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I plug a suction cup microphone device into the jack that says “phone” and phone our our surgeon. Phone means telephone, right?.
It’s about my dozenth attempt to reach him at the remote Congo hospital and this time I reach him! I ask him my 10 questions, first in English then muddling through the German that a co-worker has kindly written for me.
All the answers are there in two languages . . . until I try to play them back on the little cassette deck. And I realize I’ve just tried to record through the earphone jack!
It's because I’m not working with a newsgatherer’s recorder that DOES have a phone jack, but instead a small cassette player. So, I don’t have a recording from Congo. I have my own voice. In my office in Quito, Ecuador. Asking questions in badly pronounced German.
After my red-faced apologies over the long distance phone lines, we try it yet again. The interview winds down and my closing question (as usual): “Is there anything you’d like to add?” And suddenly it is all worth the multiple dialings, the French-language recording that I didn’t understand, the effort put into translating my questions into German.
"I'm so thankful for Africa," he says.
"Africa is a singing continent. And it's incredible how they sing. They sing in the morning and they sing at night. They come home from their fields, loaded up with a heavy load . . . and they sing!
"And the nicest thing I've seen here is, if you operate on a patient and the operation comes to an end and the abdomen is still open, and the patient starts singing. And the nurses, they even sing with the patient. The whole OR team and the patient are singing, and you're closing the abdomen, praising God for the operation."
To the surgeon, the description wasn’t good enough.
"You must have been in there. that's something very, very special I've seen here several times."
But to me in an office in Ecuador, it was wonderful.
To hear an interview segment, click here.
I suppose nobody would really want a guitar like ours. When I first picked it up in the church kitchen, the neck had been broken, apparently in a fall.
After Sunday dinner, my repair tools consisted of a towel, a drill and small bits, small nails, generous amounts of white glue and string to bind the neck while the repair work dried. It most certainly it wasn’t luthier’s work. More like toy repairs I’ve done for our kids.
Unwinding the string as you’d unwrap Lazarus from his grave clothes, I took the guitar, tuned it and plucked, then strummed the strings. The neck withstood the string tension.
It has since been tipped over twice, requiring further work. It has endured repairs, both emergency and experimental. It has been subjected to fret filing, with one unusually high fret being pulled and then reglued. It has met with both a professional luthier’s scowl and the oft’ practiced arpeggios of “Stairway to Heaven” by our teenaged son. Despite its limitations, it holds its own on single notes as well as power chords. Its action was changed, and needs further adjusting; it can still buzz on fret 4.
It's nobody's favorite.
The guitar is, in short, a “beater”. An Ebay seller would say it has “issues.” Maybe it was once an object of love (inside the soundhole is written “Felix”, alongside a small heart) but not by the time I got to it. The path to the landfill seemed a certainty.
I don’t usually name guitars, even though B.B. King’s “Lucille” cries the blues and Clapton’s favorite, “Brownie” brought hundreds of thousands at Sothebys. Those guitars have something to offer. This is a “kitchen guitar” from the church kitchen at Iglesia de la Gracia. It has nothing to offer. Like me, this guitar has “issues.”
Not just a beater though, “Gracia” is my daily reminder of my daily need for God’s grace. It is “gracia” or grace that matters in life. Because none of us really has anything to offer. Nobody is buying a way to heaven: it’s all grace.
Grace is freely available, taking the beatings our better guitars would otherwise get. While the others lie in comfort, encased and insulated from mishap, Grace faces it all: arid climate, anyone’s song(?!) and fingers with maybe a bit of car engine grime still under the nails, not to mention constant tension on the strings. Yes, life’s constant tensions.
The definition of grace: to receive with empty hand what Someone else has earned. The test –and great virtue – of grace: to be beat, to endure much, and to still be able to offer a song.
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Gracia Gets New Tuners
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