The Daily SUMMER - Introduction

The first time I visit Africa I am alone and carry a lot of common preconceptions. I’ve seen pictures in books and national geographic, and mom made me eat every- thing on my plate because kids are starving in Africa (incidentally South African moms told their kids the same thing). Then the plane lands in Cape Town and I get on the shuttle bus, and for the first time in a long time my heart feels at home. We pass by stunning mansions and sprawling universities lined with palm trees, and slums with tens of thousands of corrugated tin shacks in rows farther than I can see, and zebras, and springbok, and men standing by the road with hammers in their hands hoping to make an honest day’s wages.

My heart grows three sizes that day.

Inside I am remembering something - some deep truth about the world and something in myself that I’d forgotten.

Somewhere. Somehow,
in the momentum of life on the road -
Ten years of touring
and sold out concerts
and millions of albums sold,
and people singing my songs back to me,

and astronauts playing those songs on the space shuttle (this really happened)

and the money,
and the awards,
and the bleached hair
and the ad campaigns
and people saying how great it is,
I had forgotten something about me -
I had forgotten something about little-Jeromy.

Little-Jeromy, the one who played by himself in the woods on a hillside in Pennsylvania, didn’t care about all of that stuff. He was pretty simple actually, quiet even. Definitely not the one you’d send into a room full of record execs to get them hyped for the next release. It has been a while since I felt little-Jeromy, decades probably, and I know I need to pay attention to it. There’s a pearl hidden in this field down here (in the southern hemisphere) and I know I need to buy the field so that I can come back here and find the pearl.

I call Jennifer that week and tell her I want her to return to Africa with me. She already knows it’s coming - what she calls the sales pitch. Something in my voice tells her that things have changed. (I’m not good at hiding things).

This is the beginning of the unraveling.

Between my first trip to Cape Town and our move back there six months later, things at home are tense and Jennifer and I go further in our counseling, both together and apart. I’m trying to figure out how to move forward with this new/old understanding of myself, how to undo some of the damage that a decade on the road - me burying important things underneath success and momentum, may have done to our marriage. Plus, my body is starting to do weird things. I don’t know it yet, but these are the first signs of Multiple Sclerosis. Things at the record company start to unravel too, and we lose our album deal.

It’s all overwhelming and I know I need a break to think and to process things. Some important things are ending, and it’s foggy and I don’t know what to do, but I do know that something that was reborn, or remembered, on that first trip to Africa and I need us to go back.

Six months later. . .

Jennifer and I and little-Hutch land in Cape Town for our next family adventure.
And it is great, and it is awful
And I start to understand -
This is how life is.

With the help of some friends there, and a good doctor, and the ocean, and the quiet, and the salt, and the sunsets, I start to slow down. I get on some good medicine and I start to get my thoughts back, and I start to remember things that have been long buried underneath the less painful things..

My spiritual director in South Africa is a kind man named Don. He’s Zimbabwean but he’s in Cape Town for an extended time visiting his son. Don offers to pray for me and help me through things. Sometimes we talk and other times we just sit together, listening to the waves. He helps me understand that, before I go forward, I need to go backwards. So I make a timeline of my entire life - I draw it out on sheets of copier paper and tape it to the walls of the cottage, and I go back and remember the things that I had forgotten. Don and I talk about them and then we sit in silence some more.

Don tells me that experience without reflection is pointless, so we reflect and remember, and we sort through it, and we makes sense of it, and we give names to some of it. And going back helps.

I’ve never heard the audible voice of God - the actual sound of the Divine. But that summer in South Africa, in our little cottage, alone, writing in my journal and reading the Bible, God speaks to me. It isn’t out loud. It isn’t perceptible. But I’m positive it is God. I’m reading a chapter in a prophesy book attributed to the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, and in the scene the people are being pinched - nations are coming for them - armies of men on horses, and conventional wisdom says to run, but legend has it that God tells Isaiah to tell the people this:

In returning and rest Is your salvation
In quietness and trust Is your strength

(Isa 30:15)

It will be hard, but God wants to save the people by them doing nothing. Their army is too small anyways and this way they get to know God better and they get to stay in the land. But the people don’t do it. They flee and therefore get caught up in yet another battle. God doesn’t abandon them, God still goes with them, but it would have been so much better if they’d have let God do the work. But, the hardest thing to do is nothing, so they up and flee.

And this is the thing God speaks to me about - the better way lived by abandoning my outcomes (and incomes) to God. It isn’t a bolt of lightning or some kind of burning in my chest, I just know it’s for me and will inform pretty much everything I’ll do going forward, and thank heavens I pay attention. Because I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened, and might not have paid attention if it did, if not for the fact that I was in Africa, out in the wilderness, a l o n e , as far as a human could go from home and not be on a frozen continent.

Sometimes a change of the heart require a change of scenery, and a change of company, or both.

—————

Jesus’ second cousin
On his mother’s side
Is a man named John -
The one we call John the Baptist

If you’ve ever read the New Testament in the Bible, you might remember reading about a time when Mary, who is already pregnant with Jesus, goes to visit her aunt Elizabeth who is also pregnant, and how the babies both start kicking when the mom’s-to-be are in the same room. That baby-to-be is John (the Baptist), and he will grow up to be a man consumed with bringing people to repentance and bringing them back to God.

John lives his life, or at least some of it, OUT in the desert (in the wilderness), and he wears a long coat made of camel’s hair, probably similar to the one the prophet Elijah wore, and he lives on protein that the desert provides - bugs and honey. And this desert, wilderness living - the coat, the bugs, etc., serve as a living parable for what a life devoted to God, and separate from the system, might look like (It’s not for everyone).

(or is it?)

Like the prophets of old, John’s message is not just in his words, but also in his life:

Separate. Dedicated.

And during this important time people all over are starting to wake up - to a new reality, to a deeper faith, to something more than just religion. And they are returning to God, and they are repenting of sins, and to symbolize the change, they go out into the wilderness to be baptized by a new rabbi who can school them in this new, better way. The people know that there has to be more - more than just the religion of the Pharisees, more than just the system of the Romans, a better way - something real and alive, something they know they need, but that they can’t get it in the current system.

So they go out to see this man named John because John is different.

There are plenty of Rabbis to follow, plenty of Pharisees to sit under and take notes from (people love to talk to a crown, after all), but these seekers have been down that road, and it’s just more of the same:

Rules,
Rituals,
Sacrifices,
In vs out,
Us vs them,
Jews vs Romans,
Jews vs Samaritans,
The clean vs the unclean,
But these folks seek something else -
They want to repent:
To change their thinking
To change their minds about the whole thing,

So they pack up and head east, to the area close to the Jordan river, to get away from the noise, and to experience something else. It’s summer and people are waking up, and its not enough the hear the stories about what is going on out east of the Jordan, they have to go see it for themselves. They have to get in it and experience it.

(Road trip!)

Summer is the time for being out. So throw a blanket in the car so you can lay on the hood and look at the stars like they do in the movies. Or keep a swimsuit in a backpack in your trunk so you can jump in the creek when you happen to pass one. Or keep a ponytail squishy-thing and some flip flops in your bag so you can get comfy when a friend calls on your way home from work and wants to have drink and you say yes. The point is to be ready when God invites you to something different this summer. That’s what this season is for. Lean into it. Say yes. Get out and live and breathe the summer air. It will be autumn soon enough. For now, don’t look back.