Risky Business

I completed the last entry of the journal sounding as if adjusting to “the British system of driving” was easily done. If so, it was a prevarication. There is something about getting into a car on the “wrong” side and driving on the “wrong” side of the road that seems terribly unnatural. When we picked up the car, I accepted the fact that the gear shift would be operated by my left hand, not my right and I thanked my lucky stars that the arrangement of the pedals on the floor were in the “right” order. I told myself that under no circumstances was I to pull out of the parking space and drive on the right side of the road; it had to be the left. I started the car, pulled out and automatically swung to the right. Some tolerant guy turned around the corner to face me head-on, stopped and let me swing over to the left as though I was just going through some extra maneuvers to get out of my spot. It was unnatural. We were downtown, so we moved through the city traffic and onto the freeway and I thought I had it all figured out. I went to change lanes, flipped the turn signal like I am supposed to and the windshield wipers began to flap.

The next day, we drove up Table Mountain to the Cable Car station. I will spare you the details.

Two insights come out of this. The first has to do with my experience of the unnatural. Driving on the right side of the road is, every American knows, the right way of doing things. Somehow, when driving started back when, the British either wanted to do things opposite “the American Way” just for spite, or they didn’t get the memo, right? That’s what we tend to think. Everything in my fiber tells me how to drive correctly. But the truth is, the British and their motoring heirs are not wrong, and we are not right, or vice-versa. What is embraced by me as natural has much more to do with what I have been taught thoroughly, and then I have practiced and has become familiar. Now that I have nearly a week of driving under my belt the unnatural is becoming more familiar and acceptable and predictable and even comfortable.

There are still surprises. Today Laura and I motored about 100 km to Hermanus, a sea coast town along the Indian Ocean east of Cape Town. The mountains dropping off into the sea were beautiful. We went there to have discussion with Dr. John de Gruchy, a retired theology professor who was active in the movement to end apartheid and helped to set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was a fascinating discussion. We ate lunch afterward in a little place looking out on the bay and saw whale surfacing and blowing and leaping out on the water. We drove back along the coast - a very beautiful part of our world. Out on the two-lanes, going the speed limit sometimes as fast as 120 km/hr., we discovered that passing is done differently here. The slower car moves onto the paved shoulder to let the faster car behind pass. But the adjustment I had to make was acceptable because I had accepted accepting the difference. And I wonder, “What does that have to say about the way we handle diversity?”

Peter Storey filled the hour and a half we spent with him on Saturday with a lot of profound reflection from his experience in the resistance to apartheid and work of healing the nation of South Africa after 1994. He also has a very hard expectation (and a right one, I think), that if the church wants to be where Jesus is, we the church need to be with the poor. In the midst of the conversation he emphasized the way sensitive people of privilege who want to care for the oppressed are inclined to work up the formula to fix the situation for them rather than listening to them first, learning from them and asking how they can help.

Engaging transformative work requires you to step into the place where you will become transformed yourself, where the unnatural becomes acceptable and the unfamiliar becomes familiar. Dr. John de Gruchy, whom we saw today, would add that, from a Christian stance, this is not an option we can take or leave. It is necessary for our own salvation – reconciliation with God which is the heart of the Gospel also wraps into it reconciliation with others at interpersonal, tribal/national and international levels. You have to step into the re-learning mode, be re-formed yourself again and again, if you want to truly experience the new-life generated by God’s Holy Spirit.

This takes risk, which is the second insight driving here has given me. Last night I caught up on writing my journal and reflected on this venture. Driving on the left side of the road might be the first truly foreign venture, completely outside my box in years. The stakes are high. Coming to South Africa, too, was a risk. We have never been in a different part of the world before, and so far without a guide. Yet risking has taken us somewhere and given us gifts we never would have experienced otherwise. Likewise, whether it is an individual or a congregation, the venture of ministry involves risk-taking. You necessarily become vulnerable, sometimes clueless, and sometimes anxious and forced to depend solely on God. And when you do that…you discover that you are being held by a hand that you may never have otherwise have noticed. That’s what it’s like here.

I realize that others have already done these kinds of things. We are not the first. That is not the point. The point is that it is the first time for us, and we are being blessed in ways we never would have imagined. More doors keep on opening. We are meeting people from so many varieties of life situations who are telling their amazing stories and gifting us with their gems of insight. In the midst of the sometimes risky unfamiliar we are discovering the kind of insight and inspiration that reshapes us and prepares us for enhanced ministry to come.