What chocolate cake + community have meant to me lately

A few months ago I was standing in our driveway, trying to figure out how I would manoeuvre my way out. I was the third car in the queue. Each brick was strategically occupied by wheels that belonged to the people who belonged to our property. It looked like an Amway meeting, or a game of car twister, judging by the tight configuration of vehicles contorted into all kinds of uncomfortable postures. But the difference was, they all belonged to us. And then I realised something. I think we freak our neighbours out. I had never thought of it before. I always thought these rather-hermit-like-people were nothing short of extraordinarily blessed to live alongside us. Because, okay, we may not have waxed a weed-free strip of grass along the fence yet, but, well, we’re reeeeally reeeeally nice. But the more I thought about it, the more dead obvious it became. They think we’re crazy. For many years our home has blurred the line between haven and train station. And though we’re finding a better balance these days, the pendulum still tends to sway towards pleasant and purposed interruption. We’ve got a thing for people, and we find our lives are richer with them in it. So 13 people living on 1000 square metres of suburban sod didn’t sound unreasonable at the time. A Zimbabwean family of three in the back, a young South African lady-plus Nigerian family-plus-friend in the front…plus us five sandwiched in the middle. Perfect.

We fit. Kind of. But if I could be honest, on days like this traffic jam, it wasn’t exactly comfortable. There were always extra visitors coming and going - friends and colleagues and home group members who parked on sprinkler taps and flattened the old man’s impatiens. There were smells that confounded my western sensibilities - pots of bubbling sauce laden with chillies and Nigerian ground shrimp - but pleasantly surprised my tastebuds. There was little Katie, our 4 year old thunderbolt, who’d throw open the backdoor and raid your fruit bowl by storm. Or Wednesday night suppers that were eaten under the watchful eyes of inquisitive kids who spilled out of the overstuffed Bible study next door.

At the moment, we’re down to 8. Our Nigerian friends have moved out. And I miss them, kinda like I missed the mega awesome Mariette when she moved out. I miss the plates of fried chicken that Tomi would offer as tasters, wonderful little spice bombs set out to kill you. Or the random photo shoots that had my kids working as film crew for Bayo's amazing blog. Most of all, I miss the birthdays, where the same Ina Garten chocolate cake centrepieced a song and gathering of the most unlikely group of people on the planet. With ganache on our lips, we’d talk big love and gratitude and smother honour around the room, and then leave the one with the birthday to gather up the crumbs and all those precious words.

An Uber driver, a human rights lawyer, an Afrikaans-speaking Yank, an Urdu-speaking boertjie, a future accountant/domestic helper, a Tswana woman, a woman rights activist, a 10-year old contortionist, a future spy, a banana-crazy thunderbolt, a phD student, a one year world world changer, and a kid who wears his hoodie backwards “so he can store things like a squirrel.” Like I said, weird. But beautiful. Somewhere along the way, we had walked right off the pages of the contracts that technically bound us, and we had become a family. And it made me think: You can make a community, but only God can make a family. Only He could have made this story so messy. Only He could have blurred those heart lines between employer and employee to the point of erasing, to the point of rubbing them out like the lead on my dressing table from Katie’s pencil gone rogue.

And when you’re pouring the champagne and lighting the smelly candle for your domestic helper on the day of her wedding, and your husband is gonna marry them, and he needs the bride to quickly iron his shirt because he and his both wife suck at it compared to the bride, and she sips on the champagne while she smooths out the creases…you have to know, cotton isn’t the only kind of creasing being pressed down here.

So too are all those angular edges of culture and colour, personality and privilege, that you never knew shaped the contours of Me. Shaped the contours of this rainbow ruptured nation. And no amount of state capture cleanup, or Guptas behind bars, can smooth that ugly stuff down. No president - no matter how well he can pronounce 6,748,647 - can be held accountable for the kind of dignity our souls desire. I’m becoming more and more convinced that everything we’re looking for is already in our hands. On our lips. In our backyards. The grand idol in my life called making a difference can often get in the way of making one, because I’m too busy holding up the measuring sticks and assigning the value of a moment. Telling God - the Leaver of the 99, the Lover of two pennies - which moment is significant and which one is really nothing at all. Rather than just being faithful and letting Him write the meaning of it all. So today I’m grateful for a flat and a good case of family dysfunction that demands domestic helper intervention. Because it found a way around the fences that keep our assets intact but our neighbours unknown. It’s sparing our kids from the plague of all about me in a city that’s carved around the contours of happiness at any cost. It’s chipping away at our selfishness and sense of entitlement, and forcing us to grow up. To see it their way. To apply Jesus to the inconvenience. To get beyond the lip service and really love like Christ. No fanfare, no 140-word tweet. Just quiet games of parking tetris week in, week out. Who knows? It may just be for all of us, the kind of difference we never knew we made.