Over the mountains and the sea

If you are comparing Kota Kinabalu to other South-East Asian cities, you may find it small and laid-back. It isn't as inexplicably quiet as its neighbour, Bandar Seri Begawan, and the constant traffic jams make it seem less than idyllic. But to one side you see lush, jungle-thick mountains stretching out as guardians over the city and to the other you see water, and islands, and boats wandering out to bring the two together.

Sabah Reflections #1: On being foreign (and not especially humble)

I’m not sure how regular my internet access will be over the next two weeks, so my blogging may well be sporadic at best. This post is being written offline while the ideas are fresh in my mind and will be uploaded as soon as an opportunity arises. It’s early evening in Kota Kinabalu – the end of my first day back in Sabah. It’s been a day of ups and downs, not helped perhaps by the fact that I did not get to eat anything until around 12:30. But it’s also been a day of wonderful rememberings and reflections. Some solitude in the afternoon afforded me a lovely leisurely time roaming the familiar streets of KK, going to old haunts and taking far more photos than I was actually aware of. You can expect to see some uploaded here presently, but I might just focus on thoughts for the time being.

Returning to a place that was once very familiar is a strange experience. The first few days, I suspect, are a mix of delighting in becoming reacquainted with it all and being reminded of things that you had not once thought about since leaving, some of them good, some of them not as good.

It’s amazing, for instance, how simply being back in Malaysia helps me make sense of aspects of my life here that had become distant memories, even beginning to take on the atmosphere of myth. My writings from the first half of last year, for instance, attest that while living here I grew in God in ways that, back home, I have come to question, even potentially doubting that it ever happened. Being back here I can see why. There is something so humbling about life here, at least for a foreigner. You could live in far less resourced places, but enough things just won’t work, or simply don’t work how you’d expect, that you either become very quickly angry, or learn that the world does not revolve around you. There’s also a gratitude for simple blessings that develops in a place like Sabah. Functioning hot water systems can come, appropriately, to seem luxuries. Drinking water can be an unalloyed pleasure. On the other hand, rarely knowing how to do some of the most basic things has a similar effect, I suspect, to being an adult who, for whatever reason, loses the ability to walk and must learn to do so again.

When faced with humbling situations, there are two choices: accepting humility, or being humiliated. The latter regularly stems out of pride and leads only to further hardness of heart. The former leads to joy and gratitude: the sort of gratitude that, 18 months ago, prompted me to write this simple poem/prayer, which I will share with you today:

My heart is full

(sweet syrup of

your love, and each

and every gift; with sap

my tree-trunk spirit fills);

my hands, though empty,

better suited are to reach

inside my heart and take

full quota of this

liquid-blessing. Full

my heart to overflowing.

(Blessed be the hands that give.)

Jet Planes and Setting Suns

Well, there hasn't been an awful lot of activity here at Ideas From the North of late, primarily because I've been quite frantically trying to finish up the somewhat implausible amount of marking that I've had piling up throughout the term. The deadline? Flying back to Malaysia tomorrow morning for a two week return to the place I called home for half of last year.

Apart from being flat out tying up loose ends in Melbourne (I haven't succeeded; many ends are still loose), there's naturally a lot of conflicting emotions in me in the lead up to my return. Now, I'm not going to go into the details here as to why exactly I feel mixed about it, but suffice to say that my experience of life in Malaysia involved some of the greatest joy and some of the greatest pain of my short life so far. Returning to the place where it all coalesced bizarrely and indescribably - well, you can imagine that I'm not exactly sure what to feel.

Fortunately, unlike John Denver, I'm fairly sure of when I will be back again, but have less idea what to expect when I get there. I may have a chance to report some of it here, but make no promises. I remember once hearing something along the lines that, when you've been overseas for a week, you think you can write a novel about the experience, after six months you think you can write a short story, and after a year you think you can manage a sentence. I wasn't there for the full year, but I think enough got crammed into that year to have a similar effect. I may have coherent thoughts about it all. I may not. But I suspect it will be worthwhile.

One of the biggest challenges that I face right now is entrusting the whole situation to God. I'm not sure why. I know He can be trusted with everything, and has been trustworthy so far. But for some reason I feel that nutting things out on my own, in my own incompetent style, is better by far than being humble enough to accept that God's plans might be better than my own. Yes, the humbling part of the process seems to be the hardest.

The good news is that God is still likely to look after me, however immature and untrusting I am. The Bible makes it quite clear that God provides for His creation constantly, regardless of what it does or does not deserve. This morning, for instance, I read Psalm 50, which begins with these wonderful words:

"The Mighty One, God, the Lord,

speaks and summons the earth

from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets."

The rising and setting of the sun each day should serve as reminders of God's sustaining goodness. I can trust in Him because He is powerful, and because He is good. Those are two things that I am certainly not, and this is a very good reason to trust Him and not me.

Tomorrow I will leave as the sun rises. I will return when the sun has set. In the middle - the goodness and faithfulness of God.

Invocation

(Prompted by a sermon series at my church on the Resurrection...)

Come like the long-awaited wind

Sweeping over wheat-fields and hay,

The coolness of an evening kept too long in the wings

Of a wilting, overheated day.

Come like the breeze,

Come with surprises in these pockets of wind.

Come as the change

In our day’s bored direction.

Come and rearrange.

Let your wind be our re-maker.

Come like the rising waters on our parched, cracked soil.

Come like the hope of the reservoirs,

The heaven’s drenching, torrent gift.

Come like lightning, come with the skyboards

Quaking in thunderous rapture.

Come like the heralds of the air proclaim.

Come like swift-falling storm waters.

Our brittle, broken earth needs you.

Come with majesty! Come with sudden glory

Such as rainbow-gazing Noah never saw.

Come with olive-branch promises.

Come with justice.

Come with hope.

Come, fully You; no muted impersonation.

Come crowned, the sun your halo,

The galaxies your sceptre,

The vast universe no frame for your endless expanse.

Come to our vision; come burst it open

And give eyes to see

Your earth-defying, sense-exploding

Majesty.

Who are you, really?

This afternoon saw me going with a few friends to see some local acts play at the Northcote Social Club, as part of a single launch for a friend's band. The artists were all wonderful and it was a great afternoon, the first time that I've been back to one of my favourite northern haunts since returning to Australia a year ago.

The second act, a seven-piece country sensation, were particularly striking, all in their chequered shirts, skinny legs and boots, singing songs about God, guns and midnight trains. There was nothing original about them but what they did they did marvellously. But, as one of the friends I went with pointed out, there's something a little insincere about guys who live in Northcote wearing boots that have never seen the countryside singing about experiences they've never had and never will. And I wonder how many of them actually believed in God. When they sang about Him, it had the ring to it of a stylistic trope rather than a profession of faith. It was simply in the genre to sing about Him.

It drew to my attention, I suppose, how often we simply fit into playing parts in our lives - parts that we pull off quite effectively but parts nonetheless. We may indeed look the real thing quite well, until we encounter someone who knows the real thing well enough to show to us that we sure aren't it.

Searching our own hearts, finding what is true in us and what is false, is a mightily difficult job. I for one can't do it. I'm happy enough to laugh at others being faux-country, for instance, because I feel that, in my heart, I'm the real thing. After all, I've spotted a fake, haven't I? Therefore I can't be fake myself, surely.

Oh, how wrong we are.

The truth is, the only one who can search our hearts properly is God, and it's a pretty scary prospect to think of bringing our hearts before Him. Anyone who thinks that praying is simply an act of wish-fulfilment and double think doesn't know the human heart. Coming to God, truly coming to Him, is often the last thing that our hearts desire. It takes a lot of humility, and humility just ain't something we feel like acquiring.

It's easy to play the part of being a Christian, to do all the outwardly Christian things, but open-hearted, repentant, ongoing prayer is quite another thing. I don't think you can fake something like that. It cuts to the heart of human duplicity.