Sara... how I love Sara!
She's a talkative Italian where if you asked her one small question, she might very well start her answer with a story from when she was a child leading all the way up to her adulthood just to answer a very small question!
She was one of the very very few who I could get to a very deep and raw level of soul-baring. We shed tears a few times in some of our most vulnerable moments.
The day the Lord revealed I would leave London for Singapore, I was shaken and close to tears the whole day. Leaving London was always at the back of my head, but the moment the realisation of that reality hit me, it did not feel good. But I did try to fight off the dismay in me the whole day through reason and fact.
By the end of the day when I finally got back to 52, I thought I had my feelings under composure. The first person I saw in the kitchen, as I always do, was Sara and I tried to tell her nonchalantly and as matter-of-factly as I could of what I had learnt.
But I burst out crying immediately the moment I started telling Sara. I didn't even know then how I would get to Singapore, and I felt I was already packing up to leave! Sara always seemed to stand before me bare to the core of her soul and that just forces me to strip my own self-protecting layers away in reaction. That is the kind of affect Sara has over me.
Knowing some of the hurts from her own past, the news of her husband ill sank straight down to my stomach when I heard it.
I just had to give Sara a call tonight. I just had to. And to hear her voice, to hear the tired but firm strength in her voice, it was so good. It was a relief to hear that her husband will be discharged from the hospital. But after giving me as much news as she could in a short time, she could still turn her eyes away from her own situation to ask me how I was.
And it's funny, it's a phone conversation across a great span of distance, but it still felt as if she was still looking into my soul as she did standing 3 feet away from me in 52's kitchen. And I told her in as much words as possible that Singapore's great, and then proceeded to cry.
I think it was that little place of refuge in London that all of us hurting souls had somehow found ourselves converged to shelter from the battering storm, that I was missing. That moment where we learnt to heal in that shared moment of vulnerability, trusting in one another as we sheltered under the love of the Father.
And I missed that. How I miss that fellowship. That sharing of hurt, joy, fears and hopes with absolutely no pretense, no wariness or guards put up around oneself.
Before we hung up she told me she loved me and I her. One lamb stuck in the wild of the cold to the other lamb stuck in the tropical wild.
Labels: Church tales, Friends, Travels