Of fried chicken feet, world travel and divine appointments on pavements

You’ve got to love Africa.

Murray picked up the boys’ passports today. They have quite a few stories attached to them already and they haven’t even been stamped.

In short:

We enlist the help of a perfectly amiable agency (i.e. some chaps who use a cell phone booth as a base for their trips to Home Affairs and Beyond). Forms are filled in. Wads of cash change hands. Ben, the entrepreneurial promise-maker of quick-quick-passport-delivery, insists that Murray accompanies him to Home Affairs, to prove he’s the dad of kids that really exist. At Home Affairs it becomes disconcertingly and infuriatingly apparent that Ben has lost one of Cam’s ID photos. You need two. So Murray drives back through town to fetch Cam (while Jo, his self-appointed car guard, Home Affairs advisor, bouncer and ID photo negotiator, risks death by practically lying down in Pretorius Street to save Murray’s parking bay). A marathon clogs the streets. Eventually Murray returns with the live exhibit. Cam poses for new photos on the pavement outside Home Affairs, on a beer crate neatly covered with a towel. The white backdrop is the reverse side of a Vodacom street pole ad, held up behind his head by the photographer’s able assistant. The photos emerge immediately, from a printer next to the beer crate, plugged into an extension running into the Portuguese café selling chicken and Coke and bread and hope. Everyone is fascinated. Cam and Murray are having a blast. Ben thinks it’s a sign from God that he and Cameron Benjamin Reyburn have a name in common. Fast forward a month or so. Home Affairs has had a slight problem with a scanner. Ben has gone home to his family in Zim. We have gone on holiday. Eventually through the power of voicemail and persistence, Murray brings home two brand new stark little travel docs and a world of opportunities. Praise God.

We got the passports because it’s good to have passports, not because we have plans for imminent travel abroad. Although now that we have them I’m itchier than ever to throw the boys into our backpacks and take them somewhere. All in good time I guess.

I don’t have many specific dreams for our boys. I mostly dream for them just to live out every bit of their potential, to become what God has planned. But one dream I do have is that they will travel the world, because as Miriam Beard said, ‘Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.’ I pray that whatever stamps fill these pages, each journey will be a celebration of God’s wonder in history and creation and train stations and weird tastes and weirder accents. I pray that travel will remind them that life is about people more than it is about places. I pray they will know that Jesus journeys with them, directing their paths. And that he summons each new generation from the beginning of time (Isaiah 41:4), choosing their time and place in history. I hope that our boys will always celebrate their earthly roots while fixing their gaze on a heavenly inheritance. I hope they will go where God leads.