Pastor Lobe

And now for the story of our last ride... well latest, hopefully not last!

We came to the library in Piedmont, Georgia, a little storefront place. We left our sticks in a bush outside, and walked in where it was cool; I signed up for a computer and sat down at it, beside an older African-American man who looked curiously at my pack. Well, at least I thought he was African-American.

He asked me--I kid you not--if I was walking to Florida! "How did you know?" said I.

"Well, I saw you two out there with your walking sticks, and I just had a feeling you were walking to Florida."

He asked us why, and I explained. He loved it, said he was a Christian too, he loved that we were doing this. By this time it was really obvious that his accent wasn't American; this was a genuine African. "Where in Africa are you from?" I asked.

"Cameroon."

"Oh," I said easily (it was the first thing that came to mind, of course, "my great-grandparents were missionaries there."

No way, says he, astonished and (though I couldn't tell) skeptical. He brings out a little map of Africa (on a "Pray for Africa" conference brochure) and asks me to point to Cameroon. Well I knew it was right to the east of Nigeria, but I almost pointed to Chad! I took a closer look, though, and got it right. Good thing, because he told me later that was a test to see if my great-grandparents were *really* missionaries there.

Well he wanted to help us then; to feed us, to drive us to our next destination. Your great-grandparents were missionaries to my country, he kept saying, "and now it's pay-back time." He told us all about himself on the way to his house; his name is Pastor Lobe and he's a missionary to America and hoped to start a small Bible-school in the storefront next to the library. He served us stuff I learned to eat in Nigeria: a stiff porridge of cassava flour that you take in little balls in your fingers and dip in the "soup", a sauce made of greens and boiled okra and seasoning and, if there is any, meat. (There was a lot more chicken in his soup than I ever saw in Nigeria!) He started out with a spoon, to be polite to our American sensibilities, but I without thinking took the stuff in my hands as I'd been taught, and he was delighted. Brought back memories...

He decided to drive us all the way to Jubilee Partners, our next destination. Jubilee is a Christian community that welcomes refugees and eases their transition into the U.S by giving them a safe and free place to live for the first few months, teaching them English and other basic skills (handling of money, dealing with bureaucracy, whatever part of the American experience they didn't have back home!), and working with them on any medical or legal problems. (Jubilee works with refugee-placement agencies, which themselves take care of placement of the refugees when they leave Jubilee.) Refugees come from all over; there are four families from Burundi right now, one from Chad, and two from Burma. (Yes they might feel funny around each other, but they'll have to become culture-flexible to survive in a foreign country, especially this one, so it's a start I guess.) More about Jubilee in the next post.

When we told Pastor Lobe about Jubilee he loved the idea; he wished the church would be more like that in general, both in terms of sharing their goods and living communally and in terms of helping others; he wanted to see this place. So he drove us seventy-five miles southwest, and we got there in time for supper, when they were expecting us; they welcomed us gladly and invited us all to come down to the Welcome Center--the little cluster of houses where the refugees live--to welcome two new families and give Pastor Lobe a chance to see with his own eyes and speak French with the Chadians.

We went down; we went from house to house with the lady in charge of medical issues, collecting the new people's medical forms; then suddenly, at one house, we were invited in. A large table, and around it almost all Africans; the families from Burundi, from Chad, Pastor Lobe, and then me and Paul and two Jubilee folks. A young man got us chairs, gave us Cokes and Fantas; a young girl started a song, and someone began to clap. They clapped faster, they sang louder, two men got up and danced. Ah, memories! They sang--we all sang, when the words were simple, though they were in Kirundi--we clapped, we swayed, though there was no more dancing. I was so glad for Paul to get a taste of Africa, though I couldn't take him to Nigeria with me. Then Pastor Lobe stood up and began to preach!

He preached in French; one of the Burundi men translated into Kirundi and I into English. The words were simple and the message short and basic--praise God, trust God; and then he prayed. The people around the table seemed to love it. As we stood and got ready to leave, he was holding a conference with the Kirundi about how they could organize their own African worship service sometime. One of the Jubilee folks gave him the phone number to call for permission, since Jubilee needs to screen visitors to the refugees; though someone like Pastor Lobe is obviously OK, the dangers of not screening are obvious. So... we'll see what happens, but God does wild things sometimes. Maybe part of what he has out here for is to connect people. I'm not sure how else Pastor Lobe could have found Jubilee!

a place of homeness

We visited with our friends Luke and Sarah for several days... We hadn't actually met them face to face before, but Paul and Sarah had interacted on a web forum where people discuss Christianity & politics (politics usually comes out on the losing end!) and had arranged a visit since they were practically on our path. They live in a nice little place, back a ways from the road, surround by the South Carolina woods, and have two little daughters and a baby son.

I was fascinated to hear about their intellectual and faith journey; they had come from believing in Christian Reconstructionism (a school of thought that essentially thinks Christians ought to be in charge of the government enforcing Old Testament laws on everyone) to a position where they believe that, as Sara put it, "Jesus and the State occupy the same space, and you have to choose where your allegiance lies." I have to say; I know all y'all (as they say down here!) won't necessarily be in agreement, but I am not willing to salute the flag anymore nor sing the national anthem. Sara has a point: these rituals, however disguised by what passes for common-sense, are rituals of worship. That they are truly worship is borne out by the fact that the State we're thus pledging to is the only entity in our lives that can order us to kill without incurring the moral condemnation of everybody we know. (I hope that sentence made sense! And again, not trying to be inflammatory, it just seemed relevant when talking about Sara and Luke to mention where I agree with them.)

We passed some happy days there, playing with the children (in the photo their oldest daughter Virginia is helping Paul hang up clothes), drinking tea and talking, helping with their chickens & organic garden, etc... Sara and I prepared a new bed that will be planted in the spring, using the organic "no-dig method". (I love it! How could you not love something called the "no-dig" method? Only thing better would be the "no-work-at-all" method!) We covered the alloted space first with fertilizing materials--compost & chicken manure/bedding (you have to use the bedding, b/c the most fertile stuff is actually the urine!)--then overlaid them with two or three layers of cardboard. This had to be food packaging, because that's the only way of guaranteeing the absence of toxic chemicals. Then enough leaf-mold (slightly decayed leaves) to make it look like a big leaf-pile! Then stack a few falled branches log-cabin style around the bed to make a raised edge, and voila! Wait till spring. The earthworms (or, in SC, fire-ants--can you believe they can be beneficial?) will be attracted to your compost & fertilizer, surface into it, eat it (in whatever stage of decomposition they prefer), and go back underground, fertilizing and aerating the soil as they go. After several months of this, your fertilizer will be nicely mixed into your soil in a far better way than you could have done--a way that aerates the soil rather than compacting it and killing your beneficial fungi and bacteria, as digging does--and all the plants that used to be there will be dead and decayed thanks to your cardboard cutting off their light. (The cardboard also rots, you don't need to remove it.) Continue placing fertilizer (compost, manure) and mulch (straw, leaf-mold) on the surface every year, and the process continues; your soil gets healthier every year.

Yeah, I know; that was a bit long if you're not into gardening! I guess I'm just so excited about what I learn about this stuff; and as Paul points out, when I learn something I immediately want to teach it.

And, well... we just had a lovely time putting our feet under the same table and talking endlessly, and having family communion with them, and eating Sara's cookies, and... the last night about summed it up. For Luke's birthday we'd had a cookout and then a campfire, and after the neighbors they'd invited had left we stayed around the fire together and began to sing folk-songs. Sara sang one they'd written together for their children:


Refrain:
Sing O merry day
Brother Sun, lend your ray
Smile upon this happy morn
For to us a babe is born

And you, child, shall be called
Beloved of the Most High God
To join the ever-youthful throng
A singer of hosanna's song

Refrain

Take up your palm and shepherd's staff
Beckon the lion, bear and calf
Lead them to that holy hill
Where none shall ever hurt or kill

Refrain

The Prince of Peace has ridden by
And thrown down mountains lifted high
And raised the lowly, poor and least
To sit beside him at his feast.

Refrain

The battle's won, so run and play
Teach us to put our swords away
And lift our hands to take instead
A kingdom in this broken bread.


This is posted with Sara's permission and if you really like it and want to know the tune, call me and I'll sing it to you! (Or maybe I'll figure out a way to record it and post it up here.)

So we sat there together, in the glow of the fire, listening to each other's songs, and I felt a sense of... homeness. We live far from each other, and will only see each other now and then; but still we remind each other of what our true Home is like; and we will live there together someday.

the time of rides

The next stretch of our journey (yes, I'm still playing catch-up) could be characterized by on word: rides. It started in Uwharrie Forest, actually; we (perhaps ill-advisedly) decided to try, for the first time, deliberately walking at night. An hour past sundown would, according to Paul's map search of the day, take us to another church, and we dearly did want to go farther that night because the next day promised to be a scorcher and we'd have to walk thirteen miles before we hit a library. (Numbers of miles have become as eloquent for us as numbered hours of sleep for college students: thirteen means you'll have to walk past noon, until maybe two o'clock. We aim for eight, which will get you there by eleven.) We started walking, and it grew full dark, cars passing by us in bright flashes. (Don't worry, Dad, we were on the far side of a wide shoulder & I was behind Paul who had his reflector-vest on!) We walked and we walked, and just as we were beginning to wonder, a red pick-up truck slowed down beside us. A country-lookin' guy was at the wheel, and kids in the back of the extended cab. He offered us a ride in the bed. We jumped in.

I asked Paul, who hair was flying in the wind, if he wanted a hair-tie. He thought I was just being nice. When we got to the next town (you know, the place thirteen miles away?) he spent half an hour combing his hair!

That was the first ride. The second was the next day, a guy who was "a little short on good deeds for the day" and going all the way to Charlotte. He knocked out at least three days' walk for us. That night, a Wednesday night, we went to a Baptist church service and a lady invited us home to use her basement guest-apartment for the night, and bought us Wendy's burgers on the way. A day or two later (it's all running together!) we stopped at another church for the night and met a bunch of mothers coming out of a baby-shower. They called the pastor and his wife said no, we couldn't sleep there (our first outright refusal; but of course she wasn't looking at us) and the women got to work on an alternate plan. This was one bunch of mothers who weren't interested in saying "no, go away, you're not our problem"! Also they claimed to find it interesting and exciting, when I'd been worried we were just another thing to deal with; I think they were telling the truth, because when they did find us a place the whole bunch followed us there to settle us in! They found us the pastor of a Pentecostal church one of the women attended, someone who was more interested in folks with needs. They drove us to his church, (where there was a recovery group going on just then,) and led out to the cabin out back in the woods, where we would sleep. (Later the pastor showed up, and at his proposal we opted for a church van instead, because of the mosquitoes.)

And from this pastor we got the last ride in this dizzying array. It was his day off tomorrow, he said, why not drive us all the way to Gaffney? He offered, and drove, with an ease that suggested that yet again we weren't just another thing to deal with. He told us about the two young sons he and his wife adopted a few years back, young enough to be their grandchildren; taken by DCFS from a niece or nephew, I believe, who is on drugs and unwilling to quit. We discussed adoption, and the new policy, which seems to be (we met others this has happened to on this trip) to try to place a child for fostering and adoption within that child's extended family. (I approve.) We discussed the difficulties involved with drug addicts, and agreed about the right thing to do: to offer relentlessly the kind of help (and in abundance) that they truly need, refusing them the help they think they need--the covering-up, the bailing-out, all the support that makes the drug lifestyle sustainable. It's not sustainable. They need to know that. We told him about our ministry, and he was glad.

Then he dropped us off at the library, and within two hours our friend Sarah, with whom we were planning a visit, had picked us up.

whap

We were walking down the road in Uwharrie State Forest, cars passing by us (coming toward us of course, since we were walking on the left side of the road as we should) when suddenly...

WHAP!

Something hit me on the shoulder; I flinched away from the force of it, thinking: beer bottle? rear-view mirror? THEY HIT ME! All this within the space of a second; then I had turned to look after the car, which sped away--it had never slowed down--offering no clue. The object had fallen in the road.

A half-full package of Gummi Life Savers.

We picked it up and walked on down the road, speculating: did someone throw this at us? Try to give it to us? Intentional whapping or charitable impulse? My shoulder was still stinging. A lot of people don't realize how fast they're going, or how that affects someone who's just walking. We've had quite a few people yell out their windows at us as they go by; we catch a loud syllable "O" or "Ah" or "Eyy," and the car's flashed past before we can turn our heads, and we continue walking, speculating on whether it was hostile or friendly. (Once, an exception, we caught the full word "hippies." Still weren't sure if it was hostile or friendly.)

We did exactly that. We walked on down the road, the package of gummies swinging from my hand, speculating: did they throw it at us? Try to hand it to us? Did some kid toss it out the window to spite her brother? If it was a charitable act, did they hear the WHAP and feel stupid? My shoulder had stopped stinging by now. "Oh well," I said. "These look good."

And they were.

witness

I had another privilege at Tom's: speaking about God to someone who is, I think, in some way searching.

She was a college student who's paid by some government agency to help with Tom's son, Slate, who has cerebral palsy; she spent an afternoon at Tom's place with us, taking Slate outside for a walk and playing Candy-Land with him, and then stayed for supper as well.

She asked me why we were doing this walk. I have an array of short answers for that question ("It's a pilgrimage" "It's a faith walk" "It's kind of a spiritual thing...") and tend to pick the one that I think will be accessible to the asker, and watch their eyes to see if they're interested and I should explain more fully. (Or if they looked interested in the first place, I give them my favorite: "Well, we just got real excited about how Jesus sent his disciples out with not much and told them God would take care of them, and he says seek first the kingdom of God and your needs will be provided for, so we wanted to try it.") I think I told her it was sort of a spiritual thing, and then launched into the longer answer above; she looked surprised and a little intrigued, and didn't say anything more at that point.

But later she initiated a conversation about church. She used to attend as a kid, and was thinking of attending again but didn't know where to go. She queried me about my denomination (a bit hard to answer, but the Plow Creek church is Mennonite so I say that if they really want a denomination) and about denominations I'd recommend. I'm not very good at that, so it was a bit inconclusive... but later, as I sat at Tom's computer working on my book, she started the conversation up again. It was strange and interesting to her, she said, to meet people who took God so seriously. Everyone she knew mostly went to church and then didn't think about it anymore. That got us going a little more!

I told her about my year and a half of doubting, and how the question of whether God existed seemed like most important question in the world. I tried to explain why it seemed so important, why I could hardly imagine not taking it seriously. Tom came in at some point and the three of us kept talking--about heaven and hell, about judgmental churches, about taking God seriously. About her choice of a church, which she was still interested in; about feeling the presence of God in a church meeting and how you know it's real. That's the moment that imprinted itself on my mind: Tom and I, both from our different experiences, telling this girl with calm certainty that yes, sometimes you do experience the real presence of God, so much so that everyone in the room knows it, and we've experienced that. She seemed like someone who didn't need to be told theology she already knew, but simply needed someone to bear witness: this is real, I've seen, this is the most important thing there is.

And that's what we're supposed to do, I think. Bear witness.

at the potter's house

Seagrove, North Carolina is a sort of mecca for potters--apparently it started because of the local clay (though most of the potters there now get their clay from places like New Jersey!) Paul has a friend there, Tom Gray, who's a potter; we visited him over a long weekend, and enjoyed ourselves enormously. Not only do I love pottery, but Tom is also a wonderful cook and interesting to talk to, and has a big thing about table fellowship--or "putting your feet under the same table" as he calls it.

He made us some excellent pizza, with all fresh ingredients from the garden, and we ate on lovely glazed pottery plates, all different. The next night he made pot roast--also excellent--and the night after that he inspired Paul to try a new thing: French bread! True French bread is an extremely simple recipe--flour, yeast, salt and water--but the texture, that hard crusty outside and light fluffy inside, is hard to get. French bakers (and French people never make their own bread, by the way, they leave it to the experts) have ovens that blow steam over the bread at intervals. The way to approximate this at home is with a simple spray bottle and some water; spray into the oven and it turns into steam. Paul did it, and I was astonished at the result. It was genuine!



That same day Tom had let me do something that was a help to him and a privilege for me--I made pottery. I, Heather, who've never touched a wheel, actually made pottery to sell! It sounds impossible, but there are two kinds of pottery: the turned work made on the wheel, and "slab work." (Try to imagine making a square platter on a wheel, and you'll see why there's two kinds of pottery!) With slab work, you use a roller to create a slab of clay, then lay it over a plaster mold to give it its shape, smooth it down onto the mold, and leave it to dry. When it's dry you pop it off the mold and voila! (As the French say.) Ready for the first firing. After which you put on a mix of chemicals that will react in the heat of the second firing to produce the colors and effects you want. (I didn't do that part. Of course.) With slab work the important thing is not skill but carefulness, which makes it tedious for experienced potters and easy for beginners. So Tom and I both got the good end of the deal.


Here, Paul is putting scrap clay through a machine that compresses it into a long cylinder like the one in front of me; I'm flattening the cylinder by whapping it on the table. (The cooks kneading the dough!) Behind me is a sort of wringer where you put the clay through between two rollers, flattening it uniformly into the thickness you want; farther behind me is a shelf covered with the white plaster molds made by Tom for this kind of work.

Here I'm smoothing the clay down on the mold with a wet sponge; then after I trim off the edges there I am with the "finished" product, a deep squarish plate. I made fifteen different pieces, mostly this same shape, while chatting with Tom and Paul, listening to Third Day, and drinking Pepsi. What could be more fun?

the nameless church

Then we visited our friends Ryan & Ashley and Ian & Jamie, two young couples who live together in a big house and are part of an emerging-church group that, last time we saw them, didn't yet have a name--hence the "nameless church." We stayed with them over Labor Day weekend, eating more hamburgers than we've eaten on the trip yet! (Somehow it seemed like everybody organized a cookout on a different day, and we made it to most of them...) We hung out, rested, I worked some more on the book... We watched "Little Miss Sunshine," a truly hilarious movie about a family of disparate eccentrics who go on a long road-trip in an old Volkswagen van without a starter, in hopes of arriving on time for the Little Miss Sunshine contest that their little daughter has qualified for. Every time they start the van there's a scene of them all pushing it and then running to catch up to it, jumping in the side door one after the other...

The really funny thing is that Ryan and Ashley recently acquired and took a road trip in, you guessed it... an old Volkswagen van without a starter! Just for kicks on our last night there we decided to drive the van to Carle's, the most famous of Fredericksburg ice cream places, (where Dan and Hannah had also taken us our first night there!) for some ice cream. We had a great re-enactment of all those movie scenes right there in the street, jumping in the door breathless and laughing, the entertainment of the evening for everyone who saw us.

Ashley had a book about knitting lying around, and I got interested (my mom taught me when I was little but I'd long forgotten how) and Ashley gave me a refresher course--and some needles and yarn! So now I have something to do with myself if I'm stuck with no library and no book...

We left Fredericksburg by bus. We'd been planning this for awhile; we'd been noting that we weren't moving south fast enough, and even though in this weather it seems hard to believe, we weren't staying ahead of the winter as we needed to. So... with some money some generous people earlier in the trip had given us, we took the bus from Fredericksburg, VA to Greensboro, NC, and saved ourselves about a month of walking. I watched from the bus window as the first few scattered jack pines among the woods began to take over, and the dirt turned reddish; I saw my first redbud and my first magnolia. Back in the South. It's been a long time.

my inner geek

Then we took the commuter train down to Fredericksburg and had a visit with good friends from College, Dan and Hannah. Well, Hannah was more my friend and Dan was more my brother's friend, but since they were already dating at the time it all mixed together pretty well... We were all part of a club called Pooh Corner, aka the Wheaton College Children's Literature Oral Interpretation Society. We met every Tuesday might at 9:58 to read children's books out loud, doing the voices & everything. (My brother made an excellent Gurgi, from Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. "Crunchings and munchings!") Ah, those were the days... And Hannah and I cross-stitched our way through D & D sessions, and she read Pilgrim's Progress (for our Modern Mythology class) to me out loud while I sewed a sword belt. Yeah. We were geeks, and proud of it.

I'd been looking forward to seeing them for awhile (though in typical Heather fashion I hadn't let them know we'd be coming through as early as I started looking forward to it!); somehow I kept remembering little things our friend-group was into, like the Dr. Demento CDs (funny songs; kind of wacked-out funny songs) and little humorous sketches my brother used to play us from MP3 files (like the side-splitting "Internet Help-desk" sketch.) Hannah says I was feeling nostalgic for my inner geek.

And it was a lovely visit; my inner geek was satisfied to the full. I turned off my inner novelist (who'd worked very hard on chapters 7 and 8 in D.C.), since there was less computer availability, and had some blessed free time reading the latest book by Lois McMaster Bujold, a favorite author of Hannah's and mine. (She used to write science fiction and has lately gotten into fantasy... imagine that!) I hadn't been expecting it to be out yet, let alone available to me (Bujold's popular, and I wasn't expecting to find the book in library after library); I finished it in two days. After Dan and Hannah's toddler, Titus, went to bed, we watched a couple episodes of Firefly (a truly good sci-fi show) and the next day during his afternoon nap we watched Unbreakable--about what superheroes would be like if they existed in the real world, fascinating.

And Paul got to listen to my favorite Dr. Demento CD...

street church

In DC we visited another street church like the one in Boston, this one simply called "Street Church." It was a great experience--made me a little nervous when we were asked to hannd out fliers inviting people to the service, but I go t over it! None of the other street churches we've visited handed out fliers, but I rather liked this church's reason for doing so; they were trying to invite everybody who's usually in that park at that hour, homeless and far-from-homeless. The park was downtown, and people who work around it often take their lunch breaks their around the time they hold the service; a few of them have actually started attending--with the homeless! I like that very much; breaking down walls.

I also liked their way of doing communion. They had, I think, a good balance. Some people make the mistake of assuming homeless people are automatically not Christians, and that they need to be preached to primarily, and encouraged to make a profession of faith; for those people, serving communion at a street church wouldn't come to mind at all. Some go to the opposite extreme and offer communion to all, with an inadequate explanation of what it is, and sometimes a manner that assumes everyone will take it (leading people to take it even if they're not really sure what it means.) I think it's tremendously important to be open to the spiritual lives that the homeless already have; I also think communion is a tremendously important thing and people, for their own sake, should only take it if they understand and believe in what it is and means. So I liked the way they had--in the little half-sheet order of service they handed round--an explanation of what communion is and what it means. I also liked--since the explanation was given only in writing and wasn't spoken--the fact that people had to come up to the front if they wanted to receive it. I think the method I would like best (for us to use in retreats, for instance) would be to say a few gentle and serious words about what communion is and how taking it is a sign of accepting Jesus' presence in your life--and how if you are not ready for that, you really do not need to take it--and then hand the bread and wine around in a circle, skipping whoever wants to be skipped.

break

Okay, for you who are checking this regularly, SORRY! It's been almost a week and a half since I last posted, right? Well, here I am again.

We've come to our mid-walk break. Actually we're over halfway through it! Last Saturday morning, a day that was predicted as 98 degrees, we walked into Washington, DC, and made it to Nate and Angela's house by 10:00. Just under the wire. Nate and Angela, friends of Paul's (he met Nate on an online discussion forum called Jesus Radicals), have just married and moved into a house where they've invited other Christians to live in community with them... and it seemed like all the other Christians they'd found had just moved in that week! I felt right at home. I've lived in a couple of communal households, and this one reminded me a lot of the last one--the Patch, the "young people's household" at Reba, where I have some good memories. I pray that the household thing works for the folks in D.C. It can be difficult living communally, and it can foster some real spiritual growth; it can also not be the best thing when you have, say, a new baby. (Actually I've never seen that done. But you can imagine.)

Anyway they gave us a wonderful welcome, and the next day I had a wonderful birthday, with a convivial blueberry-pancake supper provided by Paul, and my birthday wish: a viewing of the extended edition of The Two Towers. (We had some technical difficulties and couldn't get it started as early as we meant to, so it lasted till midnight!) And the next day Paul made his famous pizza for everybody, and I spent the day writing and watching favorite scenes from Return of the King on my borrowed laptop as breaks. Aaah.

More soon... I just realized it's a lot more important to post this NOW than fit my whole break into one post! Love you guys...