Antecedents

This blogging thing didn't turn out like I thought it would. I thought I would spend an hour so each night of the Ethiopia trip blogging and leaving pictures for you all to see as our journey progressed. What I didn't count on was the long arduous travel days, the lack of any processing time, inaccessibility to the internet and a general inability (partly due to jet lag) to focus the soul after so many images and experiences came rushing at us like headlights in a snowstorm.

There is an African story of some western travelers who followed native guides on a particularly dramatic journey. At one point the guides sat down and refused to move on. Upon questioning, the guides explained the reason they had stopped was that they had to give time for their souls to catch up to their bodies. A good bit of our trip felt like our bodies were dragging our reluctant souls along at a pace that seemed unfortunate - much like a hurried mother drags a crying child down a sidewalk who just wanted to stop to pet a puppy. We had a job to do and a lot of ground to cover. But I think our souls are still back in the highands of Ethiopia somewhere gasping in awe at a stunning view, or teasing some kids, or marveling while some five-year-old herder coerces 50 or so dog-skinny goats up a mountain side. And it just may take some time for our souls to even want to return to these bodies now recouping from the second shock of jet lag in a few short weeks.

Over the next few days, I'll recall the trip as best as I can remember it. I have Nanci's penciled notes to help. But let me start from before the beginning:

As our kids have grown and become increasingly independent, Nanci and I have been longing to share more of our life together. For years now, my work as a musician has kept me travelling far and wide while Nanci's work as a teacher and homemaker has kept her closer to home. For the most part, this has been okay. We've experienced the loneliness of so much of our lives being separate but it's a life we've felt called to and sustained in. Recently, however this has started to stretch thin, and as our boys don't need the intense care they once did, we've been watching for ways to live and experience life together more fully. So a few months ago I decided to go on a fast requesting that God would grant us this wish. And I decided I would fast from coffee as I drink so much of the stuff that a coffee fast would remind me many times a day to pray our request. It was less than a month into the fast that I got a call from Heather Plett at the Canadian Food Grains Bank asking if I would consider going to Ethiopia, and the request extended to Nanci as well as myself. What I didn't know at the time, but has since become a source of amusement to me, is that Ethiopia is famous for many things, not the least of which is that Ethiopia turns out to be the geographic origin of the coffee tree :-)

Another significant antecedent to our trip was a conversation I had with a friend just two days before we left home. Cathy Campbell is an Anglican priest here in Winnipeg who wrote a deeply insightful book on food justice issues as they relate to “kingdom etiquette.” The book is called Stations of the Banquet (Liturgical Press) and think will become my main text as I reflect back on our trip over the next months. Anyway, Cathy encouraged me to recall as I travel that immediately after his birth, we first encounter Jesus, the bread of life, lying all swaddling and gorgeous... in a feeding trough. There is something profoundly sacramental about food. And if we would have eyes to see and ears to hear, what we learn might be far more than a flat, linear understanding of food security, but rather of gift, gospel and the dignified communion that springs from encountering together and sharing God's goodness. Food is life and Christ is food – family is celebrated, nourished and sustained around the table. “Come to the table” has been an almost audible pulse of the last few weeks – perhaps it always has been so, but like the pulse of crickets in the night, it sometimes takes a particular circumstance to notice what has never ceased to sound.