An American and an Iranian walk into a cafe.

The punchline sounds imminent, doesn’t it?

Rumi (let’s call him) sits across from me and our paper cups of coffee on a busy high street corner. He moved to London a year ago. His family lives in Tehran, including his parents—whose windows recently shattered.

Rumi’s beset by migratory grief. (Imagine having none of the comfort you get from having a garage with a car in it, or knowing that you could read your cereal box front-to-back if you really wanted to, or at any given time having a friend within ten miles, or your master’s degree suddenly counting for nothing because of the language it came in, forcing you to start all over again from scratch). It means chronic loneliness, embarrassment, confusion, anxiety, and depression. You forget how to laugh. It's like your soul’s been dislocated from the socket. 

We’ve been working together for the last several months, Rumi and I, on improving his English. Over time, I’ve been able to string together the pieces of his story. I help give him the words, and he gives them back to me. It’s tedious. It’s rewarding. We hobble through conversation, striding into relationship.

We learn a lot from each other. One of the things I learn is that Rumi has been interested in Christianity for some time, but has had no one to talk to about it. One of the things Rumi learns is that, in a sense, the same is true for me.

In giving people the time of day, we get opportunities to proclaim what Time it is—the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:19).

Could this be any less than what Jesus did and calls us to do? Did he not share in a migratory grief of his own at his incarnation? Does he not know the sound our soul makes when it pops out of place because it makes the same sound His shoulders did on Good Friday? Didn’t he come, and is coming again, to pop everything back into joint? And didn’t it all start with giving others the time of day so that the Day could have its time?

It is not fast. It is not flashy. It has a strategy of its own. But while things on a global scale seem to play out so predictably, tragically, inevitably—a familiar setup to a familiar conclusion, a tired joke—on the human scale, God is there, popping all things back into joint. It’s enough to make us laugh.