Notes along the way
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Albert, Tom and Tim are home.
Here is a link to Albert’s slide show of Tanzania. Click on the URL below.
Here's another with some pictures added and some duplicates. The URL looks the same.
Friday March 4, 2011
Home: Entered the house last evening at about 9:30. We had been traveling for just over 48 hours. We had not changed our clothes in about 55 hours. The return included about 6 hours in brutal heat. First we were out in the equatorial sun for several hours (added to by our driver’s car having a dead battery—no AAA! to say the least) then we were in a line in a super-heated building for two hours waiting to be permitted to leave. We were not far from passing out. Poverty is shelterless in the heat, and the words of the psalm come to mind: Let me dwell in your tent forever! Let me take refuge under the shelter of your wings!
Never has my anticipation of home been so acute: the quiet, the orderliness, the cool or warm snug comfort; the cats fed better than so many humans we have seen; the ordinary unaccountable taken-for-granted wealth. Bwana asifiwe…Praise the Lord.
I do not know if the term third-world is any longer the proper technical term to describe where we were, and what we have come from, but it could not be more imaginatively further from our reality than two worlds away. What we expect and get as normal—as human life and its accoutrements, as routine as the rising of the sun and the rain falling on the just and the unjust alike—is unbearable in contrast to what we have experienced with our eyes and heard with our ears.
One cannot come away from the scenes of unfathomable poverty and ask where is God in all of this? where is divine justice? where is tender mercy? The answer is that it does not exist if it is not we! We alone are the shelter of God’s wings!
(I am amazed at what I find when I go through all of my photos, that is I am amazed at what I do not find. I did not realize this, but I apparently could not allow myself to take pictures of the—shanties is too elegant of a word—of what people call home, of what serves as the shadow of God’s wing, of shelter from the scorching heat and rain. I could not permit myself! Something edited it out! Perhaps the invisibility of this enormous poverty is telling: our hearts cannot stand it.)
Albert+
p.s. How irritated I am that my sandals are not available to me this morning. They are in the suitcase that will only be delivered to me later today because it was put on a later flight than we took from Dallas yesterday. I have only 10 other pairs of shoes to choose from, but I don't want what is here; I want my sandals! My, my! My righteous indignation.
Link to Albert's sermon in Tinai on Sunday, February 27th. Click here.
