Since the Writing for Your Life gathering in March, I’ve been thinking about Barbara Brown Taylor’s encouragement to imagine tactile, smell, and taste images for religious vocabulary. Maybe because I need it daily, grace is the vocabulary word that swirls around in my mind.
Grace feels like a bucket shower with more hot water than I need to rinse the grime and the soap.
The bucket shower is not just any bucket shower. It’s the one that Mama Furaha prepares for me when I arrive at my home in Beni after two days of travel from my home in the US.
The travel is exhausting. Eighteen hours on three flights, all economy class, begins the journey. An 8-hour car ride crossing Uganda’s plains and hills follows that. My stomach knots as I arrive at the border Uganda/DRC border. I can never be sure if an official’s capriciousness or official changes will tangle up entry into Congo. The 80 kilometers on the road from the border into Beni, under the best conditions, takes 90 minutes to two hours. The car pitches and swerves over cracked roads as it swallows dust. By the time I reach Beni, I’m exhausted and caked in sweat and red clay.
Mama Furaha has heated water on the charcoal fire. She pours the precious contents into a plastic bucket that I carry into the bathroom and set in the tub. I’ll need to mix the hot water with cold from the tap. There will be enough water for me to rinse, soap, and rinse again, three times over.
This is grace.
