Three homes, hundreds of hours of Arabic, many pounds of bread, and more than a few meltdowns. It has taken far longer than I planned to write this update, but here is my best attempt to sum it all up.
Seeing my Worth
The clearest place I can see God’s work over the past year is in my identity. I have struggled a lot in a job without clear daily tasks or measures of success, working with people whose openness to the gospel is frequently compared to hard, rocky soil. Who am I on days when all I accomplish is getting groceries, because that task alone took hours and left me completely drained? Who am I when I have a bad Arabic day or when my Arab friends don’t text back? Who am I when I can’t perform? Who am I when I doubt God? Who am I when I have nothing to offer?
I had no idea how much I equated my worth (and how much God loves me…) with what I did.
Accomplishments + Spiritual Performance = Worth and Love.
No Accomplishments + Lackluster Performance? Well… you can do the math. I’ve spent a lot of the last year questioning my worth and what God expects of me, and while I haven’t figured it all out, I have seen God’s heart for us a little clearer. We are commanded to rest, told we can do nothing apart from him, and defined by who he is (the branches to his vine, the sheep to his shepherd…). I’m slowly seeing that maybe who I am in him is more important than what I do for him.
The Construct of Time
Something I’ve come to love about this culture is time. In a highly connected, collectivist, family-oriented culture where relationships and social capital are so important, time is a different concept. Lateness is often expected. Government offices open later. Social activities last hours upon hours. I’ve found myself saying, “Arab time,” a lot. “Does it start at American 4 o’clock or an Arab 4 o’clock?” “Will she be here in an American 15 minutes or Arab 15 minutes?”
When seeing Arab friends, I clear my calendar for at least 4 hours. At first, I found my American self thinking, “There’s a lull in conversation. Does that mean we’re done? When will this be over? I have to get to my next thing.” This month especially, I found myself thinking, “Wow that was such a short visit,” when a new friend left after 2.5 hours. While my mom was visiting in September, we had dinner with a friend and her mom. At 10pm, after over 5 hours my friend said “lissa bakiir!” — “it’s still early!” when I talked about heading home.
People make time to just be together, to be with their family, to just rest. Time is, more often than not, unhurried. People make time to just be together, to be with their family, to just rest. Yes, it’s sometimes aggravating when it’s the officer at the Border and Residence Department taking his time chatting with a coworker, but it has been a sweet glimpse of what I think is a worldview closer to Jesus’. Life isn’t a race. People aren’t a stepping stone to the next task. Time isn’t earned and spent, it’s a gift. As I’ve let go of hurry, extended time with friends is sweeter.
A Year of War
I arrived here 10 days after the beginning of the current conflict in Gaza. Marches, missiles, boycotts, anger, grief, fear—all of it has colored this year. It’s hard not to reflect on a year of war alongside my first year, and somehow harder (and scarier) to talk about. I knew next to nothing before I started thinking of moving here, which makes me feel fearful or inadequate to write about such a complicated, decades-old (or really centuries-old) issue. And yet here I am, less than 100 miles from Gaza, in a country whose population is believed to be more than half Palestinian, seeing things I will never unsee in the local news, feeling the physical weight of grief, pleading with God to save people, losing hope alongside the people here who seem to have lost their’s generations ago. I feel that I can’t live here, work for the Kingdom, write about God’s work here, and not talk about this.
I am not an expert or an activist or a politician. I just want to share what God has shown me through these people and this war. I loved Jesus enough to say yes when I felt pulled to this place. You said yes (hopefully) to hearing what I have to say from this side of the world, what God is doing, what life is like. And this is it. God is intimately close to war, to the hurting, the orphan, the oppressed, the displaced, the sinner, the broken. He is Here. The world is bigger than I thought it was. Pain, injustice, and suffering are greater than I thought they were. And Jesus is bigger, more important, more radical than I thought he was.
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted;
he rescues those who are crushed in spirit.” Ps. 34:18
“God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him” Jn. 3:17