I’m perched on the roof of our hotel in Kontum, Vietnam. We are in a valley; it’s expansive. The last leg before our arrival here today was smooth, breath-taking biking. Lots of coasting, easy on the legs, candy on the eyes. This is easily the most challenging and exhilarating cycling I’ve ever done. Looking out across the valley in every direction from where I sit stretch rolling mountain ranges; across the valley is an expanse of human population, and a larger expanse of cultivated land – rice paddies, corn fields, banana groves (Yes, we eat well here. And frequently.), all winding with the bend of the river, with the dikes, with the irrigation ponds. And looking up, I feel as if I’m still pressed up against the bottom of the sky, even here in the valley.

I’ve heard it said that Vietnam is the land of the Emerald rice paddy. I now see why this distinction was made. There is a different shade of green here, a different tone of verdancy that permeates the lush depth of colour we cruise through, over, gaze upon and rest under every day…

…so, yes. I’ve been nourished by our physical, geographical, vegetative surroundings as we’ve been biking… but I’ve also been thinking – thinking, today at least, about communication…

We don’t speak the local languages. Our days are full of miscommunications, misunderstandings, bad translations and poor exchange rates. We get frustrated. Negotiating through sign language with the help of an incomplete phrase book is exhausting. We find ourselves yearning for someone who speaks just a few words of English to help us – help us get comfortable, fed, housed, well taken care of…these issues of communication follow us each day, and as I think, I find my thoughts turning to issues of global church. If fulfilling our simple, daily necessities is this difficult, this full of missing the point, how much more falls between the cracks in our attempts to do cross-cultural work or inter-cultural relationship-building? What do these layers of challenging communication, the potential for misconstrued thoughts and ideas mean for those of us striving to be the global church, trying to build community in the midst of difference?

…even as we try to function as a group of six relatively similar cyclists there are times when the tensions rise, when we simply do not meet each other, see each other, hear each other clearly. How much harder is it, then, at the global level, when we try to understand what it means to be unified Anabaptists?

I’m struck by the enormity of what this means… but these days of cycling, of frantic waving of arms and pointing fingers to order our lunch and get directions are showing me other things as well. Like this moment at the side of a Laotian highway, during a lunch break in Sekong, for example:

I wish I would’ve asked her what her name was. Or if the young girls crowding her, holding her breasts and round hips, crawling into the large curve of her lap were her daughters, or if she had daughters, or had sons, or if this was her home, and if so what she did there, what she loved about it, how and why she lived life – particularly in the way she did – because I could tell she lived life in a particular way – it surfaced in the bubbling up of her self, in the way she grinned at me, out of all the broad roundness of her face, the way she held her unusually buxom Asian body, the way she laughed with wholeness, with deep joy that draws everyone in, it was in the way she embraced me, pulled me comfortably to her and patted my bottom, exclaimed at my beauty, at how spicy Lao food is, at how much we could eat, in the way she was so genuinely happy to serve us, then came and sat with us, comfortably joining our table in a way that extended her own hospitality even more deeply…

…these are the moments that point me towards connection and commonality despite a lack of words – “same, same… but different” – even as they also plant in me an even greater desire to rest longer in these places, to learn the language, to be immersed, to learn and understand a little more… even as I also lift my hands in gratitude at the recognition of how much we convey without the use of coherent tongues…