A QUIET LIFE
Some Christians give the impression that the Christian life is like living in Disneyland. They apparently skip from one breathless roller-coaster experience of God to another. The Lord seems to be very, very busily engaged in almost constant conversation with them, they enjoy a broadband prayer life, and epic miracles accompany their every waking hour. Bluntly, I don’t find the life of faith to be like this. God is wonderful, and my life has been punctuated with more than my fair share of wonders, but many of my days fade into grey and should be filed under the heading of ‘nothing much happened.’
But perhaps we should look at those lacklustre days with renewed appreciation. I remember a visit to sweltering Banda Aceh, Indonesia, the city that suffered the greatest losses from the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami that followed. On that day, something quite extraordinary happened to the sea, which bunched itself into a wave that delivered a knockout punch to the town. Over 200,000 perished there in that pummelling, including a coastal fishing village that just disappeared off the map in seconds. Tired fishermen pointed their boats back towards port and home that night, unaware that a monster had crept beneath their bows while they fussed over their nets. To their horror, there was no port; no homes to sleep in, and no wives and children to greet them. All was gone.
One morning I sipped coffee with Wahuel, a smiling man who told me that I looked young from the neck down (almost a compliment), and who had lost both his children to that wicked wave. His wife’s entire family was wiped out. And then I chatted with a giggling Nurlaila, a delightful fifteen-year-old whose home is still the temporary barracks, hastily thrown up in the wake of that terrible day. Both her parents perished in that awful sea, and just seconds after telling me that most dreadful news, she burst into singing – in perfect English – the Abba classic, I believe in angels.’ I’m sure she does, but for a moment I wondered how. There were so many there whose lives had been smashed to smithereens by that ominously historic day. Mass graves abounded – anonymous resting places for thousands. Many were never found, swallowed up by the ravenous beast that was the sea.
All of which made a restoration of relative normality a delight to behold. We visited the Community and Children’s Centre run by Children on the Edge, the charity originally launched by the late Body Shop founder Anita Roddick. It was a hive of bustling normality. Kindergarten children giggled on the swings. Computer skills classes were held in one room, embroidery in another. In the large hall, a children’s choir practiced their performance for an upcoming concert. All very ordinary, and wonderful with it.
On the last night of our trip, we attended a football match organised by Children on the Edge, the culmination of a two-week tournament. It was just like an England world cup match – a mixture of brilliance and ineptitude, a penalty shootout nail-biter to decide the result, and even a petulant young player given a red card and sent off for fouling and then getting lippy with the ref. We cheered ourselves hoarse as the grinning captain held the moulded plastic trophy aloft: it was almost as big as he was.
I wiped a tear away as I watched ordinary kids enjoying another quiet, ordinary day, free from fear – for a moment at least – from a monster wave. They were able to dream about bending it like Beckham; able to laugh and argue and pull faces and have melting ice cream running down their chins; able to do what kids do best – just living extravagantly for the moment. These people didn’t want a life that looked like a disaster movie, but where the special effects were real; they just wanted to be able to laugh and cry and wake and sleep and love and die like everybody else. A quiet life.
Perhaps some of us are suffering from the raging disease that afflicts all who know for sure where their next meal is coming from – boredom. The ordinary looks rather dull. Let’s pause again, and be grateful for those days of quiet predictability, where nothing much happens, including nothing much that is bad. Somehow, the ordinary can start to look rather magnificent.