Since being on the Race, I have discovered that my favorite part of a house is the rooftop. This month in Malaysia, we are blessed to be staying in a building with a rooftop, and whenever I get a chance I love to sitting up there for hours looking over the city and letting my imagination bounce from rooftop to rooftop.
Yesterday I got to thinking about how my perspective of the city changed when I was on the roof in a similar way that my perspective of community and spiritual growth has changed the past couple of months.
You couldn’t tell from the picture above, but these streets below are filled with people constantly moving somewhere while avoiding the honking cars and the motos speeding by so close you can smell the driver’s cologne. Some people rush past you as fast as they can, others cheerily greet you and want to know where you are from. It’s hard to see very far ahead because the buildings tower over you, plus there are people you have to avoid running into.
Everywhere you look there are signs that all look the same but different making it difficult to decide where to get the best food or figure out where you are sometimes. As you walk along your nose is greeted with different smells of spices that make your eyes start to water or raw meat that makes you wanna throw up. Just to keep you on your toes, you also have to watch out for the rats that dart across the sidewalk at all hours of the day.
The streets are always busy, always noisy, and always demanding all your senses to pay close attention so you don’t get squished by a bus.
Then.
There are the times I make the effort to walk all the way up to the stairs to the rooftop. I can still here the hustle and bustle happening below, but it is not nearly as loud as the beauty I can see stretching out for miles and miles. On one side there is mountains, on the other side there is ocean, and everywhere in between there are just hundreds or thousands of rooftops of all shapes, colors, and sizes.
From the roof everything looks different. The city is peaceful, calm, everything looks small. The longer you look the more you see little details like all the pieces of green life growing on all the buildings and roofs or a cat balancing and running across a tin roof.
Being on the roof, you can feel completely alone which is exhilarating or isolating depending on the day. You can see farther to know when storms might be coming or where you’d like to visit, but in order to actually get anywhere you have to return to the streets where the people are. There are no shortcuts – jumping from roof to roof will eventually end badly.
Going up to the roof fills my imaginative, creative side, allowing me to come back down and interact with the streets below differently than I did below.
Just like the streets, living in community means constant people, from different places, with different ideas and dreams, that you sometimes want to be around and sometimes are forced to be around. You have to pay constant attention in order to build community and not get squished by frustration.
Then.
There are the moments when I go up to the roof and meet with the Lord, and my perspective totally changes. Everything is perfectly peaceful and calm just for a little while. There’s beauty and life and imagination. Sometimes the things I learn are exhilarating, and sometimes there are hard things I have to share that not everyone else is going to like at first.
Whatever happens on the roof though, I have to go back down to the streets where the people are in order to make any sort of changes.
Have you been to the rooftop lately? Try it out, it’s pretty nice up there!
