grieving

I guess there are two ways to think of it: we are either dying from the day we are born, or we are moving towards a passage into the real life, the real home, the real place for which we were created... for those of us who have said "yes" to the invitation, at least.

As I see my skin start to sag and wrinkle and realize that my body is aging and in some ways it's all downhill from here... I try to keep the perspective that everything here is just a prelude, anyway, to the real story. Who cares what happens here, except that it's getting us ready for there? The point isn't to stay young forever, the point is to measure our days and live them so that they mean something for eternity.
And I try to keep the perspective that it's okay to let the people we love go, and it's really just a short separation, a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. We weren't made to stay here forever, and like Paul, we should rejoice when it's time to go. What a joyful thing when a soul gets to shed an old and sick body and put on immortality.
But yet when I hear my beloved grandma has shrunk to 100 lbs and opted for palliative care, and that my dear grandpa is struggling to breath in a body that is about to shut down, all I can do is close my office door, sit at my desk, and weep. It's just so hard in the now.
We are still in lovely Zimbabwe... lots to write about but haven't had time. Hard to believe that our time here in Africa is nearly at a close. But I'm feeling ready to go... things have their seasons. And I want to be home.

rafting the Nile + words worth reading

After several weeks of really sporadic email access, we're in a hotel in Kampala with wondrously fast wireless internet (wondrous considering this part of the world and the fact that our hotel is $23/night!) So I'm getting caught up with my web-based life a little. I've posted some pictures of our Abu Dhabi trip over on Facebook and hope to get some pictures of our Kenya adventures up today.

Yesterday we had a glorious day white water rafting on the Nile near Jinja, something I have wanted to do for years and I am so glad that I waited til I had someone to do it with! We actually will have pictures to show, too-- one of the 8 or 9 Ugandans who accompanied us 5 mzungus (it was nice to feel that they were thus prepared for any eventuality, although we had a safe run) was a photographer who stowed his camera in a water-tight box in his kayak, and then would get to the rapids ahead of us to take pictures as we flew over. I wasn't going to pay for him to go along but the other 3 people in our party did and have offered to share the pictures. As it turned out those other 3 were a mom from Chicago who is visiting her parents here (missionaries), and 2 teenage girls (one her daughter)-- they are all here for a missions trip. We had a wonderful time getting to know them and are planning to have dinner with the whole family next week. (Side note: my trip to Nigeria has been postponed so we are here a while longer!)

Her grandparents were also missionaries in Africa and her father has lived in Africa his entire life, except for college. She had so many funny and wonderful stories to tell about them. My favorite had to be about her grandfather, who in the 1930s imported a crate of soda from Mombasa. Soda was then unknown in Africa. On the journey inland his African companions became very thirsty-- apparently they had run out of water. Not thinking anything of it her grandfather passed out bottles of Coke. The very thirsty Africans downed them in one gulp, which made the Coke start foaming out their noses, and they started crying, thinking that this white man was trying to kill them! I can't imagine that warm Coke, which does hurt a bit as it goes down (strange that we have come to like this feeling), would have been very pleasurable to people who had never had it before!

Anyway, we had a glorious day on the Nile. Sometimes Uganda is so green that the green almost hurts your eyes, and after a misty morning the fog burned off and we had brilliant blue skies with puffy white clouds. We are a bit sun-burned today in spite of vigilant application of SPF55 waterproof sunscreen, but it was worth it. I have to say my favorite part was probably floating down the Nile, in the parts where the water was smooth and we could get out of the raft and float along in our lifevests. We went 27 km. total and the water was mostly pretty swift currents so we could "swim" along by doing hardly anything, just letting the current take us and enjoying the cool water and brilliant sunshine and astounding beauty all around. We saw a lot of cool birds and I am not even much of a bird person, but I really enjoyed watching them swim, fly, dive, and just be graceful and beautiful.

The rapids were a blast too. We weren't expecting class-5 rapids but we got them! In the first set the raft tipped all the way onto its side (although not over) and so I was tossed out and shot through the rest of the rapids by myself, but I didn't hit any rocks or get hurt so it was actually really fun! Then one of the 4 Ugandans in kayaks came to rescue me and I held on to his kayak and he took me back to the raft. So it was all fine. I was actually really impressed by their professionalism and knowledge of the river, and would do it again in a heartbeat.

We went with the lowest-cost trip, which I don't think compromised the safety and quality of the rafting at all, but did mean that our ride home (2 hours back to Kampala) was a somewhat rickety matatu which got two punctures on the way back. The first one was repaired by the driver in record time but when the second tire gave out on the outskirts of Kampala he didn't have a spare. So then we had to find a public matatu (shared taxi minibus that holds 15 or so people) to take us back to downtown Kampala, then walk from the taxi park to our hotel. It was all fine but we were tired by the time we got back.

One more thing I wanted to share today, because I have read it several times in the last few days and it has hit me hard, in a good way, as I seek to try to honor the differences with my beloved:

How to Really Write a Love Letter

I love everything this woman (Ann Voskamp) writes-- she is deep and has a gift for clean and beautiful writing. But this post was particularly good.