On call

Sunday afternoon and my phone starts ringing. This is no problem as I have left an automated voice mail response explaining that I am out of the country but I tend to check to see who is thinking of me nonetheless. This call was from the duty line for college.

Let me explain: there are four of us who have overall responsibility for the whole college and at any one time one of us is on duty so that we can be called if there is a crisis. The system, though, cascades so that if one of us can't be reached the next one is called and so on. Now my phone is ringing and I am two days journey from college in rural Uganda...

Or at least it feels like rural Uganda to me. We journeyed for 8 hours down roads that make English side streets look like motorways and arrived in Soroti which is one of Uganda's significant towns. I am staying just outside it down a dirt track, with goats, hens, and pigs running around the building. At nights the dogs are let out and they roam the compound. The view from my window is entirely green and the main building I can see is a barn. However we are 500 yards from the state prison and a mile from the Cathedral. Familiar and well-used categories don't always transfer well between cultures.

Anyway, the phone was ringing and that meant there was some kind of crisis in College. I tried to process the correct response and decided my best course of action was to ignore the call. If I had answered I could not have done anything from here and the phone would not cascade to my colleagues. You can imagine that this was hard (particularly as I have no Internet access so I won't be able to discover what has happened for days) and despite it being the logical thing to do it left me with a rotten taste in my mouth.

There is something in us that is hard wired to respond when people are in need, part of the image of God in us perhaps, which diminishes as we ignore it. However we cannot help in every situation as the evident need around us demonstrates. Learning when we can and when we can't help is vital, but I suspect that it should never stop hurting when we can't hold out a practical hand of love.