I am constantly saying goodbye.
And I don’t know if it’s because I’m an introvert whose relationships are carefully selected and chock-full of depth, an intense lover of people, or because I always end books expecting there to be a sequel, but I feel the weight of goodbyes hang from every part of my body today.
Every person that I’ve looked at here on the island of Lesvos has walked away carrying a splinter of my heart, and I can only sit here this morning surrounded by yet another unpacked bag hoping that my love and Jesus has in some way lodged under their skin the same way they’ve gotten under mine.
There’s Kevin and Krystle, a young married couple devoting the best of their time and energy to meet the needs of the volunteers and refugees passing through Sykamania every hour of every day. The love they have for each other shines through in the most unsuspecting ways, but my favourite is the way they speak to one another. Our first night at camp, Krystle stood with us in the mess of rising water and called out to Kevin, who was in the process of moving deteriorating boxes of biscuits from one wet tent to another. Her gentle voice cut through the chaos like headlights in a fog.
There’s Emmanuel, a 22 year-old Greek resident and one of the long-term site coordinators here at camp, who refused to let a fever keep him from work the first several days of our arrival. I walked past the food tent one cold afternoon and saw him crouching on a crate of bottled water, faced and neck flushed strawberry red, a little refugee girl cradled in his arms, blissfully unaware that the arms holding her had slept nine hours that week so far. “Is there anything we can do for you?” we asked as he impatiently loosened the zipper on his jacket. He grinned beneath his black glasses. “Kill me?” he suggested hopefully, and then walked off to receive more people into camp. “Work ethic goals,” Tabitha whispered. Yeah. ‘Find something you love and let it kill you’, isn’t that how the saying goes? This kid is in it for the long run.
But the person who will be the hardest to say goodbye to is Amir.
A 22 year-old college graduate, born in Iran and living in west London, Amir is a writer who’s devotion to seeing the entire universe from as many vantage points possible profoundly affected me. With family capable of being persecuted in Iran, Amir writes under a pen name, and wants to go back to college in order to establish himself with credibility so as to write without censorship. Our conversations forced me to confront the fact that up until now, I have seen the world through a very small lens, and that my God-given talents were never met to be a means to further my ego – they were meant to give a voice where voices have been taken away.
“I just feel like you two ought to know one another,” Kelly-Anne said as we gathered at the front gate, which was surprisingly devoid of the usual hundred people waiting in line to get in.
(all photos: AnnaKate Auten)
“Want to know what I was just thinking about?”
It’s Monday night, and Amir hands me my cup of coffee, black, before carefully hoisting himself and his hot tea up onto the covered pile of cinderblocks next to me. “Tell me.”
I direct my eyes at the night sky. “Have you ever noticed the way that stars seem to cluster directly over the place you are on any given night? Look at the way they are brightest here – “I pointed directly above us – “And become fewer as you look down.” I swept my hand over the sparkling lights of the Turkish shore, just four miles beyond us. “And then there is a dark band in the sky all the way around, just above the tops of the ground light. Doesn’t it remind you of a giant umbrella?”
The next night, we are back by the fence’s edge, standing under the same umbrella.
“In Iran, there is a lot of talk and poetry about the death of the ego,” he said. “A great poem I love talks about a man inside his house, and he hears a knock at the door. He calls out, “Who is there?” and the stranger replies, “I am here.” The man does not open. A little while later, the stranger circles back to knock again. And again, the man inside calls, “Who is there?” This time, the stranger says, “No one is here.” At that, the man opens his door and smiles, “Welcome, for there is only room for one.”
If there is anything God has shown me in the last year since signing up for the Race, it’s that His plans will always succeed. My role in this life is to help usher in the presence of God, but more often than not – my job is to just get out of the way.
The more of the world I see and the more people I discover, the more I’m convinced that my life is at the same time both insignificant and incredibly necessary. My existence, actions and death will eventually be felt universally, just the same way that your existence has been affected, however small or large, by any man or woman making the journey across the sea to our camp.
Meeting Kevin, Krystle, Emmanuel and Amir has fundamentally changed the trajectory of my life. And even though I’ll almost certainly never meet Amir or any of the people in Lesvos ever again in this life, I know in the core of my being that I will never be the same. My gift to Lesvos has been the love of my Jesus, and its gift to me was a radical twist of the kaleidoscope which I look through.
“Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives.
Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today.
These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction.
Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me.”
– Cloud Atlas.
