A Friend Along the Way

This past week, I’ve been staying with my aunt and uncle who live in Southern Georgia. As we would sit around the dinner table, and speak with each other in Amharic (a healing experience for me that I can perhaps share about another time), my relatives shared stories with me that struck me with awe because of our disparate life experiences.

One such story, told by my uncle, had to do with seeking political asylum. In 1974, Ethiopia was taken over by the Derg, a Communist party that forced Ethiopia into becoming a Marxist-Leninist state. Famine and economic decline under the Derg implicated the party of incompetence and corruption, leading many to flee the country. My dad told us stories about how the Derg regime would hound young men (including him) and kidnap them for the purpose of fighting in wars they wanted nothing to do with. It was a terrifying time that forced my uncle to escape to the Sudan. His vehicle? Feet. He walked, which made him vulnerable to policing guards who expected civilians to attempt defection.

Hiding in forests, and too many close calls later, my uncle found companions along the way who proved to be asylum seekers. To keep from insanity they would watch out for each other and look for resources to preserve themselves in such harsh conditions.

On one fateful, terrible day, while collecting water from a drinkable source—I think it was a river, but not the Nile—one of my uncle’s friends was snuck upon by a strong current, and his body was whisked down the cascade, never to be found and assumed dead. The group couldn’t tell the deceased man’s family because they knew nothing about them, and they were running for their lives.

This was only one of the stories that showed the vast difference between my uncle’s life and mine.

Of course, I understand what it’s like to be ruled by an oppressive regime even under the guise of “a Republic.” But, I’ve never suffered what the Black ancestors faced on plantations and Chinese immigrants under the Exclusionary Act or the despair of Latinx, asylum seekers. So when my uncle recounted his trauma to me with a seeming lack of emotion, except for the occasional relegation of his terrifying plight to a “tough time,” I didn’t understand how he hadn’t become a fatalist or a full-blown Hedonic nihilist.

The only things I could gather from the storytime around that dinner table lathered with Ethiopian cuisine (that I still can’t taste, CURSE YOU 3-years-of-COVID) are that the pursuit of freedom and the love of/and for our friends along the way keep us going in ways we couldn’t dare imagine possible.

There is a mystical power that undergirds our treks down the literal valley of death, not even its shadow. As a Christian, it’s hard for me to not interpret my uncle and his friends’ pilgrimage toward liberation as an example of the detection and care of Jesus.

How could this be if they didn’t all survive though? Detection and care feel like false words for the loved ones of the deceased. In a world where there’s no rhyme or reason to who dies and how they die, simply racking up the countless reports of inevitable tragedy, what use do we have for Jesus?

I’ve come to realize that Jesus is not useful in times of tragedy like we may have been taught he was. Growing up, I thought what it meant for Jesus to be a good Shepherd is to make sure that I don’t suffer. If I prayed hard enough and obeyed long enough then it was a given that Jesus’ present help would roll down the hill of heaven to me unhindered. This didn’t last long. Martha’s “Lord if you had been here,” resonates.

Jesus, as Tim Keller often said “is beautiful”, which is much better than being useful. Though I would very much rather Jesus swoop in at the site of all my life’s complications and disappear them, I’ve come to learn that the willingness of Jesus to go through what we do is worth more than a remote Savior who solves our problems like they are puzzles. There is a beauty in a God that befriends us and our suffering.

It’s not unlike the friends my uncle met along the way to the Sudan. Jesus was susceptible to enemy fire and knew what it was like for his people to be occupied by a formidable empire. Yet he endured life with hope. One could theologize until the cows come home about how Jesus’ divinity gave him the superpowers to bypass fatalism and to give up his mission to love and to liberate. Yet, he faced the full brunt of stress and angst in the garden and endured the cross, showing us that our search for freedom finds its gratification in his friendship and his care. The current, though it stole the life of their beloved, did not pushback the interest of Jesus to hold onto my uncle and the remaining survivors, choosing love over self-indulgence everytime because he loved the world.

For me, the knowledge that Jesus accompanies me while he doesn’t always unburden me doesn’t function to belittle the ways tragedy traumatizes us. It’s just to testify that the detection and care of Jesus have only kept my gaze more fixed on liberation and helped me persist in loving others in the face of troubled waters.

Jesus is a reliable friend along the way who can handle your stress, discontent, and disbelief. He’s a friend to refugees like my uncle, having been one himself in Egypt. He’s a friend to those who lose their friends having lost one himself, responding in indignation and sorrow. In life, as we know it, our problems may persist, but Jesus’ presence lingers and carries us from despair into his friendship, a friendship that suffers along with us and rejoices when we arrive at places of safety.

Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash