Word Feast : Because words are meant to be eaten. Rev 10:9

It’s definitely Spring time. I can tell by the tree outside my office window. It’s a splendid tree, and I love looking at it, but mostly during this time of the year when it’s leaves are the greenest.

So in the spirit of Spring I’ll be posting something slightly newer over the next 4-5 weeks. It’s a short(ish) story about some people standing in a queue. I know that doesnt sound very exciting, and it’s not really, at least not the action-packed thriller or scandal-laden drama kind of excitement. It’s a just a platform to say a few things about love, and the many facets that love takes. I hope those facets shine through, but even if they don’t I hopes the story is at least a little amusing.

This story had burrowed itself deep under a pile of drafts, where it’s a nice and warm, for a long time now. To be honest I didn’t think it would ever surface, and it’s only because of a few good people that it did. So thanks Mikey for inspiring me to land the plane. Can’t wait for your story to take off. And thanks to my sister-in-law Chelsea for the helpful ideas, comments and editing.

That sounded like the acknowledgment page in a novel, which this isn’t. The truth is that every story involves a few good characters driving it along, be it in a fictional drug line or real life. Hope you enjoy it!

Secrets are powerful. If you know something deep and mysterious about someone then you have power in the form of potential energy, the blackmail type, a power that grows as long as you can keep the secret. Not all secrets are sinister though; girls giggle secrets of boys they like, and they too gain power, the kind that comes from being trusted. Some secrets are harmful, like the guilt of the past. They’re incredibly powerful. Some secrets contain the power to change lives.

The campsite was not your average Christian camp location. No mountains or soccer fields or tires to squeeze through and walls to slug over. Just a musty Convent in one of the murkiest areas of JHB. Instead of hearing rivers running or birds chirping we were treated to the tune of cars howling in the auto shop next door, accompanied by the wailing of the local Mosque. The place looked and smelled old, as though St Peter himself was on retreat there, back in the day. It’s rooms were decorated with paintings of those guys, the style of painting you only see on secret wallpaper revealed behind a smashed wall in an old hotel. The eating hall was a cramped wooden chamber with doors in the walls that could have led to secret Nun tunnels linking to the Vatican.

It was no ordinary Christian camp. Everyone who had ever been came back totally transformed but would never tell you what the hell actually happened. It was all a big secret, designed to protect events which contained power in surprise. It also made parents really suspicious. There was also a lot of tension between peers who never got to go, that kind of outsider jealousy on the one side clashing with prideful exclusiveness on the other. That whole ministry was one powerful secret.

And it really was powerful. I learned the secret of how God’s love is best displayed and authenticated and communicated through acts of service. I learned the power or praying in secret in a secret prayer closet all day long. I learned how releasing secrets can unleash the power of freedom. I experienced that transformation for myself, and then got to practice the power of service and watch it change others.

I also came to learn how draining this kind of love through service can be. Not the deep kind of draining, the one where the soul is leaking and only God’s finger can plug the hole. I mean the frivolous kind of draining, the one caused by serious lack of sleep and the energy depleted in trying to contain emotions. The kind coffee can help with.

And herein lay one of the best kept secrets: a jar of Jacobs instant coffee hidden behind a flowerpot on the top shelf above one of the secret tunnels to the Vatican. It was a secret between our Camp Mom and some of the higher echelons of coffee society, the kind of secret that has power in the affection transferred between the loving care-giver and a seemingly insignificant need. The power of small acts of love in service.

Thanks Mom Gail for all the secret coffee, and for authenticating the bigger acts of love with the smallest act of service, which in turn authenticated the biggest act of love where Jesus laid down his life for us.

I stay up late on a Sunday night just so I can hear the silence. My bedroom window is the speaker through which Sports Club music, traffic noise, and drunken pedestrian shouts are broadcast into my sleep. But an hour or two each Sunday night is not enough, so I regularly try and escape the noise for a day or two.

One year my buddy James and I tried to find some quiet in the Mpumalanga mountain district, but the place we had booked to camp had lots of cars and kids and manicured lawns. So we rode out of town and found another place out in the woods which seemed deserted and unkempt.

It’s there that we met Fred, an old man living on his own in a beat-up caravan in the park, getting paid minimal wage but with the benefit of a front porch made up of the Sabie forests. It would make me sound good to say that we befriended the elderly guy because we could see he was lonely, but thats not the truth, not for me anyway. We first went over to speak to him because he was playing his music way too loudly. There was so much wrong with the picture, not excluding the choice of music, the distortion of the tiny speakers, and the contrast with the solemn Lowveld Panorama. We had to save the silence.

James is a guy with a big heart, so he wasn’t brutal about it, in fact the only thing he did was make small-talk and throw in how far we had come for some peace and quiet. A feint hint at best. The result was the music turned softer, but only to tell us some stories of his time as a soldier on the border, and how he had lost his wife. It was then that we decided to drop the music issue.

We invited him over to our campsite for a poitjie, which was a disaster story of it’s own. I tried in vain to rescue it from becoming chicken soup by transferring it from the cast-iron pot to the gas stove, but it didn’t seem to work. It did however give us time to hear more stories while I attempted to boil off the liquid. A few hours later and we had learned that Fred didn’t just lose a wife but was about to lose his back, with mega surgery coming soon which would either allow him to walk in the forests once again, or leave him paralyzed forever.

We ate the soup. He stared into the distance a lot. We tried to seem concerned. I was concerned, about my poitjie making skills. He pretended to like the poitjie. I pretended to know what he was going through, but I didn’t. I pushed limp and soggy chicken skin around my plate. He chewed on undercooked rice and smoked a lot. At least there was some silence.

The only way to make a happy ending out of bad stories about poitjie soup and broken lives is to have a really spectacular cup of coffee. Here’s the recipe: Double espresso’s made in the moka pot on the gas stove. Add milk chocolate to the upper chamber and let it melt while the pressure builds in the boiler. Stir the mixture as it bubbles into the upper chamber, keeping the chocolate from building bricks. Heat up ceramic mugs, and pour in 1/3 condensed milk. Pour the chocolate/espresso mixture into the milk in a smooth swirling motion.

That’s enough of a sugar/caffeine combination to perk a hippo. Which meant sleep did not come easily, but it did leave sufficient time to ponder the meaning of suffering in this world. I cant say I figured it out. Perhaps I would have done better had my heart not been echoing it’s palpitations in my sleeping bag. Perhaps I would have done better had Fred turned his darn music softer. Or perhaps it was meant to remain as much a mystery as the reason for my poitjie turning to soup.

The journey was way too long. Australia can be quite anal over many things, one of them being speed limits on national highways. Can you imagine doing a 1200km trip at 100 km/hr? I guess it didn’t matter too much, because we were on holiday, it was a beautiful stretch of road, and we were heading to the famed Gold Coast.

The catapult that shot us slowly down that long road was the combination of beach names like ‘Surfers Paradise’, ‘Broadbeach’ and ‘Runaway bay’. And Mooloolaba. Which doesn’t sound like anything familiar, but is honestly one the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever been to. What it lacks in waves it makes up in golden sand, lush Pandanus and a big old fashion sail-ship stuck in it’s cove.

I’m not the kind of guy that can just sit on a beach and suntan, pretending not to stare at other tanners through the security of sunglasses. I mean that’s fun for a while but after a minute or two I’ve got to do something. Swim, hit a cricket ball, throw a rugby ball, pat a little rubber ball back and forth for a world record 580 times. We didn’t have many of those balls with us though, so we had to resort to swimming.

Two problems: The water is freezing, and I had no swimming shorts. It was like being a Vaalie in Cape Town all over again. I did however have an old pair of shorts in my bag, but they were really dirty, like I had used them to wash a muddy dog or something. But when you’ve done your staring what else can a man do but don the dirties go diving in an ice bucket?

I ran in like I was naked and managed to survive the initial shock, paddling about in the absence of waves. When the monster ice-headache set in I set out of the water and noticed to my surprise how nice and clean my pants had suddenly become. It may seem like a really trivial incident, but we were in the habit of trying to learn something new every day, and so that night we philosophised the dirty pants into a lesson.

It goes something like this: We let low self-confidence prevent us from doing the very things that would build it. Put that in your coffee pot and drink it.

Speaking of which, on the very long drive to the beach of dirty-pants and ice-headaches we had the best cup of coffee in Australia. No it wasn’t Starbucks, not even close. It was at a dirty old Greek coffee shop stuck at one of those desperation stations, the kind you only go to because you missed the other ones in your 100 km/hr hurry on the highway.

There’s a lot of lessons in that cup of coffee too, but I think they’re quite obvious and you would get them on your own anyway. Not like the dirty pants story, that ones a keeper.

Christmas is often a strange time for me. The end of the year often leaves me tired, thoughtful and a little raw. It’s a good thing that at the same time is a religious celebration filled with messages of hope and various strains of merriment, which counters my personal melancholy. But sometimes it’s not enough.

When I was a kid I thought I’d never like girls, and I thought it was pretty certain that I was a mutant-type of child who would never fall for that mushy stuff. But along with the rest of the human race I grew up and fell in love all over the place. I think at that time my dream of being the lone-ranger warrior type had swiftly changed to being a good ol’ married man, and I think the plan was to have it done by 26. I’m 30 and still the warrior type.

How that relates to Christmas time is simply the fact that the family season tends to compound any longings for one of your own. Don’t get me wrong, spending it with the family of my birth is always a sincerely special occasion, I guess it’s just that at that time you realise how well the two go together.

2007 was a Christmas like that. I had just switched careers from being an engineer to following my dream of being a pastor, and hence had much food for retrospective thought. Those amplified pensive waves combined with the usual brooding to bring on quite a tender emotional state. The Christmas spirit did a lot to bring some warmth, and the family gatherings with wheelbarrow loads of sticky gammon, potato bake, grilled chicken, roast lamb and less-impressive salad types also balanced the musings with dashings of great flavor.

I’ve realised that there are some couples that intimidate single people, especially those who look like they’re constantly practising patting their dogs. Then there are some that manage to infuse the good side of the relational spirit into the lives of single people. My friend and colleague Stephen and his wife Bianca are pretty peerless in that regard. As Christmas day 2007 was dying and everyone was starting to settle into that weird combination of anticlimax and satisfaction, this couple invited me over to her families farm to sit by a fire and drink some coffee. Of course I said yes.

We sat by that fire and drank around 3 mugs each of some cheap Portuguese coffee found only on the streets of Rosettenville. I think we finished a whole tin. I dont remember anything that we spoke about, or anything significant that happened. It was just a warm night around a warm fire with coffee.

Maybe that black coffee represented the proverbial cure to the emotional hangover of Christmas. Or maybe it represented the last order to a great meal, perfecting a day of physical and emotional mealtime. Maybe it represented the kind of fellowship that is inclusive and therapeutic, or maybe even the perk to kick-start a new year.

Or perhaps it’s just the aroma that is loved universally and which can only be the satisfaction of significant relationships with families and friends.

“You’ve got to learn to let go!” She said. I said: “I am who I am”. I also said: “The demon is in too deep and I cant get it out”. I also said: “If I do I’ll fall down this cliff and die”.

I’m not schizophrenic, I really did give three different responses to the same remark. They were of course, in different contexts.

We were walking along North beach Durban where an ol’ timer was playing some Louis Armstrong on a beat up Les Paul replica. She talked about spontaneously doing a little waltz, and how cool that would be. I talked about how spontaneity is over-rated. It’s unromantic I know, especially considering the location: warm sea warmer air but cool breeze cold ice-cream hot sand all people all types animals included everywhere smiles all around. But no waltzing.

I said that the extreme of spontaneous is erratic, like a guy who paints his house a different color every day. Orange! Now pink! No blue! Purple! Pink with purple dots! He’s crazy, not cool. She said I’ve got to learn to let go.

I was sitting in my office, facing a wise spiritual guide. I was on the couch, he on the chair. The view is funny this way around. But he was more skilled at this, artfully removing the splinter like a man working on a tiny 1912 Titanic replica. This iceberg sank me some time ago, but the wound kept surfacing in strange places like debris on different shores.

I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to lose that memory, even though it’s presence tended to fester. That’s the trouble with wounds like these, they trick us into hanging on to them. They use nostalgia to romanticize the past. Or they try forgetfulness to hide the bad and reveal only the good. Or they try spite and the lie that holding a grudge means holding a weapon that can get some revenge. But they’re all tricks, at the end of the day hanging onto hurt or some bad experience never works out in our favor. He said I’ve got to learn to let go.

I’m hanging on a tiny tree attached to a sheer cliff. We’re both holding on, the tree and I, he with his roots and me with my fingers, both of us fighting harder than the other to stay attached. You’ve got to learn to let go, he said. Yes the tree, he said it. I think because he had a better chance at living with me off his back. “You’ve got to learn to let go!”

Sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. If you’re hanging on a cliff and a tree tells you to let go, you don’t have to listen to him. Because if you do you may fall and die.

If you’re hanging onto bitterness or jealousy or hurt or sadness then you should let go. Cos if you don’t you may fall slowly and die slower.

If you’re hanging on to who you are and your unique personality and don’t want to be spontaneous? I think hold on. If the whole world let go there would be chaos, and anarchy and we’d run out of house paint.