The Person Who Never Arrived
Atualizado: há 20 horas
When we stepped onto the runway at Dili airport, we saw a line of people trying to board the plane we had just arrived on.
It was November 1999. East Timor had recently chosen independence in a referendum organized by the United Nations, and the result had been followed by violence, fires, looting, and displacement.
Margaretha Adwardana and I were entering by choice. Those people were trying to leave because their lives had been disrupted.
The journey had begun at a missionary congress in Foz do Iguaçu, after an urgent request for prayer concerning Brazilian missionaries who had disappeared in East Timor. Margaretha, Hsiung, and I decided to go. Friends helped raise the resources. We bought powdered milk and hundreds of Bibles and began moving toward a place none of us fully understood.
Hsiung was not allowed to board the flight to Indonesia. Margaretha and I continued through Jakarta, Bali, and West Timor.
The weekly flight from West Timor was supposed to have departed three hours before our arrival. We bought tickets anyway. When our plane landed, we could see the other aircraft still on the runway. It had been delayed for three hours. Our luggage and boxes were transferred directly from one aircraft to the other.
In West Timor, because we were religious workers carrying a large quantity of powdered milk, we received a special FAO pass and seats on an Australian military aircraft bound for Dili.
When we arrived, no one was waiting for us.
A European nun was at the airport, waiting for another nun who never arrived.
Someone's absence created the time in which we could be seen.
She noticed that we seemed lost and offered us a ride. When she learned what was inside our boxes, her expression changed. She was responsible for a shelter filled with displaced families and children. That morning, she told us, she had prayed because their food was running out.
We needed transportation. She needed what we were carrying.
Neither of us entered that scene as someone self-sufficient, arriving to save the other. We were people with different resources and different needs, meeting in the same place.
The shelter was inside a gymnasium crowded with hundreds of families. Among them I noticed a boy wearing the yellow shirt of Brazil's national soccer team. I pointed to the shirt and then to myself. He smiled.
It was a small gesture. But for a moment, the crowd was no longer just a crowd; it had a face. And I was no longer merely a foreigner who had arrived carrying boxes.
Later, we found the missionary base burned. We eventually located the missing Brazilian missionaries alive and safe at the camp of the Portuguese forces.
The mission that had begun with the names of missing people ended with faces found.
That experience would later help give rise to AME, a mission initiative that also responded to humanitarian emergencies. But the images from that first shelter remained with me. Years later, when Syrian families began arriving in Brazil, something in those memories returned.
For a long time, I told the story of East Timor mainly as a story of opened doors and miracles: the delayed airplane, the unexpected pass, the military flight, the nun who found us.
I still recognize grace in those events.
But today I notice something else.
We were found because someone else did not arrive.
I do not know what happened to the nun who was expected that day. Perhaps she was delayed. Perhaps something went wrong. Perhaps someone was worried about her. I cannot turn her possible frustration, loss, or fear into an explanation of providence simply because her absence benefited us.
The missed connection was not good in itself. But it created a time of waiting. And within that waiting, someone remained available long enough to notice two people who were lost.
Perhaps there are events whose meaning cannot be reduced to a single story.
Our paths crossed, but they were not the same.
Sometimes, a missed connection is simply a loss. At other times, it leaves someone in the exact place where another person needs to be found.
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