settling

Remember how I told you I'm a lover of stability and a sender of roots? Well, Liberia hasn't managed to change that quite yet.

I've been here a little over a month now, and I'm settled into a routine of sorts. Of course, being a nurse, nothing is ever totally routine. Patients get sicker, extra shifts have to be worked, and there's always the few who decide that the floor of the ward is really the bathroom. But apart from these small hiccups, there is a rhythm to ship life that has started to soothe me into something dangerously like complacency.

There's something so comforting about mandatory community meetings and scheduled devotions and strict mealtimes. It means that I don't have to think. (Not much, anyway.) I can sit back and let myself be carried along by the current of life here. And that's not a good thing.

A bunch of us had church on the beach this past Sunday. We sat under the shade of a low-swinging palm tree, listening to praise music piped through IPods and watching the waves break gently on the rocks. We talked about God's love (anyone starting to see a theme yet?) and we talked a long while about complacency. It was no great surprise to realize that I'm not the only one who's been getting a little too settled.

It's strange, really, how forgetful I can be. When, from the dock, I can look out across the bay at the Ducor Palace. Before the war, it was an international tourist destination and a symbol of Liberia’s prosperity. Now its empty rooms are filled only with the echoes of gunfire and the ghosts of refugee families.

And you remember Grace, right? Anthony’s mother? I sat next to her on her bed one day last week, and she told me stories about her family. Matter-of-factly explained how her nephew lives with his mother in Norway now. Because someone sponsored them to go there. Because he needed surgery. Because there was a rocket during the war that had taken his arm off. Also twisted his foot (Like so, she said, curling her fingers into an unnatural claw by way of explanation. When he was just almost two years old.)

And I sit at my computer, wondering when the café will be open, because it’s the next thing that’s supposed to happen around here.

Give me one pure and holy passion.
Give me one magnificent obsession.
Give me one glorious ambition for my life.
To know and follow hard after You.

That’s it, isn’t it? That’s all that matters. Anywhere I am, whether in the comforting routine of ship life or in the swirl and bustle of the streets of Monrovia, I should be running towards my Saviour. That’s the only way I’m going to find sure footing.