4. There's a lion outside

This post is going to be intentionally reflective. Over the next three months I'll be talking much more about the practical stuff and how we're getting ready to go, but I hope you'll forgive me a bit of a philosophical muse on where we are right now.

This whole affair really kicked off in November 2011. John Abrahmse, the aforementioned persuasive leader of J-Life, stayed with us in our home. Every morning we were treated to a voice shouting from his bedroom "Daniel: there's a lion outside! A LOIYON OUTSOYDE!" in what I can only assume was an attempt at a British accent. Think Dick Van Dyke on an especially unconvincing day, shortly before sacking his voice coach. Nobody could really work out why he did this but in the end we decided he was just being South African. At any rate he provided some useful data to my cultural study.

Anyway, that is not the point of the story. The point of that story is to give me a neat lead into my current thesis. I want to talk about all the things that threaten to hold us back.

You may never even have picked up a bible, but I will put down good money that you have quoted from it: an eye for an eye; at my wit's end; pride goes before a fall; by the skin of your teeth. On the other hand (actually that one's not from the bible) I'll put down equally good money that you have never quoted Proverbs 22:13. Funnily enough, this particular proverb is of limited utility to the average urban westerner:

"The sluggard says, 'There’s a lion outside! I’ll be killed in the public square!'..."

You might wonder why a Northern Israeli would be worried about a lion, but that is where you (and I, I must add) show our ignorance. According to Google (to which I have now outsourced almost all of my intelligence and memory), lions were common in Israel at the time Solomon was penning the wise words which became the book of Proverbs. It was technically possible, though unlikely, to be killed by one in a public square, which would be a charismatic way to die but nonetheless inconvenient if you were on the way to the bank. This, too, is not the point I am trying to make (I find some points are best approached cautiously from many sides before finally settling cosily into their warm embrace).

The point of the verse is to warn against the dangers of making excuses to avoid work. Solomon's sluggard is one who is habitually lazy and indolent, someone known to be  work-shy, someone looking for any excuse to avoid what they have been asked to do. Now an actual lion outside is probably a fair excuse to postpone buying the milk, but like Solomon's sluggard, we find it very tempting to make superficially plausible excuses to avoid the things that bore or scare us. It is all too easy to be held back by fear: how many opportunities do we miss because of our own lion outside?

I'm happy to admit I am scared of what we're getting in to. Not so much scared for myself, but scared for Daniel and Reuben. You know how you can get close to the edge of a cliff yourself without too much difficulty, but if one of your kids does it you freak out with fear for them?

So I'm scared of so much for them: I'm scared of malaria, scared of hijacking, scared of kidnap, scared of them being used against me, scared of losing them. Now those things can and do happen here in the UK, but in the UK we're not unusual: just an ordinary middle-class family in a middle-sized house in a quiet area. However in Africa we are exposed by being exactly the things that anonymise us in the UK: by our choice to move to Africa we increase our boys' exposure, and hence the danger to which they are subject, however unlikely that danger is. It's the same feeling we have had while giving the boys their African vaccinations: a small but present danger of side-effects to which they would not be exposed if we just stayed in our own country like sensible people.

We have, time and again, wondered if we really should be doing it. Who would blame us if we didn't? Who would blame us if we just waited until the kids were grown up? Ahh, but then we'd be higher up in our careers, and we'd have elderly parents, and there'd be grandkids on the way, and then we'd decide we were too old to make a difference...you see where this is going? There's always going to be a lion outside.

As a Christian you don't have to prove anything, you don't have to earn your place in heaven, you couldn't even if you wanted to: you already have the suite because Christ booked it for you in advance and paid your bill. That's not to say that your place doesn't come with responsibilities: it does, and one responsibility is to make the best of our talents. We're being funded on this trip by the goodness and grace of friends: do we have to do anything to earn their sponsorship? No we do not. Do we have responsibilities as a result of their sponsorship? Of course we do. Same with Christianity. We don't have to do this for any reason other than that God has called us to do the best we can with the talents we have been given.

Yes, we're scared. But the point at which we decided to go for it was the point at which we realised we were more scared of not doing it than we were of doing it: scared that if we didn't take this chance we'd hit seventy and look back and wonder what we did with our lives. Scared that if we missed this opportunity we'd always be thinking "what if".

There will always be lions outside, but I think you either face them or stay forever looking through of the window wondering what it's like out there. We got tired of wondering. Hopefully when we step outside the lion will be looking the other way.

3. Live Life as a Sojourner

In the last two posts I've talked about Who, and Where, and What For, but not really Why. So here's the Why.

Everyone has some thoughts about what the Point Of It All is, this thing we call life: if by a lucky happenstance you are born as an affluent Westerner you get about 80 years of relative comfort clinging precariously to a rock hurtling through space, then you die. If you're an average African, you die 30 years sooner.  Whenever it happens, you die, and if you're particularly lucky a few people remember you for a few years. Then they die. And so on. The writer of the book Ecclesiastes said all this was nothing more than "chasing after the wind".

So most people think there has to be some point to it all: some reason why getting through those 80 years isn't just a futile exercise in stoicism. People's reasons are different, doubtless you have your own.

For some people it's money. For some it's fame, for others infamy. For some it's longevity, for some service, for some experience. Some want to tell good stories, some want to go along for the ride. Some want to leave a big legacy, some want to die penniless philanthropists. Some want to change the world for the better, some for the worse. There are probably as many reasons as there are people who reason.

A wonderful and stately couple who mentor us have a corkboard in their kitchen. On the board is a map, and stuck in the map are lots and lots of pins that show where their kids have served as missionaries. The couple themselves give almost all their time and energy to teaching relationship skills. They live to serve others: it's something which has really inspired us. The whole family epitomises living as sojourners.

A sojourner is someone who is passing through, someone transient. In The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle ('Conan Doyle!', I hear you shout, 'Surely you are mistaken, for undoubtedly that was Michael Crichton!'. To which I reply, 'Pah! Get thee and thy literary inexactitude behind me, fool!')... Where was I? Ah yes, The Lost World. As the protagonists are setting off into the unknown, one says "...to go and take a sporting risk, young fellah, that's the salt of existence, that's the worth of living, to not be dull and soft and comfy...", this written at the time of the great explorers, and enshrining the spirit of the age: to explore, to travel, to discover, to risk...to sojourn.

So what does it mean to live life as a sojourner? To me it means holding things lightly, treating everything we have as temporary and liable to be recalled. It means giving up a good job to do something cool, giving up a nice house to move somewhere exciting, and giving up a large and well-appointed comfort zone (with a coffee grinder and colour-matched scatter cushions) to step out and serve others. By no means do Christians have a monopoly on this kind of thinking, but I kind of think we find it a bit easier, a bit less of a wrench. Christianity, in its purest form, calls for sacrifice: giving up yourself for the benefit of others. I'm not talking about religion or denomination here, just the simplicity of Christ's life: love and sacrifice to spread a message of hope.

So everything we have is transitory. At best you have it, whatever 'it' is, money, experience, fame, for 80 years. Then it's gone. Pow. The sojourner recognises that, and treats everything, every moment, every opportunity, as temporary. The sojourner makes each minute count, takes every chance to make a difference, seizes crazy opportunities to do something brilliant. They do this because they know that wherever they are, they are simply on the road to somewhere else, and where they are going makes this short time look like a dull warm-up act.

That's what we aspire to.