We have been in our new home for three weeks now, and we are still in the process of setting it up. We have only just got our bedroom sorted – I at last felt brave enough to buy a crisp white duvet cover – now we no longer have toddlers and no longer live in a country with bare floors and red dust… - and I think the room looks fresh and lovely. But we are still trying to work out the living room – fitting a well-known DAYBED in as well as a double futon (the only place for guests to sleep) and our new comfy sofa is just not working too well. There are several large book cases in there which we have not yet put books on, and we haven’t yet put up pictures in there. That room still looks frankly a mess, as does the hall, which has an empty bookcase strewn with wooden African objects, a light bulb, a pile of files… I don’t really know why it is all taking so long… We still don’t have internet but it should be installed on Tuesday. The waiting, and the mess, is driving me a bit crazy.
When I think of the wooden shacks we used to pass every day on our journey to school, perched high up on the mud banks beside the road, with just a curtain hanging in the doorway, and big-tummied toddlers being bathed in plastic basins outside the door, I have to wonder why we can justify spending several weeks getting comfortable in this home, moving our possessions round, wanting it all to look perfect, putting the right pictures in the right rooms… hunting round the second-hand furniture shops for just the right bookshelf… But I know from living on the UCU campus that there is a whole range of décor and number of possessions even from one Ugandan lecturer’s house to another, it is not purely a matter of the haves and the have-nots. It is partly a matter of choices and priorities. But the inequality and unfairness of it remains. And the truth is that we do not live in a shack on a mud bank, we live in a typical three-bedroomed, carpeted, English house. Why this should be, though, is a question all of us have doubtless asked at some point in our lives. Why was I born into a comfortably-off British family instead of to a woman in a refugee camp? No-one knows the answer do they? Predestination? God’s grace? Sheer luck? I don’t know, I am just grateful, and I know that I have to live the best way I can, live as I believe God wants me to live, in the life God has given me. And be thankful. As English people go, we are not rich nor are we particularly poor… (at this point…)
When we first arrived in Gloucester we heard a very good sermon in one of the local churches on John 1, about Jesus being the Word incarnate, and how we should strive to be incarnational Christians who witness to neighbours and friends here by being alongside them and being involved in their lives. We have since met a group of couples who do just that, befriending their neighbours and opening their homes to them, having a crowd of people over for breakfast on a Sunday morning, owning a big van that anyone can borrow, and so on. Through their example and friendship, several neighbours have become Christians already. Which is so encouraging to hear about in this very post-Christian society. We moved to England very aware that there is a desperate need here for Christian witness, for people to be willing to stand up for their faith and actually, practically, bear witness to Jesus by their lives and words. Christianity is seen as so out-dated and irrelevant here, and is almost seen as something to be trodden down if it raises its head. But we feel so encouraged by the friendly, out-going Christians we have met here in Gloucester, and by the warm churches we have gone into.
We definitely want to make an impression here for God's Kingdom. But at the moment we are still in the process of getting incarnated. We are still finding our feet and ordering our home, learning how to shop and cook with a whole different range of ingredients, fixing up phones and bill payments… Jesus himself took the full nine months in the womb, and thirty years in Nazareth, right? So maybe I shouldn’t get stressed about taking a couple more weeks… We are getting there.
rosie- i'm loving the parallel of our lives- and that mine is being born out in your home! i feel so much of that tension- how dare if feel "unsettled" with chairs and tables and doors that lock when i drive through what we drive through to get to school each day? where is the fair in that? thanks for reminding me that Jesus took 30years- i love that. it helps me breath.
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