It is Tuesday, today is Tuesday, and I woke up this morning in Addis Ababa.  My email has been locked because I tried to log in from here, so this is the only avenue I have to express that I am here, I am safe, and that everything so far has gone according to our plans.  I am here with two men from the SSGMA (South Sudan Gospel Mission Alliance) out of Lincoln Nebraska.  I learned from David Casner, one of these two, that Lincoln boasts of having the second largest population of South Sudanese in the world.  The vision of the SSGMA is to build an orphanage and leadership training center in Gambela, an area very near to South Sudan.

I also realized this morning that the war which has broken out in South Sudan is different from previous wars there.  In the past, the Khartoum government forces from Sudan in the north have come to kill the Nuar and the Dinka people.  This most recent war is between the Nuar and the Dinka, and so it seems that the unification they found in resistance to the Khartoumi regimes has been, for now, forgotten.  War against an aggressive foreign state i.e. Japan and Germany of the 40s, can be a great unifier of the peoples of a nation.  Without a foreign enemy, we humans look to make enemies of the people living next door to us.  The Second Commandment, love thy neighbor as thyself, is as contrary to human nature as the First. 

We leave for Gambela tomorrow, and so I can not say that I will have access to the internet in any form there.  If I do, you can expect updates like these.  If I do not, you can expect nothing. 

In April of 2012 my journey as a missionary began in earnest.  It is fitting that on this occasion that I am once again in New York City and, once again, staying with my generous friend Stacey.  I leave tomorrow for a short trip to the African continent where I hope to discern where I might build on some partnerships still in their infancy.  I hope you will enjoy my words and pictures from this time.

There are as many ways to say Happy Easter as their are modern languages.  How many ways of saying it have been lost to the collective mind of our modern world?  How did the Goths say it?  How did the first Copts of Egypt call out to their fellow believers “He is risen, Christ has defeated the grave!”?  How does our world cry out this same thing in this time?  Easter; a festival of colored earth.  

The wealth of this world, my world of Seattle, is immeasurable.  From my church family this morning, to the family of my birth this afternoon, from my breakfast of rich coffee, to my post-dinner plastic egg filled with peanut M&Ms.  The richness we are blessed with is overwhelming in the physical sense.  The richness we are blessed with spiritually is incomprehensible.  One of the first and best lessons I learned from my pastor Bill Berger came in the form of an answer he gave regarding the Holy Trinity: three gods in one.  He said he couldn’t explain it, and that’s when I knew I could trust him.  

I can not explain it either, or days like today, magnificent days like today; days when I wake up so very rich while still not having the capacity to even appreciate what it means to live and to be so completely loved by God.

In baseball there is a standing criticism of people who only attend games when a team is having a winning run, or during a good season.  This criticism is extended to fans of all sports in the United States who only tune in for teams with the makings of a great year.  In defense of myself and almost every Seattleite seated at Safeco Field last night I want to ask “who wants to set aside time to fight traffic, to pay money, to sit around scores of drunk Americans, to watch a bad team lose a boring game?”  So, yes, I am a fair weather fan of the Seattle Mariners, and probably always will be.

The game was a backdrop, a venue, a theater, and an excuse to a greater purpose: the purpose of spending time with people I love.  My friend Molly and I took the Water Taxi from West Seattle to meet my folks at Elysian Fields for dinner.  The sky was not according to Hoyle clear, but the sun over the water made sharp the skyline.  Seattle is like a city in bloom, having not yet fallen into the decay of a place past its peak.  All along the waterfront, and as deep into the city as Westlake Avenue or 6th Avenue South, the erection of towering boxes of mirror glass, the next soon-to-look-outdated architectural fad, are too numerous to track or even to notice.  Seattle is looking more like a shiny Vancouver with every passing day.

Attending a baseball game in person is a good way for gatherers who want only to talk together, while not being forced to do so; escaping the distractions of television’s over-messaged intensity.  It is a slow game with peaks of excitement, but not too much.  It was a far more freeing experience than I remember.  We sat, and stood, and cheered, and booed and gathered around the idea of community for an evening.  It was quite delightful.

My decision to pursue missions as a vocation was largely in reaction to the options laid before me as a modern American Christian; an obvious statement to be sure.  But, if you close your eyes and imagine who you would most like to learn from, or who’s shoes you really would enjoy the walking in; whom do you envision swapping sneakers with?  For me, I find that an aggregate of experiences by the people I most admire serves best to point me toward the latent passions already planted within my psyche.  I have also found it helpful to focus on living heroes, not heroes of the past.  I can not expect to emulate the life of one no longer living; their world has passed away.

In this time I find that it is the builders, the missionaries, and the peacemakers who carry me rapt with them in their tales of life’s journeys.  It is the work: both physical and in relationship building that I love.  So, as my father prepares for his adventure, I am preparing for mine.  I will be going to Ethiopia in late May as part of a missions contingent to aid in the refugee crisis there.  The conflict in South Sudan has displaced tens of thousands and the SSGMA (South Sudan Gospel Mission Alliance) has declared for being part of the solution.  This group plans to have three buildings constructed in the area of Gambella by 2016.

I am eager to get building again.  On Monday I visited Virginia Mason for my vaccinations.  I was able to finally complete my Hepatitis A and B series, both of which I began years ago.  My yellow fever vaccination card will help me navigate customs posts and visa requirements in the east African nations I hope to visit.  The other two shots and two oral prescriptions should round out my immunity prep.  I didn’t expect my life to lead here, but I always enjoy the surprises of God.

Adventure is far afield in the United States.  Our structures and our technologies have made life so very predictable that we have decided to seek satiation for our curiosity through digitized, proxy-life.  My generation and the generations both before and after mine have chosen the most boring existence imaginable.  What is so boring about it?  Look in the mirror, and tell me.  God does not call us to tread-water in a debt pool until our good years and ingenuity are spent.  This is where our dissatisfaction comes from.

I think we are between two extremely powerful forces in our little world.  The first and older of these two forces is God, who calls us to love Him above all else, to love our neighbors as ourselves and out of love for those neighbors to proclaim our love for Him to all people everywhere.  The second and far younger force is fear; fear of death, fear of loss, fear of failure.  Silly to fear these things, all of which are guaranteed to us at birth.  What is not guaranteed is how we respond to His calling.

My father’s latest adventure has taken him deep inside of our hometown of Sumner.  He has decided to be sore, out of breath, and sweaty.  He has decided to become a man who walks for want of a better life for as long as he has life.  He has chosen to face fear, answer God’s call, and pick a life more suited to the progeny of our adventurous ancestors.  Had every European feared the sea, toil, and uncertainty, my father would be taking his walks around one of the British Isles, but God called his ancestors here, and here he is.

My parents have always been blessed to have neighbors who are thoughtful, and really pretty wonderful people.  Just on the other side of their driveway is a white, split-level house where Ed and Tina Bemis lived until about 2004.  Ed was a WWII veteran, and was always around watching television or climbing in or out of his camper-van for a trip down the hill for an afternoon whiskey in town.  Tina was his ever-vibrant and terribly cheerful wife.  After Ed passed away, we had an interim neighbor for short time, and then a man named Ray moved in.

Ray is a baby-boomer, like my parents, but on first glance you would mistake him for a man in his 40s.  While physically strong, energetic, compact and muscular; Ray is a combination of many great character traits as well.  My family has enjoyed and benefited from his proximity to our home and our lives.  Though capable, Ray was having to negotiate his move from our neighborhood alone.  My community group was more than eager to lend their hands.

One of the most interesting parts about inviting numerous people to give away their time with you are the varied responses you get.  My friend John replied with something quotable I had never heard before.  He said “I love helping people move.”  After unscrewing my eyes to make certain of his sincerity, I applauded his attitude and wondered at the rare mental space John’s mind must inhabit.  It was akin to meeting someone who enjoyed visits to the dentist.

And so John and Warren, Cody and I blessed our neighbor by loving him as we would hope to be loved.  There was singing and drumming, beet-box style synthetic guitar riffs and impressions of Blink 182’s snarky discourse.  We also took energy to ad-lib Jimmy Fallon style thank-yous to the items around the move.  “Thank you, moving van ramp.  For only being 30″ wide, when you could just as easily be a safer, more comfortable width.”

Can anyone be more welcome to a jobsite than a hungry man; a person who wants to work more than any other thing?  There is a reason that the Home Depot parking lots are all lined with men from Mexico and Central America, and the reasons for hiring those men are inescapable.  They are sojourners, travelers, strangers, vagabonds who have left family, comfort, pride, and safety for the promise of work.  A few weeks ago we had the good fortune to have a man like this happen upon our jobsite.

Toby is a man about like me, somewhere in the thirties-to-forties age bracket having tried a number of different vocations over the years leaving him with a strong familiarity with construction.  He works hard, shows diligence, honesty, respect and care.  He is as good a man to have around as one might hope to acquire, especially by chance.  In many ways he is better than I am, he is more hungry.  A man who has not eaten for many days will do almost anything in return for a stomach which no longer aches, a mind who’s flutters have quieted over the care of small bills, the dry, soft wrap of a new pair of shoes.  I have enjoyed his company and his work.  

We also had special visitors today; a crew of three native Chinese granite installers.  I can never tell if the most excellent of craftsmen even realize how rare their proficiency is, or how impressive their skills are to people like me.  These men turned what had recently been stone, quarried out of a mountainside, into pieces of furniture in a matter of hours.  And they did it without speaking our language; amazing.  This land is great, and this land is going to get more and more beautiful as summer approaches.  Soon the crocus sativus will have the company of countless blossoms.

After my uncle’s death, his daughters and his widow remembered that I had sung Amazing Grace at my grandmother’s funeral in 1999.  I am almost certain that I did not, but the history goes so.  And so, when my Aunt Sheila asked if I would sing at her late husband’s memorial service, I said I would.  Instead of the expected song of salvation, I chose to sing “The Parting Glass,” which I heard for the first time on an album by The Pogues and, later, a rendition by Ed Sheeran.  For my uncle I composed a third and fourth verse to perform for my uncle’s family and friends.  

Of all the money that e’er I had

I’ve spent it in good company

And all the harm that e’er I’ve done

Alas it was to none but me

And all I’ve done for want of wit

To memory now I can’t recall

So fill to me the parting glass

Good night and joy be with you all

Of all the comrades that e’er I had

They are sorry for my going away

And all the sweethearts that e’er I had 

They would ask me one more day to stay

But since it falls unto my lot 

That I should rise and you should not

I’ll gently rise and I’ll softly call

Good night and joy be with you all

There was a man from Oklahom’

His daughters legend beauties both

Twas rare to meet so blessed a man

For Fortune’s daughter he betrothed

She stood by him through ill and well

A better partner ’tis rare to find

But the lord has taken Lynn Allen Hughes

And alas his Sheila is left behind

The march of time brings heroes forth 

In seasons of necessity

All acts of kind love’s sacrifice

A perspective only God can see

Recalled to him young noble soul

Crossed through the door in the blue sky’s wall

For our Lynn we fill the parting glass

Good night and joy be with you all

Joshua Hughes

21.February.2014

I have been contemplating death more and more these days.  My work is often a solitary affair which allows for eight hours or more of intimate time with my Ipod and its’ contents.  To this I’ve added some Shakespearean tragedies as well as Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.  Both the antique Roman emperor and the most famous of all English playwrights were familiar if not altogether unimpressed with death.  The pilots of the RAF in the first days of the Blitz were called to the sky and therefor called to death for the purpose of saving their homeland.  We are not so fortunate in this time to have such clarity of path or purpose behind our passing.  Death has become ominous like the idea of rushing from an aircraft at ten-thousand feet to a wide-spread limbed belly-flop onto pavement some few minutes thereafter.  We needn’t fear pain.

Death has crept ever closer this week with the passing of one of my father’s brothers.  My uncle was a man who’s life is certainly beyond the describing of in a format such as this.  When I was young he seemed to be a mysterious, successful, far away, intelligent southerner with a beautiful family; two terrific daughters.  As I aged, my curiosity brought me to seek him out in a more intimate way.  My uncle Lynn introduced me to the continents of Europe and Africa in 2004.  He knew the city of London quite well, but the southern African nations we discovered for the first time together.  He and I were on safari for 18 days.  I always thought we would have one more trip together and, it seems, we will.