Finding Me in Finding Him

Is it burnout? my sister asked. 

Probably, I said. 

We carried on our conversation; it wasn't a new discovery, after all. But it kept niggling at the back of my mind. 

A few days later, I found myself sitting on the blue-gray sofa in the living room, eyes tightly shut, as I talked to God through my tears.

I'm so tired, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. 

"Come to Me, you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest," He answered. 

I feel like I am overwhelmed. I can't do it all. I feel responsible for the salvation of the whole world. 

"My yoke is easy and My burden is light," He replied. "If you are feeling overwhelmed and that you cannot manage, then the burden you are carrying is not My burden; it is a human burden, placed on you by other people."

But I feel responsible to save the world; we are supposed to share the gospel to the ends of the earth. I can't speak the language, neither where I am living nor the people group I interact with. I feel useless and ashamed that I am not a better example to the new believers who look at me. 

"Remember Mary and Martha? Martha was off doing good things, important things, necessary things. But Mary, she chose the better thing. She chose to sit and listen to Me and learn from Me. 

I created the world; it is My responsibility to oversee kings and kingdoms, to make sure every person has the chance to know of Me. But I can do it without your help. I would love for you to come alongside Me and work with me to share the good news of salvation with others, but I would never ask you to do that at the peril of your own soul. 

You are weak and fragile and I understand that. You don't realize how much I care about you. I see each tear fall; I feel your loneliness. I know how hard it is to be so far away from family and friends who love you. You're valiantly struggling to give all that you can, but you are empty inside. 

Those feelings of shame that you are not doing enough? They are not from Me. I give you peace and joy. When you are in My will for your life, your shoulders will relax, your eyes will smile, and you will wake up with joy each morning, eager to embrace the day. 

I created you for connection and community. I created you to write and share your heart. I created you to cry for the broken and sit with the lonely. But now, right now, I don't need you to do any of those things. 

There's a verse that is often attributed to Me that basically says all I am asking of you is to reverence Me, to obey Me, love Me, serve Me with all your heart and soul, and keep the commands I have given you. It does sound like quite a long list, but did you stop to think about who is the focus of these verses, found in Deuteronomy 10:12-13? It's not other people, your boss, your family, your husband, your church, your society. 

It is Me. If you search for Me with your whole heart, you will find Me," He said gently.

I sat quietly thinking, What if I let go of expectations, from others, myself? How would my life look like? 

Having leisurely morning devotions with a cup of (grain) coffee or green tea. Taking a long walk by the sea and watching the street cats try to steal fish from the fishermen's full buckets. Knitting a sweater for the very first time and undoing six rows to pick up a dropped stitch. Taking a whole morning to bake a cake and refine a dahl-puri recipe. Eating steamed broccoli and yellow lentil curry. Musing on my blog. Listening to Nichole Nordeman, Rascal Flatts, Luke Bryan, Carrie Underwood while tears stream down my face. Daring to tackle an unfinished manuscript and start on six more. Watching The Good Doctor while exercising on the elliptical machine. Completing a master's in psychology to be able to sit knowledgeably with the weary and wounded. Getting lost in a part of the city I hadn't been in before. Eating a chocolate chip cookie in a little cafe. Letting my shoulders drop into the rhythm of life instead of scripting it out hour by hour in my planner. 

Look to the LORD and His strength; seek His face always. ~1 Chronicles 16:11

Scrap the Books

I could scrapbook again, I thought, as I wondered what hobby to pick up. A sudden tear sprang to my eyes as I realized it would be a futile effort in the end, anyway. I'd had scrapbooks. Sure, they weren't as pretty as Shiloh's with stickers that matched the background of each page. She was carefully scrapbooking her life, placing every moment into static glossy photos framing memories so she wouldn't forget. Some painful, others beautiful, milestones, adventures. My sister gave me a scrapbook of my wedding. She was a novice to scrapbooking but she had created the most beautiful capture of time surrounded by curated borders and stickers that matched each photo perfectly. 

I'd simply glued things onto a page. Twin pennies Zach picked up from the sidewalk and handed me one summer afternoon. The back pocket of my favourite salmon leggings after they were threadbare. The insert of an Anne Frank DVD. A stick of gum inside a note Katie put on the appreciation board. My I-98 when I entered the US so uncertainly more than 25 years ago. It looked like a hodgepodge of stuff at the bottom of a junk drawer that just needed to be cleared out and probably thrown out but every piece was a snapshot of an ocean of memories. Except I couldn't drag them around the world, so I'd taken a picture of each page, torn them up, and thrown them away. 

And then there were the books. 

Growing up as a missionary kid in Burkina Faso, Egypt, Lebanon, my parents gave me and my sister books as gifts. They would buy them when we went on our vacation to see family every two years, hide them in the suitcases underneath layers of clothes so our curious little eyes wouldn't see them, and give them to us at birthdays and Christmases. I would carefully save up my weekly pocket money until I had enough to go to the dusty toy shop at the end of the street in Heliopolis where I'd discovered a treasure trove of St. Claire's and Mallory Towers series in English. Every time I had enough, I would hurry down to choose another volume, worried they would sell out before I could complete the set. One summer we went to a church conference in Utrecht and my mom paid me to babysit my little brother. I bought him a wooden stick and rudder airplane at one of the booths and spent the rest of my money on books at the ABC. 

The five pounds my dad would hand me at car boot sales in Bexleyheath went first to books. I would search for the 25p bins and bargain for as many paperbacks as I could fit into a plastic bag. Library giveaways in Beirut, a bookstore in California with a punch card where if you bought ten books you got one for free, expensive airport impulse buys in Boston when I had a decent salary, 20TL children's books in Istanbul. Everywhere I traveled around the world, books drew me to them like magnets, their pages holding an adventure I hadn't yet been on. 

But for the past ten years, I'd been culling my collection. I'd lugged boxes of them to the mailroom. Books I hadn't read in years. Books I'd only read a paragraph or chapter in. Books I'd gotten for free. Books I'd bought at a fraction of the cost at the Family Christian bookstore before it closed down. I gave away the rest of my books to my mother. I couldn't afford, on a missionary's salary, to store or ship them from continent to continent. I would keep my top 50 or so. 

For me, books were more than a repository of knowledge. They felt like home. And maybe that was why it felt like I was losing pieces of myself. 

"I was created to be where You are," ~Phil Wickham, Homesick for Heaven

To Belong

I hurried down the road, carefully stepping to the left onto the sidewalk that would lead me past the mosque, down the stairs with the worn black safety strips, and to the parallel sidewalk that would take me to church. It was a gray cool day, unusual for early May, and I huddled deeper into my winter jacket as a breeze blew past. 

I love this weather. I wish I could live somewhere where I could speak the language and communicate easily. Like England. 

Ironic, since my passport was from the UK but I had only ever lived there when I was small, too small to remember, and for a brief time at that. 

I guess that's what it must feel like to long for heaven, I thought. I have a "passport" from there; my real home is there; but for now I must still stumble about on this earth where I often am misunderstood, struggle to fit in, and feel alone. 

If I moved to England, nobody would question why I was living there. Nobody would impatiently cut me off while I was trying to communicate. I could walk into a store and understand what everything on the shelves was. I wouldn't have to juggle miles of paperwork and worry about whether I would be able to get back in the country or not. I would belong. 

I wiped a tear away and wondered if this was why I would forever be a nomad, wandering from country to continent. Wistfully wishing I could live in the countries my passports called home and yet never quite settling down. Perhaps because no matter where I lived, whether the words could roll off my tongue like summer grain off the combine, or whether I haltingly pieced together sounds into a child's Play-doh figurine, I would never feel fully at home. At least not until all of this mess was over and done with and the compass in my soul that beat true north finally pointed clear. 

To the Home where I belong.

Vignettes and Verity

Oh, that's sad, look at the homeless person sleeping on the shop's stoop, I pointed out to my husband as we walked past. A large lump lay on their side, covered in a thick blanket and facing away from us. We couldn't tell if they were a man or woman but we suddenly realized what the homeless person was doing. They were busily scrolling through their phone, watching Instagram reels. 

A couple of days later, we passed the neighborhood beggar man. He was young, probably in his late 20's, and he always dragged a giant dirty white tarp basket behind him to collect recyclables. He stood on the sidewalk, asking everyone who walked by to buy him something to eat. As we passed by, I noticed the brand new Nike shoes. My husband saw the matching Nike jacket. Neither of us could afford to buy brand name clothes on the missionary stipend we were on. Believe me, he probably has a house somewhere, my husband muttered. 

We slid into the metro just before the doors closed. My husband nodded towards an empty seat, I didn't want to sit, and by the time we had finished arguing about it (I thought he should sit because he had overstretched his leg doing weights at the gym the day before), a young woman had sat down instead. When we reached the first stop, another seat opened up and my husband hurried towards that one. I followed him and stood in front of him, holding on to the overhead strap to keep from stumbling when the metro came to a complete stop. The metro drivers tended to do a little jerk at the end to line up with the exit markers. We had two more stops to go. The metro started up again, and soon another seat opened up but I didn't notice it because I was chatting to my husband. A man sitting next to him caught my eye and ever so subtly nodded in the direction of the open seat. I turned and made my way to it. It was not often a stranger looked out for us in the bustle of the city we lived in.

Friday bazaar. The bane of my existence while simultaneously offering wonderfully fresh fruits and vegetables and treasures galore. We'd bought the last block of white cheese, my husband had carefully picked out 10 giant twin-egg-yolk eggs for frying and 10 slightly smaller eggs for boiling, and I'd snagged a good-sized stalk of broccoli for $1. Our last stop was to pick up some fruit. I carefully picked over the remaining Fuji apples and chose 5, putting them into a pink plastic bag. The vendor slung the plastic bag on his scales and, quick as a wink, grabbed 3 random apples, threw them in, and started to reach for a yellow one that looked quite bruised. I started to protest, my husband told the man we didn't want that one, so he told us it was 1 kg (though I was sure it was only .8 but by that point I had no more energy to argue). I left paying for 3 extra apples that I didn't want and vowing never to buy anything in the Friday market again. Or at least not from that vendor. I hate Friday bazaar, I texted my family in the group chat. 

I think I'm finally reaching the point where I'm realizing that I do not have to change who I am at my core to fit in or please anyone, regardless of which culture I live in. Of course there are moral rules and there are certain cultural rules that are valued as highly as moral rules which I will abide by. For example, I would never intentionally steal something (though I did walk out of a Walmart with a floss once, and realized when I reached the car and pulled it out of my purse that I hadn't paid for it! I mailed it back, along with a $1 bill to make double amends but I left my return address off out of fear I would get nabbed for petty theft!). I would not cross my legs and intentionally show the sole of my foot to someone from the Middle East because that is considered like cursing them. The first is a moral rule; the latter a cultural one. 

However, I've spent my entire life adapting, acclimating, and chameoleonizing to the point that I've lost who I am. Or maybe I never had the chance to figure out who I was. I'm not really sure. But what I am sure of is that I will blow my nose when I am in public, even if it is considered rude in Istanbul. I will eat by myself if I am hungry and I won't force my husband to eat something if he doesn't want to, even though in his culture people always eat together and it's considered polite to eat whatever you are offered even if you don't like it. I will decide when I will do ministry and how and I won't always be available for every single thing. I will find my own job and I will take joy in what I do, instead of feeling guilted into doing certain jobs because it will enhance someone else's ministry opportunities. I will stand firmly and silently on principle. I will make my life as easy as possible, instead of always accommodating everyone else. If I cannot do something, I won't do it. I will say no more often. I will prioritize my physical health so I can stabilize my emotional health. I will drink water when I go out and not apologize for needing to use the bathroom, even though the people I am with don't need to use it and are impatient to go to the next destination. I will create quiet spaces in my world where I can rejuvenate, whether it is reading my Bible or knitting or going for a long walk or having a cup of coffee. I will stop trying to subsume myself and disappear into invisibility. I will learn to find my voice and speak up firmly and say, No more apples. I only want 5 apples. Sadece bu, fazla istemiyor ve ödemeyeceğim. 

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.