Fruiting Season
From 20 October
Pastor Timah in the Cameron Highlands - Oct 2009
Durian. The King of the Fruits. It announces its presence with an intoxicatingly rapturous scent that is vaguely reminiscent of damp garbage and rot, an odor so pungent and persistent that it is banned in hotels, most forms of public transport, and the homes of those with the least bit of common sense.
When it is ripe and ready to be harvested, it detaches itself from the tree branches on which it grows and drops to the ground - a large, heavy, spike covered projectile of deliciousness and doom hurtling toward terra firma from many meters up. Pity the fool who sits under a durian tree during fruiting season.
Durian. Gathered from highland rain forests and sold at roadside stands and city markets, it is a natural treasure of Malaysia.
And it was to this odoriferous delight that Pastor Timah, a guest preacher at Luther House Chapel, compared her people - the original/indigenous people (orang asli in Malay) - during her sermon on a recent Sunday.
She spoke of seeds being sown on the the good soil of the Cameron Highlands and her people's villages there. She shared with us her encounter with 'foreign' missionaries, Chinese Christians from Malaysian cities and towns whose own faith had recently been tended to and cultivated by the Spirit working through orang putih from America. She expressed, on behalf of the congregations she serves, gratitude and thanksgiving for the ongoing missionary activity of the Lutheran Church in Malaysia and Singapore.
In her stories, in her witness, and in her person - as one of the first orang asli to be ordained - she made manifest in both word and deed the undeniable fact that, among her people, now is the fruiting season. Seeds that had been planted have sprouted. From tender saplings they have grown to become mighty fruit-bearing trees; rising up to the canopies of the highland forests, their precious fruits ripening even as we speak.
Congregations of the faith-filled are organizing all throughout the mission zone. Dropping into isolated villages marred by poverty, alcoholism, and the anomie that comes with existing on the margins of modern Malaysia, these new churches there are reshaping the landscape around them through the provision of basic social services, the songs of children, and the sharing of Water, Bread, and Word. They carry with them an unmistakably heavenly scent, a lingering fragrance of grace, of hope, of love, and of new life.
This is one of the leading edges of Mission in 21st Century Malaysia.
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