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Africa Inland Mission
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Kijabe, Kenya
00220

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When Zachamee was little, he used to roar at ladybugs and tell on his brother for poinking him. I’m pretty sure that was just last week, but then Friday I took his senior portraits (😶), and when did time get this wild and slippery? Largely in spite of me, Zee has grown into this gorgeous person of justice, relentless in championing those without a voice. Folks displaced by war or trafficked far from home: my kid has got you. His room is a shipwreck with four corners, it’s true, but he’s faithful and perceptive and unabashedly nurturing. I’m just a wee bit proud of you, Zachary. Remember to be brave and kind out there. Keep your gaze pinned on the overlooked. Turn your ear toward the still, hushed voice of a God who’s worth more than the sum of our lives. You plan to study law to uphold humans caught in the grim underbellies of our world. I cannot think of a more fitting calling for you, even as it rattles my living daylights. But I will not bubble wrap your life. Instead I’m trusting God to go firmly with you, so that justice lights up every sky you step beneath. You will always be my fierce and beautiful kid, and I will never leave your corner.

Every year, immense swirls of zebras, trailed by wildebeest and gazelles, beat a circular path around the Mara and Serengeti, chasing the rain-watered plains. Few sights have made me feel smaller or more startled alive by wonder. At the Mara River, zebras plunged through water lumped with crocodiles, graceful even in their fear. After reaching the far bank, some of the stripey guys turned to gaze back before skittering into the water again to return to the side where they’d begun. I didn’t understand it until I did: plains zebras live in families. If all of their family members don’t cross, they circle back and stick together. In a rare nature-channel moment, we saw a croc and a leopard locked in a half-hour, high-stakes staring contest over a downed zebra. I don’t even remember for sure who won, because I only had eyes for a small someone else: this kid-sized zebra in the background, watching his mama thrash and go still. I suppose this is how animals work. I suppose crocodiles and leopards need their dinners too. But even now, the only thing I know to feel is sorrow, and the ragged wish that life wasn’t quite so soaked with death. These days everything hums a tune of foreboding—the wind packs it into low-grade panic in my lungs, the skeletal trees dance to its rhythm, my shadow mourns behind me even in the cheeriest daylight. I guess I know that life is riddled with loss, and living in families means our hearts are bound to shatter on repeat. But I also know other things. I know, for instance, that living in families means loyalty so thick and redeeming it pearls into gold and drips off the edges of even our most bereft days. It means we have people who stare into the inky pools of our worst selves and still refuse to let go. Family could mean mirrored strands of DNA, but it also could mean the person who sees us when everyone else avoids eye contact. It could be the folks who choose to need us even though we complicate their lives. I will bleed straight despair when I someday lose you all, but I will never regret that you’re mine.

Monday we ran beneath a fat, coppery moon, the sky purpling into morning around us. I showered and walked from one job (dorm) to the next (college office), then drove the bumpiest road you’ll ever meet down to a school in the valley. Lunch is a dependable thing at this school, a hearty helping of maize and beans that leaves you filled and warm. Some kids wrap their meals untouched and tuck them away like a promise, and that’s how you know they come from a house with little food. At the end of the school day these kids will carry home a full bowl of githeri to share with smaller brothers and sisters, waiting till everyone eats together. This is the Grace Effect skinned down to its bones: receiving a salted bowl of mercy only to dish it out again. Mercy in, mercy out. These kids are a miracle. My experience in East and Central Africa is that the most profound generosity is lived out by people with no resources to spare. Someone washes up on their shore and instead of closing ranks, they do the irrational. They light a fire, split their meal five ways, fold one more into the nested crowd of their blankets and homes. Living here makes me restless and thrummy and thrilled to be alive. These days my biggest hope is that my heart never learns to calm itself down. That I never stop being wonderstruck by grace in all its ill-advised forms. #thegraceeffect #jeffmanion #kenyakidscan

December was my favorite. We got to have Braden home for his birthday AND Christmas, neither of which has happened for three years running, and I’m not sure I could invent a more generous possibility of a human being. Whenever I’d say, ‘Whose turn is it for dishes?’ B would answer, ‘I’ll do them,’ even though he’d washed 688 out of the last 700 times. While I was busy disinheriting people over card games, B was laughing, smoothing all our jagged edges, steering our vessel of familial crazy toward kinder, more rational shores. He forgives before you ask. He plays memory and basketball with his sister. He quotes Doctor Who, brews coffee eight times a day, and brushes his teeth after every meal and hearty snack. He left yesterday, and sometimes this world seems too much of a wild thing that eats soft shelled souls like him for breakfast. But. God is with him and for him wherever he goes, and he cannot walk into a reality where he isn’t paid for in blood. I love you, B. Go be braver and more faithful than we deserve. ♥️

There’s something about the six o’clock light, how the slant is just sharp enough to slice clean through me. It feels like sorrow and longing, a lamp in the window. It feels like coming home. That’s how Christmas seems today, like I’m deep in the middle of super nowhere, and I miss everyone, and I’m exactly where I’m meant to be. Merry Christmas, dearies. God has come for us.

When Zachamoodle was two or so, he perched beside me on the first pool step, his babyflesh ringed in floaties. I glanced away and then back again to find him face down in the water. He ended up fine, obviously. I snatched him up quick as a heart attack, and today he’s giant and eighteen and fine. But the thing I can never get all the way past is how drowning doesn’t make a sound. - This seems apt for the whole lot of us these days. We’re thrashing and desperate and signaling like mad, but it must look too much like swimming. - A friend of ours back home died in September, and how is this possible? One second he was fine and the next he had a stroke followed by a mostly recovery and then a brain-bleed. And as much as I know this life doesn’t orbit me, it feels impossible for someone I love to die when I’m not close enough to believe it. He is still there, I think. I will get on a plane, and then another and one more, and by the time I disembark with nappy plane-hair and a rollerbag, he will be there in all his big-hearted glory. - I just need enough planes, is all. - My oldest kiddo is here, fresh off a semester in South Africa, and this I love. I do not have time for him, for staring in his eyeballs and puttering around the house over lukewarm cups of best-ever coffee, and this I resent with all of my wizened heart. - Meanwhile in the bowels of Central Africa, no one is allowed across the river. Congolese army on one side, rebels on the other. The regular, non-soldier, non-rebel people can’t get food, they can’t access healthcare, they can’t, they can’t, they can’t. They drink grim cups of suffering, dark and sickly as a bruise. - Drowning, every one of us, but I am intent on noticing. I have all these people within reach, big and small and medium, Owens-people and otherwise, and I’m praying for hyper-awareness to spot the distress lining their easy composure, to grab hold long before they’re going under. - We belong to each other. - No one goes down alone. - Not on our watch. Not today.

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