MosaicImages: No substitute for comfort and relationship

This is a quote that a friend shared with me recently. "There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken for granted relationship." (Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head). Let’s dissect this phrase a bit:

1. There is no substitute for the comfort. When cooking, there are some things that can be substituted when you don’t have a particular ingredient. We learned this lesson very well when working in Africa, where often times the ingredient required for an American recipe just wasn’t quite available at the local village market. For goodness sake, the back inside cover of my Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook has an entire list of “emergency substitutions”, divided into two columns: “if you don’t have…substitute with”. My favorite emergency substitution that we always used in Africa was for brown sugar, which you can make with 1-cup regular sugar plus 2 tablespoons molasses. That does require that you have some molasses available, which in Congo was a staple in my shipment of food from the US but in the Central African Republic, all it took to get as much molasses as you wanted was to take a quick trip down to the town where the sugar factory was pumping out sugar cubes, granulated sugar and sugar “syrup”, which worked quite well for any recipe that needed molasses.

But enough about cooking and food substitutions. There is no substitute for the comfort. I like the word “comfort” here, and the fact that it’s preceded by the definite article “the”. There is something to be said about comfort. We humans are always seeking it. We want to live a comfortable life. We want to sleep in a comfortable bed. I like to ride on a bike seat that is comfortable! Comfort is a good thing.

Now taking a glimpse at the second part of the phrase “the utterly taken for granted relationship”. Which are the relationships in life that are “utterly taken for granted”?? Perhaps the teacher-student relationship. Or a parent-child relationship. Those relationships that you just take for granted, you don’t even think about them, and perhaps most hurting of all, you don’t appreciate how important they are or how easy it is to just go on living without acknowledging how important a relationship can be in your life.

We, the local church here in my world, took the opportunity to provide not money nor gifts, we just decided that hey, there is no substituting the comfort that we can share and offer to those who we take for granted in our local community. We spent an afternoon being the church, not doing church. We played with kids. We painted with our fingers. We had good fun running outside and eventually tossing abandon to the wind and throwing water balloons all over the playground. I mean, a girl does have to “profiteren” as they say in the local Flemish language! (Profiteren: to take advantage of). So, when the weather offers 80+ degrees and sunshine, bring on the water balloons! And make sure there is plenty of water and plastic cups for drinking to assure that everyone stays hydrated (now, that’s the nurse in me that’s talking). We shared stories about Zach, the short guy that owns the mobile phone shop in the city who kept ripping people off by charging them lots of money for cheap phones. We shared about Jesse, an important man who came to town to talk to people and many who came in contact with Jesse changed their hearts when they heard him speak. And how, when Jesse identifies Zach as someone important, someone that Jesse wanted to hang out with, wow, how quickly Zach came down from that tree he had climbed so that he could see this important guy. Zach threw open the door to his home, hung out with Jesse and then decided to give back 4x the money that he had taken from people. And that was a truly fun moment in the story, as Pastor Steve, a.k.a. Zach, went around the room and gave chocolate euro coins to all the kids in the room with the warning “eat your chocolate quickly, it’s warm today”.

We call our program “the friendship club”, because we’re building bridges of trust in the local community that can bear the truth about Jesus (or Jesse, as he showed up in our story). It’s not rocket science. It’s all about no substitutions. Sharing comfort. Being in relationship. It’s that easy. In any culture.