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A pause to catch the breath

Here we are in 2026.

I am still in Dili. Raj travels a lot for his new work with the Equitech Collective.

I've greatly enjoyed these 6 months at Biblia ba Ema Hotu. We've seen the team grow. I've learned a bit better how to listen and maybe a little about how to speak in someone else's language. I've seen how Scripture is meant to be the big-C Church's project amidst the rough-and-tumble of little-c church. I'm learning to be content here, in this season that doesn't last forever.

We're well into rainy season again: the big winds that peel up the corners of zinc roofs; the cooling showers that help rinse out the air around Dili; the irregular blackouts from falling branches on power lines- tempu udan is a season that makes me stop and think as we reach for the solar lamp.

It's become easier to stop and think about things.

Someone asked us last week to map the stars and scars in our life. I had to say that in this season, sometimes all I can make out are scars: a mass of knotted welts, criss-crossing contractures and puckering cicatrices. (Interesting coincidence: the Tetun fitun and fitar are also very similar words.)

What is a scar? These days, when we (myself or others) lament the disfiguring or sensitive keloid, I say out loud (because I need to remember): "a scar is proof of the thing you survived. A reminder that the healing is in our soft tissues, that our very blood teems with macrophages and fibroblasts and endothelial cells hurrying to close up the breach, to remark the trauma, to let life go on."

Many people I meet on the field, in Timor, other places, have scars.

On stars: the Timor night sky has always been a great place for seeing the stars. They are no more present than they are in my native skies, but they are much easier to see when there is no light pollution.

Stars are an apt image, I think, because they are so different: cosmic, luminous, remote; engendering wonder even in our age of google wonderkill. Here are the things that are still numinous and beyond me: friendship, embodiment, beauty, sleep, words.

"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."

"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of." 

- C. S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader 

In what may be my last chapter in Timor, I find myself pausing to consider my options more. Less duress. More awareness of what I can and can't do. I won't stop grieving the sad things, but I also hold myself less responsible for the systems that are out of my locus of control.

"Choosing to live unoffended does not mean pretending everything is fine. It means refusing to let bitterness be the loudest voice in the room...
Every time we stay unoffended, we punch a hole in the algorithm that profits from our rage."

- Carlos Whittaker 

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