One Who Remains

One Last Flight - July 2012

The flight from Sandakan to Kota Kinabalu last week was pretty routine. Timely (by Air Asia standards) and efficient, with minimal turbulence. There was nothing exceptional about it.

Except that there was.

When the plane broke through the clouds on its descent into KKIA, my seatmates shifted to look out the window as the mountainous terrain and deep greens of the Bornean landscape came into view. Conversations faded and a hushed, almost reverential, air settled upon our row. After a year of comings and goings, this would be their last landing in Sabah - for now. Within a week's time they'd be wheels-up on an outbound flight jetting half-way across the world. This was part of 'Goodbye.'

I realized how different my perception was, how I have become one who remains.

I arrived last August but a few weeks ahead of this YAGM group. The culture and the countryside, (everything really) was new to me - new to us. We explored it together. As the 'Professional/Expert' I occasionally fooled myself into thinking I had half-a-clue. In moments of lucidity I acknowledged that I leaned on them as much as, if not more than, they leaned on me. And now they are departing.

While I have many more flights ahead of me, God willing, this was our last one together. They are moving on . . .

And I remain.

The realization brought me back to Iringa, Tanzania in the summer of 2008. I was studying and practicing Pastoral Care in hospitals and village dispensaries across the diocese and had just spent a week in my 'home' parish of Tungamalenga. We timed it so that my week there would coincide with a visit from my 'home-home' congregation in Apple Valley, Minnesota. As their ten-day visit came to a close, I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with my Tanzanian friends bidding farewell to our American visitors.

No longer one on the bus heading for the coast, I had become, for that brief interval and for the first time, one who remains. 

As I wrote at that time, "Watching that bus rumble around the corner with my brothers and sister, I passed a transition point in my life’s narrative. Whether that mark turns out to be a comma, a semi-colon, a period, or elipsis dots remains to be written. . ."


That observation has turned out to be true. It has been four years and I haven't been back to Tanzania while visits to Minnesota have been brief, at best. I knew that change was in the air but I did not know where it would lead or what it would entail. The transition has been both geographic and vocational, relocating myself from the Midwest and East Africa to the tropical heat of Southeast Asia and a shift in my role from one who arrives as a visitor to one who receives them.


Again I feel a transition in the air; this time it is a subtle process of settling in. Perhaps, until now, I've identified myself as a visitor. Perhaps it took saying "Goodbye" to realize I remain - to realize I belong.