For What Was

I shook as I leaned against the tiled wall in the public toilet stall, thankful for the floor-to-ceiling door that muffled the whispered sobs I could no longer hold back. Control yourself, I silently repeated over and over, trying to gather myself so I could go outside and finish my meal. It made no difference; no matter what I said or thought, the sobs kept coming from a dark place so deep, I couldn't see the bottom of it. 

A few minutes earlier, I had been sitting with my husband at a gray plastic table-for-two, waiting patiently for our fast-food orders to be ready. I'd decided on biscuits, coleslaw, and cashew fries from Popeye's and he'd ordered a chicken sandwich wrap from a counter a couple places down. My fries came out and sat on a tray alongside a small tub of coleslaw, my husband picked up his sandwich, but the biscuits still were not ready. If there was one thing I hated, it was cold fries, and the longer I had to wait for the biscuits, the colder the fries were going to get. 

Do you want me to bring the fries here? my husband asked. I nodded. He went to the counter and returned with the fries and coleslaw on a tray. I smiled and reached for the first fry. It was stone cold. 

I'm going back to the counter, the fries are cold, I said. I picked up the bucket and headed back. The young cashier turned from filling another order and looked at me inquiringly.

Bu soguk [It's cold], I said in my limited Turkish. 

He took the bucket, turned around, and I watched in amazement as he dumped the fries back in with the rest of the others, stirred them around for three and a half seconds, and scooped up a fresh (albeit my original mixed in with the new) order of fries. I put my hands around the bottom of the bucket. It was still cold. 

My mind went blank and I forgot the word for, "it's not" and kept repeating bu soguk. He put his hand in the metal pan where the fries were, shrugged his shoulders and rattled off some words as if to say that this was as hot as it would get, then looked at me dismissively. I had run out of Turkish vocabulary. All I could do was grab my bucket and walk off. 

After sitting down, I tried to start eating but the tears that had began that morning were pushing violently against my vocal chords and eyelids, insisting to be let out. I was afraid I would burst into tears in the middle of the food plaza, so I hurriedly excused myself, mumbling something about needing to go to the bathroom, and rushed off to find the nearest stall. Thankfully it was close by. 

You need to learn to regulate your emotions, I told myself after I had blown my nose and wiped my eyes. I know, but I couldn't. I don't know why I couldn't stop crying. 

Usually I knew. I would dig my fingernail deep into the soft part of my thumb until the pain overtook the urge to sob and, after a few moments, I could normalize my emotions long enough until I was home and could retreat to the bedroom or my office to let the feelings out. But this time? 

Maybe it was an accumulation of things. The night before, my husband had finished a 6-month translation project that had kept him up late nights. Now a book was ready to share with a people group who had limited access to practical knowledge of God from a Christian perspective. If all went well, we would even be able to make it available on an app that would make it accessible worldwide. Several friends were translating it into another language for a second people group my husband also worked with. That group had even less materials available in their language, other than the Bible.

A donor had sent some funds for translating work and we had calculated a very reasonable price per word to pay my husband. The rest of the funds would go towards the second translation. We had sent an email to our calling organization asking for payment from that fund, but the treasurer hadn't replied. 

All the verses about not trusting in gold and silver, laying up treasure in heaven, and how God will provide for all our needs flooded my mind but at the same time anxiety worked my stomach into thick knots tighter than the beanie I was knitting for my husband. I didn't do well with not knowing, not hearing. Both of us had sacrificed free time so he could finish this translation project and what if they said they wouldn't pay him? 

Or maybe it was the frustration of not being able to communicate in yet another country, even though I did try. I listened very hard and did my best to stumble out a few words but the moment someone recognized that I was not a local, they switched off and turned away, too busy to give me a chance to try to say what I needed. My husband ended up becoming my translator, code-switching all day long between his two mother tongues, English (our common language), and Turkish. I didn't know how he handled it. I had lived more than a third of my life in countries where I could not speak the language and I was oh so very tired of it. 

Perhaps it was the challenge of not being able to find and cook favourite foods that I missed so much. When I went to visit my mom, I cooked tofu scramble for days and tired her out with the garlic baby bok choy, Grillo's dill pickles, seaweed, and salsa with tortilla chips I lived on. Every time she asked me what I wanted her to stock up on before I came and I would invariably answer, Chips and salsa. Oh, and baked beans. I need baked beans. Do you have toast and Vegenaise?

I'd been spoiled, living those 17 years in California, the land of vegan delights. A slice of toast with Vegenaise smothered in Bush's Baked Beans was a must-have. Haystacks, stir-fries, vegan burgers, all were foods I could only dream of in Istanbul. Even the foreign supermarkets didn't stock veggie meats and their beans were outrageously priced. Every now and then I splurged on a Twix or a Snickers bar, just to feel like I was home. 

Home

It was a word that came unbidden but always hovered invisibly above me, questioning, floating, unsure and insecure. Every now and then I managed to pin it to a person, a place, a feeling, a sensory memory. I gave a presentation, I was published in a TCK magazine, I wrote a poem, a blog post. Yet, no matter how creative I tried to be, home still remained as elusive as grasping one's breath in cold weather. When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, I longed to be here. But not always. 

Sometimes I was there and I didn't want to come back here. There, in California, I could breathe again without my lungs rattling at night. I didn't have to gather up my three pillows and head to the living room where I would prop myself up with a couple of extra sofa cushions behind the pillows in an attempt to sit up straight and breathe a bit quieter. I didn't wake up sneezing violently every morning. My eyes didn't itch, my nose didn't itch, my throat didn't itch, my ears didn't itch. In California, I could earn minimum wage and still live a respectable life and afford to go out to eat and buy nice clothes. I could eat Indian food at my favourite buffet or enjoy a budget lunch special at $7.95 with a lovely peanut-sauce-dressing salad, green curry with Thai basil and eggplant, and fluffy jasmine rice. 

When I was here, I stepped out my front door and I was in a kaleidoscope of energy. A bakery tucked away in a poorer part of the city where you could buy fresh stone-baked flatbread, bald chubby babies laughing at us as we shared a table in the ferry, a skeleton of a building already going up where yesterday was an empty lot, fresh flowers or tiled sidewalks busily being put down by municipality workers in the town square, a women's handicraft exhibit or used book fair full of things to look at and buy, and countless side alleys that housed magical little shops of all kinds, pulled me into the dance of life and I didn't want to let go. I thrived on adventure, travel, and all that came along with it. I wasn't quite ready to give that up for the quiet country life my mother enjoyed. 

And so the conundrum continued. And perhaps I would never stop crying for what was, but was not me. 

Table 10

The folded airplane sat on my desk, my name in black calligraphy on one wing, the table I sat at on the other. Out of all the things I chose to lug across continents and oceans, this was one I planned to keep. A little reminder of a beautiful day with perfectly clear skies, a pair of broken shoes, and an unplugged wedding with guests from around the world. I smiled as I remembered my little brother's wedding. Except he wasn't so little anymore; now he was a captain flying for a regional airline, with his MBA, and married to my elegant sister-in-law.

To my right sat a pile of books that I was planning to flip through for a PowerPoint training on boundaries in ministry that I was developing. On top lay the book It's OK That You're Not OK by Megan Devine. The subtitle grabbed me, Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand. Maybe Megan could understand the sadness that never fully went away. Or expressed itself in odd ways, like eating whole bars of chocolate while working my remote job, or feeling some sort of perverse release when the glass lid slid off the countertop and shattered in a thousand pieces on the kitchen floor. 

Very few people understood grief that could not be neatly defined.  Even fewer felt comfortable to sit in the silence with someone who felt overwhelmed by the sadness. I had walked through the city of Istanbul, tears rolling down my cheeks, passing hundreds of strangers who didn't even give me a sideways glance, let alone ask what was wrong. When we were first married and my tears would well up without warning, my husband would ask why I was crying in the typical fix-it-logical-engineer mind that he had. I don't know was most often my answer. I understood the feeling but I could not explain it to someone who had not experienced the loss with me. 

My brother understood, even though he was just a little boy when our parents split up and we fled from the Middle East. When I simply couldn't hide my emotions anymore, he gave me a hug, handed me a tissue, and sat with me in the dark. My sister understood, as we tried to wade through rules, expectations, and yet another culture with its subculture's heavy religious undertones. She sat with me in the messy liminality without expectations of ever fully processing it all or finding the joy we once knew. When I felt overwhelmed by the heavy atmosphere, my mother understood and sat with me, giving me freedom to breathe, freedom to eat real cheesecake and wear tank tops in 100-degree summer. It was in our loss of the life we had known that we became close as a family—each of us grieving in our own way but drawing close to comfort the other.  

But there was something missing. I struggled to feel that God also understood me. All too often, He was my father's voice, condemning, why wasn't I better, why did I choose to do things He didn't approve of, why didn't I witness more/pray more/fast more? Sometimes I caught a glimpse of a compassionate God, but He was often obscured by the rules and regulations imposed on me by a high-control society. 

I glanced at the time and realized I had just a few minutes left before a scheduled Zoom call. A lady I had briefly met a couple of weeks prior had asked if we could pray together. Fix your face, you don't need to be crying in the call, I told myself. I blew my nose, wiped my eyes, and gave a half-hearted swipe at the wisps of hair just above my ear that refused to lie flat. Moments later, I was introducing myself to R and we began to talk.

How are you doing, really? R asked. The kind compassion in her voice opened the floodgates I had tried so hard to latch shut. I swallowed hard, looked away, and tried to answer without getting emotional, but I couldn't simply say a few platitudes and wrap it up with a neat, I'm blessed, thank you. I had never been good at lying, or even skirting a question, and somehow my heart sensed that here was someone who was safe and could be trusted with the lump of sadness that refused to dissolve. 

What I thought would be a 20, 30-minute max, call turned into over an hour. R asked me meaningful questions, listened patiently and interestedly, and gently reminded me that I was not only loved by God and precious in His sight but that I also had a whole family of brothers and sisters in Christ who were there to support and lift me up. As we prayed for each other, the tears returned, falling unchecked, as she entreated God with words I could not speak but felt deep in my heart. The call ended and I sat at my desk, alone once more, still crying, but this time the room was holy ground, the emptiness filled with God's presence, and the tears from a grateful heart. 

God, if You are anything like R, compassionate, kind, gentle and gracious, then I want to know You more. To be in heaven with You one day. 

When I was a teenager, I heard a speaker say that "God never leads His children otherwise than they would choose to be led, if they could see the end from the beginning." I really struggled with that concept. I had gone through a lot of difficult things that I would never have chosen, let alone repeat if I could choose to live my life over. The hard, the wrong, the unjust, all came because of the impact of sin on the world we lived in. 

I wouldn't want to repeat the difficult times in my life if I had a choice, R told me, but I read a quote the other day that really spoke to me. It said, "I have learned to kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages." [Charles Spurgeon]

I couldn't pretend I understood why the tears fell, why the hard sometimes felt harder than usual, or why God sometimes hid behind a thick cloud of silence. But that morning, as a sister in Christ sat with me and empathized with my heart, I felt God's hand touch me in reassurance that I was not alone. My family, whether by blood or by the blood of Christ, was lifting me up, supporting me, praying for me, loving me, and in doing so, they pushed me up just that little bit higher so my hand could touch the outstretched Hands reaching down to me. Or maybe He had been holding my hand all along.  

A Hallowed Bathroom

E29. 

I stared at my washing machine as it blinked error code E29 at me. I blinked back, hoping somehow it would fix itself if I turned the knob to a different wash setting. No such luck. The code persisted. 

It had been a very long week and an even longer night. My allergies had flared up, even with allergy medicine, and I missed the 3 months of respite I had enjoyed in dry northern California. After doing a bit of research online, I figured out I must be allergic to dust and danger, which unfortunately was very difficult to eradicate, particularly in the humid air of Istanbul. I made a list of the preventive measures recommended to try to help reduce the level of dust mites in my apartment:

• Wash bedding and pillows in 60-degree water
• Vacuum and mop regularly
• Dust with a microfiber cloth (I used a wet wipe)
• Spray eucalyptus on sofas, mattresses, rugs (apparently it could kill dust mites)

I set about doing battle with the invisible mites. I vacuumed, mopped, and dusted, but realized I was probably fighting a losing battle as visible specks of dust appeared on the black living room side table just minutes after I had dusted it. Regardless, I told myself my house was clean and it should help my allergies. My nose, however, didn't seem to hear as it ran its own marathon. 

After a relaxing evening with friends over for a meal, I noticed a tightening of my chest, some wheezing, and of course, the invariably drippy nose. I didn't know if it was my immune system overreacting to all the cleaning I had done that day, the strawberries we enjoyed for dessert (I was sensitive to strawberries in the US but hadn't had the same reaction so far in Turkey), or anxiety. I drank a liter of water, took charcoal, did steaming with eucalyptus, and sat by the open window. I couldn't take another dose of Allerclear yet, so all I could do was wait. 

Around 2 am, I finally dozed off, sitting up as straight as I could on our two-person couch, propped up by four pillows. I woke up 3 hours later feeling like I could breathe a little easier but continued to sleep somewhat intermittently for the rest of the night and into the morning. 

I'm going to the library to study, my husband told me as he finished his fat breakfast sandwich and I wandered into the kitchen to get some water. I nodded, my mind already whirring with thoughts of the things I needed to get done that day. I had to prep my English class and finish onboarding for a remote temp job. As he packed his backpack, I stripped the quilt covers from our bed and chose several pillow cases along with a fitted sheet from my linen closet to rewash in 60-degree water. 

See you later, he said. I stood by the door, watching him disappear down the stairwell, then returned to the bathroom where I shoved the quilt covers into our 8-kg Grundig washing machine. As I was adding the laundry detergent, I heard a knock at the door. 

I'm coming, I called out, and hurried back down the hallway to unlock the door. 

I forgot my headphones, I hung them up on the wall, my husband stood patiently waiting at the door so he wouldn't have to take his shoes off to come in. I went to his study to retrieve them. 

They're not hanging up, I called out. 

Check the bed, he replied. 

I checked and sure enough they were there, thrown haphazardly under a corner of the sleeping bag he burrowed under in the winter's cold. I grabbed them and went back to our front door. 

Thank you! he grinned, as I watched him go down the stairs again. 

I checked the washing machine one more time and decided I would wash the pillow case covers with the fitted sheet in a second load as the quilt covers were rather bulky and there was limited space inside the drum. I closed the door and spun the knob from its off position to the right, expecting to see the digital display light up with water temperatures and timings. 

E29 appeared. 

I remembered I'd had a problem before with an error code but it was related to the door not registering as being closed. I'd usually just opened and reclosed it a couple of times which reset whatever sensor was inside. I couldn't remember what the error code was, but I figured it was the same one, so I opened and closed the door again. 

E29

I tried spinning the knob to different wash settings to see if that would trigger anything. 

E29

I opened and shut the washing machine's door several more times, each time hopefully spinning the knob to see if that would reset the sensor.

E29

Feeling rather helpless, I turned to my trusty Gemini app and typed in my washing machine's make, load capacity, and error code. It quickly spit out several solutions all related to an apparent water fill issue (which didn't make sense since I hadn't even started a cycle yet). The first fix was easy: check the water supply by turning on a tap in a nearby sink to make sure the water pressure isn't low. There was no problem there. The other three solutions were progressively more complicated, involving hoses, pipes, filters, capacitors, and pulling the bulky washing machine out from the snug cubby hole it sat in under my bathroom sink to unplug and replug it back in. 

If my handy engineer husband was still at home, he would have come immediately to fix it. The problem was that he had just left for a day of study at the library for a very important and difficult final exam. Having exhausted all my options, I decided to pray. 

Standing there, in front of my washing machine, hands clasped and eyes closed, I prayed out loud. 

Dear God, You know there is a problem with my washing machine. It's giving me this error code and I don't know how to fix it. My husband isn't home, we didn't get our salary yet so we don't have enough money to pay a technician to come out and fix it, and I really need to wash this bedding so I can hopefully sleep better tonight. I just can't handle one more thing to worry about right now. Can You please fix it?

I envisioned Jesus standing next to me, His left arm placed reassuringly around my shoulders. I kept my head bowed, acknowledging in my heart that God could very well not answer my prayer and I would just have to wait until my husband came home that evening to figure out what to do next. At the same time, I remembered the verse about the mustard seed and felt I had at least that much faith that God could fix my washing machine. 

I opened my eyes and reached for the knob. I hesitated, then decided to open and close the door one last time. I spun the knob and held my breath. 

The display lit up.

No more E29 codes; now I was looking at the usual water temperatures and timings I always saw when I turned on my washing machine. I stood there in shock. I couldn't even reach out and turn the knob to the setting I wanted to wash the bedding on. 

Thank you, God, I whispered reverently. 

In that moment when I prayed, God heard and answered me instantly. It was a silly little prayer, really, in the grand scheme of things. I didn't pray for world peace, for healing, or more money. I just came to Him in my weariness, unable to do any more, and asked Him to please help me. And He did.

A friend asked me yesterday, How do you know if God is speaking to you? It was the age-old question that people have tried to answer with various equations and formulas over the centuries. I had given my own—counsel from wise friends, prayer, sermons, the Holy Spirit's conviction. And yet it felt like there was something still missing. Today, I knew. It was the presence of God. For me, my hallowed ground was a black and white tiled bathroom with a peeling paint ceiling and a dysfunctional washing machine. It was there that I met my God.