We’re Holding the Blossoms Up High

Who am I, Sovereign LORD, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far?

- 2 Samuel 7:18

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

As a child I had a big globe in my bedroom. I clearly remember getting it as a gift, when I was eight, as my father carried in a big carton box, already dark outside, and me unpacking the box not knowing what to expect, a little anxious. The globe was very realistic, with the oceans in different hues of blue, depending on the depth portrayed, and the land in different colors of yellow and green, depending on the height, each country separated from the others by black lines. It was perhaps a curious thing for a boy to have, but my father was really chuffed with the gift he had given. And through the years I tracked long international flights all over it, hearing the name of a country or city somewhere and trying to find it on the globe – to this day cities such as Rangoon, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur still bring a dark-hued sentiment to my mind, pride even.

I am fascinated by the ways the world gets into our homes – how it gets into the private spaces in which we make our lives and how we are propelled forward by this intertwining. As an adult now I picture for myself this mosaic: I would ride my bicycle through the streets and lanes in and out our village, past the church, past houses and farms, with skeins of geese overhead flying south to northern Africa for the winter season, disregard for any human borders on a map. And inside my bedroom, a window facing the rising sun and suspended between heaven and earth, I have this artful bulb that lights up from the inside and on which I trace any movement – all lines crisscrossing over places and times, in open-hearted and fabled connection to magical people.

Most children will not have a globe – it is quite odd for a child to have. I guess many children will have books, about a little girl with big dreams, about the story of the missing biscuits, or about going into the woods on a cold winter night with your father and be caught by wonder. Parents, in fact, as well as older siblings and people from around the village – other women and men that are not your father or mother, your uncle or aunt – are even more instrumental, showing you around, teaching how things are done. Maybe they chat with you as you two cook porridge or do the cleaning, about this person they ran into, or what danger they faced once.

Yet in my quest to get really behind the ways the world gets into our homes there is something else. Can there be too much of the world for one person, along the lines of: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Matthew 16:26). As followers of Jesus, we believe that the world is not there for our material gain. In the Bible we read badly about the world we inhabit. In 1 Kings 2:2, King David tells his son he is about to go the way of all the earth, meaning he is about to die. And in Ephesians 2:1-2 Paul tells the people listening to him that: “you were dead in your transgressions and your sins, in which you used to live when you followed the way of this world”.

Far before my curious construction of lines crisscrossing the globe in my bedroom, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote of the: “Korean and Viking set sail for Japan”, “the dark bulk of Fort Chabrol lurks”, and “Boer sentries with rifles won’t let them go past”, but where: “His garden still waits”. This is a dark vision of all the earth at war with itself, but while the Bible is full of darkness, it never prevails. So I go and sit in front of the LORD and ask, at the intersection of my soul and the physical world, in which the many ways of all the earth come to meet me, whether in the form of beauty, love and wonder, or in the form of culture war and climate change, of jealousy, ugly strife, and betrayal – who am I, Sovereign Lord? How do I preserve my safety and sanity while I busily go about trying to satisfy my need for an honorable place in which I can justify my life?

Safety and the Soul in God’s Kingdom

Who am I? – Is this a question we can answer? I have been trained as a psychologist with an interest in cognition and development. In psychology the questions who am I and what is a human being are often broken down into basic constituent elements: my personality can be introvert or conscientious, my identity related to affiliation with a race or ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, intersectional or shapeshifting, a self that is oriented to my unique individuality or my grounding in collectivity, as my mind works through the transformation of information contained in mental models that have been shaped by my culture or profession. To me this seems reductionist.

When we look at the world as something quietly static, something that we own, the reduction to processes and states of the mind might make sense: How we do know this world here? The known world for most of us is the haven we retreat to. The yearning that people have for such a haven is something I can feel. Running north for just short of a kilometer into an affluent neighborhood of our provincial university town is the street and area I have come to love in the six years since my wife and I moved into a complex just opposite of it. I drive through these streets nearly every day on a run for groceries or other errands, streets lined with tall trees that shade the spacious homes underneath, many with neatly kept lawn and sprinklers buzzing. It’s an ideal.

The Bible sets people’s plea for safety into context. During the establishment of God’s kingdom, the Prophet Samuel asks Saul whether the Lord had not anointed him to be ruler of his inheritance (1 Samuel 10:1). It is a powerful question: God’s inheritance, what all does this include? Taking up his reign after Saul, David built a fortress for the protection of his people and led many wars between Israel and marauding tribes at the borders he established for Isreal. But he also wrote many Psalms as spiritual guidelines. His son Solomon ruled with wisdom, building political connections, listening truly to his people, and building a temple at the site of David’s fortress to observe and attend to the spiritual needs of his people. Safety in who I am is not simply physical, the freedom from harm, but perhaps more so a way to be, anywhere I go.

How about the simple act of sitting together on a train. This is almost automatic to many of us. We trust that the system will work fine, that the train will arrive on time, and that people will follow the unspoken rules of shared space. But we rarely question how these everyday experiences are made possible by complex social mechanisms and collective trust. At a stop people get on the train and sit down on a bench, spaced to respect each other’s privacy. Everybody “cooperates” as if we assume that I am something to others and all others are something to me that is a given, that the infrastructure is something, all an invisible product of a routine, when it’s anything but. In this endeavor, who am I, here, really?

It brings a smile to my face to think how we often take some of the deeper things for granted, spiritual safety and the qualities of us that make up our soul. Maybe the question I am really thinking about and that am looking to answer is more particular: Who am I when I feel safe? This rephrasing is akin to what the novelist Leo Tolstoy’s conceives as the ability to recognize kindness in others. To what Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes called art of encounter. Or to what in Japanese philosophy is the idea of Soshin – a beginner’s mindset just like my four-year-old toddler son with a new toy, running around exploring, without preconceptions but a sense of curiosity and confidence.

World Getting Bigger, Me Feeling Smaller

As I studied and began to work, I started putting my own sight and feeling to the lines I had imaged running across my childhood globe. During my studies I stayed in India for a little while and in my late thirties I finally settled in South Africa. On my first visit to India in 2001 I met people in isolated highlands south of the Ganges who had never seen a white person before. I was something almost mythical to them. Later, in South Africa, I realized that I, again, was a foreigner, feeling out of place in a world I didn’t understand. In both events, my sense of safety seemed to come from the comfort of my old world, the things I knew to be true, but it was a fleeting feeling.

The world was vast and unpredictable, growing bigger every time I looked, and trying to own it was impossible. But that’s where the notion of safety and predictability became complicated: Who am I, when I feel gradually more lost in the world – when the people close to me feel distant? Echoing Rilke’s words in his Letters to a Young Poet, the poet Robert Wood Lynn writes in The Mothman Gets High: “I’ll tell you this, I’ve never felt further from another, than when standing beside them, trying to point out a star.” Is this now the inheritance God gave me to rule in his stead?

On one of my travels in South Africa I stayed at an old heritage house that had been converted to a bed and breakfast – the homestead of a fruit farm established in 1923 by Scottish immigrants to an area close to the Kruger National Park and the border with Mozambique. In front of the house was the enormous Flamboyant tree brought as seed from Britain and planted here by the wife of the original pioneer farmer, Grace. The tree now shaggy with old age but in full bloom.

Her grandson Andrew told me one morning as I was finishing my breakfast on the veranda, my diary in hand, that when they were small boys that they were racing the large seed pots on a creek or river, seeing who would go faster. As I sat there, strolling through the house looking at old family photos hanging on the walls, returning to where I had been sitting, I was wondering how she, Grace the pioneer’s wife, must have felt, coming to stay here, nearly alone expect for a husband. It must have been a jolt to her feeling at home in the world, this new place far away from everything she knew. Could she conjure some sense of safety?

In this day and each, to be so far removed from where you came from, from the things that you knew as a child, is hardly possible anymore. But still, especially as young adults we are often faced with new experience – leaving home, entering university, starting a career, moving to a new place, all of which can make us feel small in an ever-expanding world. The more and more we encounter any new unfamiliar things, the more we might long for the safety of our childhood world, the places we know, the people we trust.

In some of my classes here in South Africa I asked students to discuss the idea of safety: what would a safe place look like to them and what would it involve moving away from that? They made posters and some made drawings, of church, of the villages where they grew up. A place of safety is infused with the idea of having people around you that you know, and that know you, but it should feel natural – the thought of cultural differences, of having to try should not even surface. Yet at the same time safety is associated with ownership, with the opportunity to take initiative and living with genuine dignity your loved ones offer you.

In all of this there is a sense of self-possession and being teachable, to have a healthy sense of self as a scaffold for crossing boundaries into new places and new phases of life: Observing traditions that are linked to status and the status of your family, to feeling safe within the bosom of your family and strengthening the boundaries of your home. Many of the things students talk about are elements in the environment – the physical context that can be owned and controlled – to be inside or outside our walls and keeping others from stepping on them or climbing across.

Photo by Olivier Guillard on Unsplash

Guest of the World

True safety, I’ve come to realize, doesn’t lie in walls or predictability. It lies in the strength of our inner core, in our soul’s ability to remain grounded no matter what the world throws at us. Maybe Grace the farmer’s wife from Scotland would agree: The more you stretch yourself out globally, in terms of interests and connections, your daily routine, the more you need to tie inward into yourself your idea of who you are, in order to sustain and keep from snapping all the lines that you tied between all the places. You need to develop your core, of who you are.

The apostle Paul has been especially instrumental in translating to our own lives the commands that God gave to Saul and David. From the letters he wrote to Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, and Ephesians, Paul talks about the sanctification of our being – the development of our holy character. He advises us: “Everyone has heard about your obedience, so I rejoice because of you; but I want you to be wise about what is good and innocent about what is evil” (Romans 16:19). Stepping out into the world, young of heart, have you considered in what character you will rule God’s inheritance, without “selfish ambition or vain conceit” (Philippians 2:3)?

Many people, especially those who do not travel much or do not experience life outside their havens of safety, may take predictability for granted. They are used to roads that are paved, streets that are well-maintained, and communities that follow social rules. But when you step outside of this world, whether it’s traveling across continents, settling in a new country, or even entering a university where you’re surrounded by strangers, there’s a sense of disorientation. The world feels both bigger and smaller at the same time, and you might feel more threatened or lost than ever before.

One strategy for feeling safe is to try to know everything about the world, to become a "peacemaker" who understands different cultures, social norms, and behaviors. By absorbing as much knowledge as possible, you might feel more prepared for the complexities of life. But the problem with this strategy is that no one can know everything. It’s an impossible task, and it often leads to judgment and isolation when we inevitably fail to understand or predict everything.

Alternatively, you might withdraw into yourself, embracing surprise and awe at the unpredictable nature of life. This could be like the character Rocky from Marian Wiggins’ novel Properties of Thirst, who rejects the idea that he can control the world and instead embraces the unknown. But while this strategy might offer peace, it can leave you feeling disconnected from the world, as though you’re simply observing rather than engaging with it.

The more I reflect on these strategies, the more I realize that the real key to safety is not in knowing everything or pretending to know nothing—it’s in cultivating a strong inner core. This core, your soul, is the essence of who you are. When your core is solid and rooted, you can move through the world without relying on external safety nets, like walls or barriers. You can be fully present, responding to the world with joy, compassion, and a sense of peace, no matter how unpredictable or chaotic things may seem.

Photo by Redd Francisco on Unsplash

The Blossoms

In the streets that I drive through outside my complex I see the big trees with purple, pink and yellow blossoms escaping from across their walls. One particular house even has a row of five small flowery trees on the street side of their man-high wall – it’s beautiful. I specifically make a detour every time to pass that one house.

In his poem Without, the poet John Freeman ends with the line: “When without becomes within”. Without mentors, without parents, without walls to keep others out: Who I am is something unshakable in my faith in God, and each and everything that comes my way I can take in stride. Like the globe in my childhood bedroom with its internal light to bring out the relief even more beautiful and clear, the soul at your center can illuminate the world. I am not moving my boundaries outward, building higher walls to protect myself and my family, who I am is to transform my inner core into something that can receive, a soul that recognizes kindness and steps courageously out into the world for all to see – holding blossoms up high.