Fifty toes in the sand

True confessions here: whenever I read a book, I like to know the ending. I will begin a book with no real intention of skipping ahead, but inevitably, somewhere in the murky middle of the story, when the action slows or the tensions mount or curiosity gets the better of me, I will flip to the end of the book and read the conclusion. And then, and only then, will I go back and finish it, content to allow the ending to inform the unfolding of the story.

Last week we made a long journey down to Zambia, to a place I have been hearing about all of my life. My aunt (my mother’s sister) and my uncle (my father’s brother) have been medical missionaries in a village called Macha for the majority of the past 40 years. So while other children grew up hearing stories about Disney World, I grew up hearing stories about Macha, viewing slide shows of red brick buildings and brown dirt footpaths and smiling white faces in crowds of black ones. And I wanted to experience it, too.

So when we heard rumors of a family gathering—three of my cousins and their families descending on Macha this month—I knew we had to go. I thought, “How perfect! We’ll be in Tanzania, so we’ll be close!” I was right, and I was wrong. Right in my gratitude for the timing of the trip, for the fact that my family and I were already abiding in East Africa. But Africa is a massive, sprawling continent, and to travel from one country to another is not a simple matter. We looked up the driving time from Arusha, Tanzania to Macha, Zambia and came back with a staggering 36 hour estimate—and that without the necessary allowances for bad roads and blown tires and border crossings. So we decided to fly, but that appeared too costly, with indirect flights that would send us down to South Africa and back up again. We despaired until we found a puddle-jumping way to fly with an affordable African airline, to bounce first from Arusha down to Dar es Salaam and then over to Lusaka (the capital of Zambia), and from there to book a private flight to carry us south to Macha.

Heading out on this trip, I felt excited and nervous. It was like holding a new book, and knowing the beginning and trusting the ending, but feeling absolutely unsure about the middle of the story. Would the flights leave on time and the kids hang in there? Would we make all our connections and keep track of our suitcases? The biggest question mark was our layover in Dar es Salaam—the only two flights available either dumped us in Dar much too early or had us arriving without enough lead-time to catch our flight to Zambia. So early it was, and early we arrived, and out we popped into the warm air of Dar at 9:30 a.m., with nothing to do until 4 p.m., when we could start checking in for our 6 p.m. flight. Friends had told us that because of the traffic in Dar, it is difficult to get anywhere quickly, so we had best be prepared to stay put or allow for hours of sitting in traffic. As we stood there with our piles of luggage, we sized up the situation and decided we needed to find somewhere to go. But where?

A few weeks ago, my small son asked me if we could go to the beach. Arusha sits far inland, a good eight hours from the ocean, so I told him that I couldn’t make any promises. But now, deposited in the coastal city of Dar, we suddenly had an opportunity, and I jumped on it. “How about the beach?” I asked my good husband, and he began haggling with the assembled group of taxi drivers to see if someone would give us a reasonably priced ride to the closest beach. One man agreed to our price, and off we went, giddy with relief at making it out of the airport and hoping we weren’t making a mistake. Traffic was heavy but moving, and soon our driver pulled up to the first fast-food restaurant we had seen in five months: Kentucky Fried Chicken. We happily clambered out and ordered chicken and fries and soft-serve ice cream, unreasonably happy with a meal that felt like a windfall, like an unexpected taste of home, a portion of grace. Properly fed, we continued on along a path that took us ever nearer to the shore, until finally we spied it—the Indian Ocean. White sand curved along the edge of the water, with a border of green seaweed marking low tide and tall palm trees dotting the road.

Rarely in my life have I been so excited about going to the beach. Perhaps it was the unexpected nature of the trip, what had seemed a pipe-dream now suddenly materializing into reality. Perhaps it was the brevity of it: we could stay at the beach, our driver informed us, just one hour and a half, until he needed to turn around and take us back to the airport. So we threw off our sneakers with gusto, rolled up our jeans, dug out shorts for the kids, and went sprinting down the sand. The day was overcast and breezy, perfect for wading in tidal pools and gazing out over the water. We found treasures cast up by the waves and decorated a “sand-cake” with them. We played tag, hunted for crabs, and bought a starfish and a lovely big shell found by a local fisherman. And when it was time to go, all of us left satisfied, as though even the children sensed the grace of the visit, grasped the way in which it could have been otherwise.

Our journey was far from over, and we knew that: we had another hour or more to sit in traffic, and many more hours back at the airport, and an evening flight and an overnight stay and a morning flight yet to come. But to wiggle our fifty toes in the sand, to seize a day that might have been tedious and turn it into an adventure of the best kind… I couldn’t have asked for a better middle chapter. And it reminded me that stories, in a book or otherwise, are far more than their beginning and ending. The middle may be murky and mundane, but it’s only in the holy now that our God is at work. He is the God of the middle of the story, and on that day, his surprises were beautiful indeed.