What is Christianity?

A Sketch of an Unexpected Adventure

I found myself driving a Nissan Patrol along the Beira Corridor from Harare, Zimbabwe to Tete Province, Mozambique. The BBC Radio Workshop’s rendition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy accompanied me on my hours-long journey as I tried to make sense of my life on this planet. My spiritual journey had led me here, more than 9,000 miles from the land of my birth. I had to watch out for the monkeys who, like the armadillos in the panhandle of Texas where my mother was born and raised, would occasionally dart across the street in front of my car. 

I was way beyond my comfort zone. I had been warned to check with the US embassy in Harare before embarking on this journey. The peace plan implemented in Mozambique by the United Nations neglected to provide skills training to thousands of demobilized soldiers. These veterans of their country’s long and bloody civil war had been known to make ends meet by hijacking cars, taking anything of value, and burning everything else including, sometimes, the drivers. The embassy functionary had told me that my stretch of road had been calm this week. The village of Furancungo was expecting me. I had all of the provisions I would need for the week ahead. It was still a spiritual stretch for me.

What could I really do for the people awaiting my arrival? I had lived in other countries. I had a master's degree. But I had absolutely no experience helping people reconstruct their post-war lives in Southern Africa. As I continued driving I figured out that the average Mozambican would have to work 425 years, saving every metical to purchase the vehicle I was drying. I had mild hunger pains while I drove past villages where parents were using tree bark to fill their children’s distended bellies. This situation was wild and wonder-filled, like the world found in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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Yet as I arrive in Furancungo the village has gathered to welcome me. After brief introductions, they help me to get situated in a small thatched hut next to the church. Then we focus on the one thing that we share; a deeply held belief that a man who lived thousands of miles away and died almost two thousand years earlier, alive and at work in our midst. As humans, living in tens of thousands of villages across the globe had done before us, we share a meal, read the Bible, and talk about how we would apply what we read to our very different and very human lives. 

Christianity is an adventure.