A White Bright Line -- Idle by KR

Fox’s Serve Team is here and it’s so good—

I wonder if they know how beautiful they all are here in Thailand… I wonder if they know just how precious they are to this place. I suspect not.

If they did, their hearts might be unfolding like mine is now. And they would be sitting under the cool, blue clouds and rain barely falling, and the overwhelming feeling of a heart expanding bigger than it knows how to on its own would soak them like rain, and the melancholy that comes with the knowledge that all days can’t be like this would settle into their bellies and render them calm and silent.

I sat and watched them all today—in a huge, bustling mall, where life just kept on going around us. Time stopped for me, like the whole afternoon was one big, true moment. It seemed for four hours that God granted my prayers of this morning—“Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Thirty Akha kids, twenty Foxies, and ten GOH Staff went to see a movie today and then to Dairy Queen for a late and unhealthy lunch of hot dog and ice cream dip cones. We swarmed into this large place, a motley crew—Fox people clad in unnaturally purple volunteer shirts, and kids in whatever clothes they own. We wandered as one large, confused organism. Nearly every Foxy held tightly to an Ahka child’s hand; both adult and child wide-eyed and bemused as they moved up, up, up on silver escalators winding about the middle of a huge beast alive with people shopping, looking, trying, eating, working, existing.

And so the Fox people sit on bright white tiles, after watching a movie dubbed over in Thai, and eat lunch with children they can barely communicate with—and some of them look so awkward and unsure of what to do, where to go, and what, if anything, to say to the small children blithely eating ice cream cones next to them.

And it is in this big, long moment that I sense the depth of Fox’s being here in Chiang Mai with us, with these kids, in the mall, on this road, in this city, nestled in this country, continent, world so alive and small in the universe—and it’s electric. In my mind I see a bright, burn-my-eyes-white line zot and zag through all of us, connecting us to one another in a foreign world to some, a native world to others, and it carries something blinding in its reality. It tangles us up in a web and one infinitely long zag shoots up toward the heavens—out through the top of the mall, so tiny as the line travels farther and farther into the sky. And it goes out of breathable air into bright atmosphere so clean and silent and out into the deep black universe. Its light matches, if not surpasses, the brilliance of the stars it passes. And somewhere in the darkness beyond, it finds its way into the heart of God, who smiles and tugs at the thread, sending an excited wave fizzling back through wormholes and universes and Milky Ways into our blue-green planet, and the many-storied mall into our web. And we feel it burning in our hearts and we don’t need language to explain it—and if we had the language we couldn’t because it’s too true and too lovely for words.

Four children hang about Ryan, loving him with every small fiber in their beings. And he’s laughing and they are too and God and they only know what’s so funny.

And Candice watches Ami intermittently eat and play with a pink hot dog, unaware of the world around, blinking at and mumbling Thai to the food. And when I catch Candice’s eye, she begins to laugh a great belly laugh which shakes the zot of a line, sending more electricity through us.

Abe and Mat play—swinging small, brown, flip-flopped children who are laughing and shouting with glee.

And Marie and Fern sit closely, arms intertwined, and they talk a little and smile much. Though one is white and the other Akha, they could be sisters with their haircuts, bobbed in similar fashion.

And Becky, with kind eyes, sits quietly beside an older Akha girl and they look like they belong together—like all the history of the world could have been leading up to this point of meeting and sitting and eating together. And contented smiles, like Mona Lisa’s, play across both pairs of lips, as if they know how momentous they are sitting there together sharing Dairy Queen.

And all of this burns on the line and travels deep into my heart and holds it still and suspended. And when it beats again, with each pulse I am overcome with a love so strong I feel I can’t bear it. And my eyes tear up, blurring everyone into each other.

And it makes no sense that in this stone and florescent-lit bear of a building, surrounded by so many shops and strangers, I could feel this much. My heart feels too big for my chest and the pangs push outward, like it’s going to explode. It hurts to love, to be loved, to see love so apparent, simple, and human. We are so much each other we don’t see it.

And I wish I could show this picture to the Foxies and the children so they could see the great love which burns and charges this jagged, bright line when they simply laugh and play and see themselves in each other.

Christ dwells in us: unfolding our hearts, eating hotdogs, watching through our own eyes His kingdom being made on earth a little bit at a time.