Seasons

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Cattle being herded through the capital city streets, mountains of mangos for sale on tables piled high with big black avocados. A thin layer of dirt is veiling everything and a sun radiating brilliantly into the pollution of a city bursting at the seams.  Nairobi.  They are zooming past the industrial age and into technology and Chinese investments shaped like enormous concrete monoliths of Babel as they scrape skywards out of poverty. 

We go to the city once in a while to be away from the weight and nearness of tragedy in the hospital.  We go to buy chicken and cheese and coffee (mostly to buy coffee really).  Nairobi is exhausting in a different way so it relocates the normal stress and that is good enough to call it a “break”.  It is a changing place and gives us a change of pace.

Daktari is hard at work this Saturday morning where 50% of his patients live with HIV or die with AIDS, and the other 50% have heartbreaking illnesses too but are just more complicated to understand and impossible to deal with.   Sometimes all a person can do is to be there as the face of Love to the dying.  He doesn’t pretend anymore to be the face of hope.  But the Love of God is constant.

  In the cool dark of this morning, tropical birds call me to rise and get to the day’s work before the day gets to me, and a beautiful African song echoes up the hill from a nearby school.  This may be what it was like for Eve or Lucy or whoever at the dawn of time in Africa. Pure and perfect for a moment.

But today I’d rather listen to Alan Jackson.  He reminds me of where I come from.  Country music is a still life in a swirling world of changes.  It’s good to remember where you come from when you come from somewhere like my home.   The constant of home is in moms and dads and sisters and cousins who love us and in the churches who sent us out with love and generous prayers for our journey.  It is the strength of deep roots allowing us to branch out so far into this unexplainable, unpredictable and ruggedly beautiful place.

The strength of constant love at home is allowing our children to exhilarate in their free-range lifestyle here.  They climb to breathtaking heights in trees.  They soar in the green meadows.  Like Kenya, they too are zooming through developmental years, growing taller and more angular with each new morning.   Their dirty feet signify a good day’s work and the thorns remind them of their vulnerability.  They are learning what it means to be at the mercy of the rains and the Maker of the Rains.  We take them to the river to watch the water levels fall and rise.  And to pray.

Like Kenya and our kids, our seasons are changing.  Rains have come like an Amazing Grace on a tin roof.  We are in the 4^th quarter of our 2 year term. Hope is perched mid-summer on the calendar for that mythical land called home.  But changes come to us all and home will be changed, as we will be changed.  Yet Love remains the constant.  And since it’s Saturday, I’ll just sit still and listen to Alan Jackson for a while.