish like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.
But from everlasting to everlasting the LORD'S love is with those who fear Him,
and His righteousness with their children's children -
with those who keep His covenant
and remember to obey His precepts.
The LORD has established His throne in heaven,
and His kingdom rules over all."
Psalm 103:13-19
"For you have been born again, not of perishable seed,
but of imperishable,
through the living and enduring word of God."
1 Peter 1:23
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