[un]comfortable

The following is a guest post by my good friend Nick; you can read more about the author here.

Something quite profound happened to me last week while my wife Suzie and I were taking a post-work stroll. The sun paused in its descent just long enough to bathe the last, blissful hours of the day in the glorious golden light you can see in the photo above. We meandered down a dirt track, passing beautifully painted huts, a few herds of sheep, numerous cows, some goats (don’t look too closely at goats, they are frightening beasts), some ducks, dogs, plenty of dung, and the odd chicken.

As we walked, I began to tell Suzie about a though-provoking experience with a group of local kids. These are kids who have been selected from surrounding schools to be a part of a rigorous after-school program involving Saturday classes, weekday afternoon study sessions, and holiday boot camps. I have been helping out with English classes and at the start of each lesson my colleague introduces me to the students and suggests they get to know me by asking questions.

This group didn’t waste any time on small talk:

“Teacher, tell us, why are you here?”

“Mr Nick, what is the greatest challenge you have had to overcome?”

“What is your worst fear?”

And then…

“What is your coat?”

That last one baffled me. Was he asking what my coat of choice is? “Well young man, I’m quite partial to a gun-metal grey trench-coat if you have to know. Not the full length mind you, those ones are weird. Three-quarter is just right for me.”

As it turned out he was not interested in my, however classy, coat preferences. He wanted to know about my code – my motto.

“What do you stand for?” he asked again.

I looked at my colleague who just smiled and raised her eyebrows as if to say, “Well? It’s a perfectly reasonable question.”

By this stage in our walk, a group of local kids had joined Suzie and me. They babbled away in the local dialect as I continued my story. Just when I got to the part about ‘my code’, one of the little boys – I’d guess his age to be about 4 or 5 – suddenly looked up at me and yelled “Comfooort!”

“Comfort?” I replied.

“Comfooooort!” he said again.

The profundity of his insight was not lost on me. You see, I’m a big fan of ‘comfort’. I enjoy my movies, my books, and my down-time. I appreciate good company, good food and drink. I don’t go looking for opportunities to do difficult things or challenge myself. So moving to a rural town to work with an education NGO, teaching English to kids and mentoring local teachers, was not a natural or comfortable step. Hence my disbelief as this youngster, casually holding my hand as we walked down to the beach, managed to slice right to the very heart of my weaknesses.

“You’ve really cut to the core of me, young man”, I said, looking down at him as we neared the end of the road. “You’re a wise little prophet.”

“Coooomfoooooooort!” he wailed again.

In retrospect, I think what he may have been saying was “Come, phooooto” – just swallowing the last syllable. The clue came when he pointed at my phone as I took some snaps of the cliffs. He got extremely excited and insisted on posing for a photo with his friends (see below).

Amusing mishearing aside – this little moment really settled something in my soul about why I came to this place. Of course I am here to learn and to teach, to help and serve the community, but I am also here to get a little uncomfortable – to be intentional about seeking out new challenges and new ways of thinking and living which don’t, perhaps, come naturally to me.

And maybe I’ll write about some of it here, and you can all keep me accountable and remind me – when I get too caught up in the latest football scores or the recent film reviews on Rottentomatoes – of that wise little boy on the dirt road who warned me that my ‘code’ has become ‘comfort’ and that there is a great deal more to this life than that.