Hi,
Well, this little star (me) hung in a vast universe just about lost her twinkle. We arrived in Egypt a day ahead of meetings and shared accommodations with our new member care couple now living in Jordan. They, by the way, are great. We then joined about thirty others on a bus ride to nowhere or so it seems when you head into the desert. A modest retreat soon appeared like a mirage and we were oh, so happy to experience cooler temperatures as air conditioning is not possible in the middle of nowhere. You get the condition of the air, absent any knobs for adjustments or slats for direction. Flies and mosquitoes did provide some circulation with spirited hand movements from us. The meeting were good, the food was bad (and I'm no finicky food critic), the fellowship was wonderful, the environment was loud. Construction was going on two doors down from our room and our building was directly over a patio where other retreat goers visited, sang and generally had a great time until the early hours.
The last morning of our stay, I stretched out on our bed, ready and dressed for the day, hoping to catch just a few more winks before meetings started. The next thing I knew, I found myself waking up at one in the afternoon. And this jolt was entirely due to a lunch bell being rung like a new pope had been elected. Arab culture is a noisy one. The whole time, I experienced such an intense longing for silence. Doesn't seem consistent with a 'retreat' center does it? I wanted to find a lonely cave, stuff my ears, cup my hands to my eyes and slowly take in one slice of empty landscape at a time for how ever long it took. Yes, my twinkle was dimming. My fire was going out. I was one dead star on its way across the galaxy.
We left 'nowhere' and took a van/taxi to Alexandria. That city has undergone vast improvements since our early days there. We stayed with a family overnight and met with several others the next day. It was dejavu to an overwhelmingly weird degree as we walked back into the same building in which we had lived so many years before to meet a new couple who had recently moved there. Although it was not the same apartment, the floor plan was identical and this had my mind running between rewind and fast forward all evening trying to stay up with conversations. The next night, we were on a train back to Cairo. After spending several days in Cairo, visiting with others, we took a flight back to the Gulf, opened the door to our apartment at three in morning and found one of our two air conditioning units was out...again. Five days and four requests later, we were operational. Well, the air conditioning unit was functioning. We took a bit longer.
Ramadan ended yesterday and the days of celebration that follow have commenced. Families fill the park below our apartment building enjoying a mini amusement park that has temporarily been set up for the occasion. Fireworks go off each evening providing spectacular entertainment from our balcony. We live in a noisy but interesting part of the world. Did I say that before? We take our brief interludes from travel in a large building in a large city where the honking and swish of traffic, our neighbor's crying babies and energetic toddles penetrate our simple walls. Construction is underway in small increments on the floor above us and as I wandered through our darkened living room one evening in route to the kitchen, two window washers were busily squeegeeing the constantly accumulating dust from our windows, hanging thirty two stories above the bustling pavement below. The city never sleeps.
As I finish this entry, I wonder what in the world of value I have communicated of any eternal significance. Perhaps, my most recent experiences are a microcosm of the daily culture fatigue all our transplanted friends experience. It is ongoing, comes in waves, is revisited, defeated and fought again, battle. And if I were to encapsulate all the conversations we had on this, our most recent trip to Egypt, this would be their conclusions as well. All of the mundane, repetitious duties of life are now played out with strange new demands, smells, money, language, food, traffic and rules that have no explanation. They look at their young wives or husbands, they hold their new babies, they seek for words to encourage their young children, they hunger for familiar friends and family and they find strangers and new acquaintances. They experience more mistakes than successes, they create worship where there is often no physical place of worship and they slowly, slowly make a life in order to bring life to a newly adopted land.
It's one tough, repeated, 'Yes, Lord'. So, pray for them and for us that we 'sent out ones' would sink our roots deep into these new, strange cultures and sink even deeper roots into Him. I realized on this trip how very, very good God has been to me. This came by way of my by own very, very bad attitudes when my comforts were downsized just a bit, for the sake of others. Enough said on that topic...Dave and I fly to Jordan for about ten days on the 18Th of this month. Full days ahead but good ones, pray that we will live them in the power of His Spirit. Every one of you (which my imagination tells me may be fewer since inaugurating this blog spot) are integral to His work in NAME. Thanks so much for your faithfulness in a humanly impossible cause, Sara -- for Dave too
Well, this little star (me) hung in a vast universe just about lost her twinkle. We arrived in Egypt a day ahead of meetings and shared accommodations with our new member care couple now living in Jordan. They, by the way, are great. We then joined about thirty others on a bus ride to nowhere or so it seems when you head into the desert. A modest retreat soon appeared like a mirage and we were oh, so happy to experience cooler temperatures as air conditioning is not possible in the middle of nowhere. You get the condition of the air, absent any knobs for adjustments or slats for direction. Flies and mosquitoes did provide some circulation with spirited hand movements from us. The meeting were good, the food was bad (and I'm no finicky food critic), the fellowship was wonderful, the environment was loud. Construction was going on two doors down from our room and our building was directly over a patio where other retreat goers visited, sang and generally had a great time until the early hours.
The last morning of our stay, I stretched out on our bed, ready and dressed for the day, hoping to catch just a few more winks before meetings started. The next thing I knew, I found myself waking up at one in the afternoon. And this jolt was entirely due to a lunch bell being rung like a new pope had been elected. Arab culture is a noisy one. The whole time, I experienced such an intense longing for silence. Doesn't seem consistent with a 'retreat' center does it? I wanted to find a lonely cave, stuff my ears, cup my hands to my eyes and slowly take in one slice of empty landscape at a time for how ever long it took. Yes, my twinkle was dimming. My fire was going out. I was one dead star on its way across the galaxy.
We left 'nowhere' and took a van/taxi to Alexandria. That city has undergone vast improvements since our early days there. We stayed with a family overnight and met with several others the next day. It was dejavu to an overwhelmingly weird degree as we walked back into the same building in which we had lived so many years before to meet a new couple who had recently moved there. Although it was not the same apartment, the floor plan was identical and this had my mind running between rewind and fast forward all evening trying to stay up with conversations. The next night, we were on a train back to Cairo. After spending several days in Cairo, visiting with others, we took a flight back to the Gulf, opened the door to our apartment at three in morning and found one of our two air conditioning units was out...again. Five days and four requests later, we were operational. Well, the air conditioning unit was functioning. We took a bit longer.
Ramadan ended yesterday and the days of celebration that follow have commenced. Families fill the park below our apartment building enjoying a mini amusement park that has temporarily been set up for the occasion. Fireworks go off each evening providing spectacular entertainment from our balcony. We live in a noisy but interesting part of the world. Did I say that before? We take our brief interludes from travel in a large building in a large city where the honking and swish of traffic, our neighbor's crying babies and energetic toddles penetrate our simple walls. Construction is underway in small increments on the floor above us and as I wandered through our darkened living room one evening in route to the kitchen, two window washers were busily squeegeeing the constantly accumulating dust from our windows, hanging thirty two stories above the bustling pavement below. The city never sleeps.
As I finish this entry, I wonder what in the world of value I have communicated of any eternal significance. Perhaps, my most recent experiences are a microcosm of the daily culture fatigue all our transplanted friends experience. It is ongoing, comes in waves, is revisited, defeated and fought again, battle. And if I were to encapsulate all the conversations we had on this, our most recent trip to Egypt, this would be their conclusions as well. All of the mundane, repetitious duties of life are now played out with strange new demands, smells, money, language, food, traffic and rules that have no explanation. They look at their young wives or husbands, they hold their new babies, they seek for words to encourage their young children, they hunger for familiar friends and family and they find strangers and new acquaintances. They experience more mistakes than successes, they create worship where there is often no physical place of worship and they slowly, slowly make a life in order to bring life to a newly adopted land.
It's one tough, repeated, 'Yes, Lord'. So, pray for them and for us that we 'sent out ones' would sink our roots deep into these new, strange cultures and sink even deeper roots into Him. I realized on this trip how very, very good God has been to me. This came by way of my by own very, very bad attitudes when my comforts were downsized just a bit, for the sake of others. Enough said on that topic...Dave and I fly to Jordan for about ten days on the 18Th of this month. Full days ahead but good ones, pray that we will live them in the power of His Spirit. Every one of you (which my imagination tells me may be fewer since inaugurating this blog spot) are integral to His work in NAME. Thanks so much for your faithfulness in a humanly impossible cause, Sara -- for Dave too
