Welcome To The Exodus

The small church has died despite someone building it from Love. Inside the tiny town, that is dying too, its cross is still standing guard, despite its wooden arms being covered in rust.

I imagine myself purchasing it and renovating it back to the home of a new religion focused on re-empowering human beings who are sulking through this town.

Is there a laundromat here? I asked her.

She looked from under her hoodie, like I’d disturbed her from her slumber.

What?

Is there a laundromat in town?

There wasn’t. There was also no petrol station, no post office, no cop shop and, like many towns now, there was no bank.

An IGA was still here, and a pharmacy: life support machines where the only beeps were me and the girl in the hoodie, still pulled over her face, as she paid by card for a frozen pizza and a litre bottle of coke.

There was also nowhere to get a shower, which was a bummer, for I was beginning to smell worse than my growing mound of dirty washing.

Pungently, I drove around the town, past all the quiet houses that if they were situated in the cities they’d be a renovator’s dream. Their facades kept, their wooden floors stripped back and polished and a new kitchen added, etc etc. But out here they are museum pieces, and today I’m the only visitor.

For two days I’ve been camped in a nature reserve that’s only facilities are the sign that reads nature reserve. This is great, for I haven’t seen a car or a bush walker or a farmer for the entire time.

Around my bus the white gums tower as a herd of bulls in a distant field are being painted by the leaving sun.

I’m not locked out anymore. Certain people are cautious, but it’s not aimed at me, my country has awake people, hungry to speak, and many others who don’t want to listen.

These people are the apathetic weight the powerful are using to pull our country deeper into tyranny.

There is another group of true believers and I admire and respect them. But they have no more power than people like me, except for the fact that the greater, indifferent group is still following them, like children following the pied piper.I can’t come home because home is gone.

Trouble is, no other destination has revealed itself to me. So I drive into these towns like a merchant seaman returning from a long, difficult but liberating journey.

I might physically fit in, but I am not the same, and I don’t want to go to where the lobotomised Hindu cows are taking us.

But where else to go?

I’m not outcast, or homeless in a bus.

I’m full of life, involuntarily but now gratefully liberated. I can see things that other people can’t see. Truths are becoming stories as stories become truths. Even God has been exposed.

When I was young I envied the great explorers, for they had uncharted lands to explore.

Now I know that they only scooted over the surface.

The real explorations are into us. And we all have means and tools to do it.

And it must be out there, this destination, this fresh interpretation of our souls.

Why should it be?

Because so many of us, who’ve had our eyes opened, can sense it, can see the distant glow of it.

Plus, nature is thrift, so why would she fill our souls with this yearning appetite. That said, why would God imbue a hunger within us, yet neglect to create the food to feed it.

I am not homeless.

I am instead just one of many people who are leaving, have left, or are close. An Exodus of the unwanted searching for a place where they will have more freedoms and worth.

Maybe this old church could be the portal to here, if we all came together and believed.

We could repair the cross, fix the broken windows, and then its womb, that we don’t know where we’re heading, but we believe it will be home.

Michael Gray Griffith

29/07/26