Salt and light

In Pluit, Indonesia, where the Java Sea presses its salt-laced breath against concrete seawalls, where the sun drowns each evening in a slow, spectacular hemorrhage of molten gold and bruised violet, my grandmother nurtured a dream as fragile and as stubborn as a sapling growing through cracked pavement. She dreamed of a church. Not a cathedral aspiring to pierce heaven with Gothic spires, nor a monument to theological conquest, but simply a house. A house where voices, worn thin by the day’s labors, could rise in unison, a tender fortress where the scent of sawdust and whitewashed walls would mingle permanently with the fragrance of prayer and hope. But in Indonesia, faith is a complex geography, a landscape of volcanoes both dormant and active. Here, a cross painted on a wall is not me