Saturday evening and I am welcomed after two days of travel to the Bishop's House in Soroti. Even through weariness I am deeply honoured as many of the senior staff have waited to greet the Bishop and his friend from England. I am fed twice and try not to look rude as I eat only a little and wonder whether everyone's physiology reduces appetite while travelling for such long periods.
The Ugandan culture of hospitality is wonderful and has so much to teach a reserved westerner like me. We eat, we talk, we sing, and we pray, but the thing that makes me think is a comment made by one of my new friends as the team are introducing themselves in the gloom of a power cut. You might not be able to remember us all, I am told, when I see many white men they all look the same to me. The world looks so different depending on where you see it from. Here I remember to talk slowly, because it is my English accent which is the strange one. Here I am the guest, and I am overwhelmed with welcome.
So often we relax when we feel that we are part of the main 'crowd', when we are at home, and when we feel secure. There is a real discipline of welcoming others when they are not in that place, and I am grateful for it here. However there is another discipline, one which some of find harder, in allowing ourselves to be guest, to be welcome in another's territory. It is wonderful and delightful, but also unpredictable and unsettling. It is important, though, because it is only in being welcomed into another's place that we can truly begin to communicate love with them... and that surely is at the heart of the Good News that my new friends are so grateful to have received from UK missionaries a century ago.
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