Early Morning Ramblings

I flip open the lid and, like muscle memory, my fingers feel for the on button, then type in the pin in the dim glow of my laptop's screen, waiting for a moment as 37% battery flashes, before Chrome appears. I open a tab and begin to type. The clock display blinks brightly in the lower right-corner of my screen. 4:58 am

I never used to struggle with sleep. I would sleep late enough, often after 10 pm, but I would get my 8, 9, sometimes 11 hours without any trouble. If the sun came up, if I had to use the bathroom, if I got cold, if I woke up from a nightmare, I would simply pull the blinds, hurry back to bed, and pull the quilt around my neck a little tighter before drifting back into dreamland.

Now I cannot sleep before midnight and have to fall asleep listening to a podcast. I wake up with the morning sun at 6 am and my brain starts whirling. So I slip to the living room where I work, pray, or try in vain to fall back asleep. 

I try to laugh it off; my sister said jet lag had to wait its turn as I had no time three weeks ago. I'd just finished a 30-hour trek from California back to Istanbul via Amsterdam and as soon as I put down my suitcase, I had to go see the first of 15+ apartments we would look at over the next couple of days as we decided where to move to next. Our current apartment was about to be demolished, the utilities cut off, and we had to move right away. 

But it's more than that. At least the night before I was able to fall asleep a little before 10 pm so my 4:50 am wake time feels like a luxurious lie-in. 

Perhaps my brain is still trying to settle in to this new apartment we now call home. I shuffle around the house in a pair of my husband's too-big slippers, wishing I could find my own. I finally started washing my new clothes last night; the rains come next week and soon it will be too cold to wear all the new pants I bought in Ross, perfect for Istanbul's humid summer weather. The bedroom still feels like chaos, clothes haphazardly everywhere, and I can't muster enough energy to wash the six glasses that I managed to collect throughout the day on the little brown side table in the lounge. The lounge feels cluttered with two white side tables taking up prime space on the way to the balcony. The kitchen bin's foot finally broke. There's still a distinct mold smell in the one kitchen cabinet that hasn't grown more mold but persists if I keep the cupboard door closed. I need to renew my residence permit, hang the curtains in the bedroom, and cook the fresh pink cranberry beans I shelled last night. I reach for another tissue to blow my nose and realize I already have two more half-used tissues by my side. My ears and throat are itchy again; likely the side effect of having a lovely open window overlooking a very prolific garden filled with flowering trees. I think I'm allergic to ragweed. Except in California, where surprisingly, even with windows wide open for a blissful seven weeks nothing itched and I didn't have to take allergy medication to try to keep from going crazy. 

My A1c went up 0.3 points. 

I try to tell myself not to worry, my body is resilient, I just need to lose a little weight. But I'm an emotional eater and I don't prioritize nutrition when I'm stressed, so a busy day out means I'm surviving on chocolate bars and cookies. If I don't get serious about this, I will end up with diabetes. Which I do not want to have. I know all the right things to do but every time I try to do them, I end up feeling like a snail trying to maneuver its way through a swimming pool of molasses. My husband plies me with Pepsi, ice cream, a viral Dubai-filled wafer cookie. I reach for the Twix bar, the sour cherry juice, the convenient almond-covered speculaas. 

I'm not going to the gym again, I told my husband on Thursday. I desperately wanted to, but had decided that I didn't deserve the things I wanted. Just like the candle I'd paid $60 for that I'd put in the give-way box. A colleague of my husband's had volunteered to bring over some of our things we'd left in a friend's storage, after we moved to Istanbul. The intricately carved candle I'd bought in Michigan at Holland House Candles ten years prior, planning to create my own family heirloom to pass down to the children I would never have, was one of the items he packed up. I'd carefully wrapped it in bubble wrap but somewhere along the line, likely in an airport where careless authorities unwrapped the candle and then tossed it to the side, the candle lost its protective wrapping. Pieces of it flaked off and it was no longer perfect.

Even if the colleague repaid me, I would never be able to replace that candle. After 51 years of hand-carving candles, the owners had retired and stopped making their signature candles. It felt like the story of my life. Something beautiful always turned into ashes. Nice things got damaged, like the burgundy suitcase Anadolujet mauled on a flight from Istanbul to Amsterdam. Or the new-to-me phone screen that got two deep scratches before I could buy a screen protector. Or me. 

Yesterday I read something along the lines of, God created you to be uniquely you and wants you to do what will bring you joy. I shook my head firmly. I knew what brought me joy, but there was no space for that. No time to sip a cup of tea in the morning, to walk on the elliptical, to sit by the sea. No money to study for a doctorate, to buy coconut milk and tofu, to save for a home of our own. 

It's 5:58 am and the sky is starting to lighten. Maybe if I pull my eye mask on and turn on another podcast, I'll be able to escape for a couple of hours more. 

Oddly Enough

 You've probably heard the allegory before. An old man was working in his fields when a stranger walked up to him, said he was planning to move to the nearby town, and asked what kind of people lived there. The old man thought for a minute, and then asked, "What were the people like where you came from?" 

"Oh, they were the nicest people you'd ever meet. Friendly, helpful, real neighbourly," the stranger replied.

"Then don't worry, you'll find the same kind of people in this town," the old man grinned.

Sometime later, a second traveler trudged up to the old farmer and said, "Excuse me, I'm coming to settle in this town and wanted to know what kind of people live here." 

The farmer looked at him, stroked his long gray beard, and asked, "What were the people like where you came from?" 

The traveler replied, "Oh, they were the meanest people you could imagine. Petty, jealous, backstabbing people who never helped a soul. I'm glad I don't live there anymore." 

The farmer paused for a moment, then returned to picking his corn as he said, "I'm not sure you'll like living in this town then, because you'll find the same kind of people here too." 

The meaning is fairly simple to deduce: be a friend and others will befriend you. Or be difficult and you will find that others are difficult too. 

Except there's one country that perversely refuses to follow the norm.

I first moved here almost three years ago with my husband, 4 suitcases just tipping past 23 kilos each, 2 bulging backpacks, a pillow each, and as many travel pillows, jackets, and plastic bags of food we could squeeze past the Pegasus Airlines security. We were excited. This was going to be an adventure for us, after 4 years of grueling survival in a country where hyperinflation was the worst the World Bank had seen in over 150 years. It was time for a breather and we were ready for it. 

The adventure started in a tiny apartment in the western part of Istanbul. We took the M4 metro to Kadikoy 3 times a week to Turkish classes, and when we weren't in class we were hunting for an apartment, buying used furniture, visiting every Koctas and MediaMarkt for an hour's radius to look at appliances, applying for residence permits, and generally enjoying the newness of it all. Every night, we tumbled into bed, barely able to keep our eyes open long enough to set an alarm for the next day's adventure. 

I was loving it all. The yellow and white ferries, the obnoxiously loud seagulls, the midnight planes overhead, the packed metro and cheap lokanta where you could buy soup for $1 on a cold winter's day. There was free lokma from a roadside truck, a Friday market packed with little old grandmas jostling for the freshest cucumbers, and malls that went up 8 floors. Every time I turned around, there was something new to see. 

As I opened my heart wide to soak up the flavour of Istanbul and started to haltingly communicate in my few words of Turkish in the little shop around the corner, I naively expected that Istanbul would throw its arms wide open in a welcome return. 

Except it didn't. 

I smiled at everyone, made eye contact, said Teshekurler (thank you), and did my best to conjugate a few words to communicate what I needed. I tipped waiters (not a usual custom), helped a little old lady push her cart to the recycling place, and tried to answer when someone asked me how many more stops until we reached the end of the bus line. 

But after nearly 3 years of struggling to communicate with people who looked at me dourly, if at all, refusing to let me try to get out a few words and, instead, shutting me down by shoving reams of papers at me, or people who spat on my international marriage certificate to see if it was authentic and then declared it was not (it very much was authentic), or people who spoke so fast I couldn't understand what they were saying and had to leave because I couldn't get what I needed, or people who scoffed "yabanji" at me with a dirty look, or people who took my small bag of carefully chosen veggies and threw 3 or 4 more rotten ones in and then tried to charge me for the extra produce while disregarding my protests, I was done. 

I stopped communicating. I refused to go to the Friday market by myself; my husband had to come with me or I wouldn't go. I went silent in the small shops, communicated only the bare essentials, and stopped smiling at people. Most times I went out in public I came home on the verge of tears, oh so very tired of struggling to survive, yet again, in a foreign country. Would it always be like this? Would I never feel like I was home? 

And then we moved. 

I'd traveled for the summer, came back to an apartment whose utilities were cut off a couple of days later, and suddenly we were packing up our first 3 years in Istanbul into a truck and unpacking it into a very different sort of neighborhood. It was as if we'd stepped into our very own Narnia and everything turned magical. 

The stout man at the dogalgaz sat behind his desk, answering "yok" to everything my husband asked, including putting me on the new utilities subscription, but then a moment later he was presenting me with a tablet and gesturing for me to sign my electronic signature. The new landlord painstakingly went over every paragraph of the rental contract to make sure my husband understood everything it said and bought us a hot drink. The translator in the notary office (the nice one) invited me over for tea and conversation. Our new neighbours smiled and said hello as they passed us in the hallway and one said she would show me where the Monday market was. Even the man who registered our change of address in the immigration office grinned as he handed us a slip confirming it had been updated and said, "Hayirli olsun" as he wished us blessings in our new apartment. 

Everywhere we turned, people were reaching out in kindness and my lonely heart started to melt. 

I thought if I was kind, people would be kind in return. It didn't work that way here at first; people were too tired and had no time to help a muddling foreigner find her way. Then I started to become like the people I met, impatient, distant, easily irritated. And strangely enough, as I pulled way back and stopped trying to engage, I began to meet people who cared. People who were the opposite of what I now expected. 

I used to wonder how much longer I could manage; now I look out my window and think, "I could stay here forever." And for that, I am grateful. 

Here or There

Submit

I watched as the wheel logo spun endlessly on my laptop screen. 

Your ticket is confirmed

I breathed a sigh of relief. The credit card had gone through and I had my summer ticket booked. I sent excited audio messages to my friends, the arrival time to my mom, and the dates I would be traveling to my husband.

And then the tears came. 

I didn't want to be here in the summer. Its hot sticky humidity made it hard to sleep at night unless the sea breeze made it past the austere municipality building that blocked our view of the Bosphorus. My husband would be busy with work and my work could be done anywhere. Nothing exciting was happening in the summer anyway.

But I still felt sad. 

I can't do this much longer, I told God. Living between countries, never quite knowing where I should be. But I didn't have much of a choice. My husband lived here. My mom lived there. My husband couldn't travel there and my mom didn't want to live here. 

What tugged even deeper at my heart was not the liminality, though. It was sadness at missing out on life. I wouldn't get to see my best friend's little boy take his first steps. I couldn't be there with my husband when he got the news that his sister died. I missed my sister's milestone birthdays, my brother's engagement, my mom's retirement party. While I was here, I was missing winter snow in California, stir-fried tofu and bok choy, pure mountain air, and fresh morning walks in silence. While I was there, I was missing holding hands as my husband and I hurried to the metro, late night bowls of ice cream, seagulls squawking and pigeons cooing, and unexpected summer rain. 

I wiped away the tears and a small smile came to my face. While I was here, I would hold on tight to the moments and when I was there, I would store up new ones to bring back home. Because that was where I would always be, whether I was there or here. 

Home

Only the Lonely

The chimes of my husband's alarm slipped into my bleary-eyed sleep, quiet yet insistent. He didn't stir, hard of hearing as he was, and after eight minutes I knew I had to get up and turn the alarm off. His phone was in the other room. I slid the alarm button to the right, sighed, and went to gather my pillow, phone, headphones and stuffed dog. Moments later, I was settling in my little nest on the couch—in the futile hope that I could get back to sleep again. Unfortunately, it was not to be. 

I'd gone to sleep around 3 am that night. I worked til almost midnight, then watched Love on the Spectrum. I needed to start watching and deleting some of my downloaded Netflix videos so I could free up some storage space on my phone. The sleep cycle came and went as I powered through, determined to finish just one more episode. I was used to not feeling sleepy. Even when I went to the gym, I finished my day feeling somewhat weary physically but with a racing mind that refused to quiet down. 

I need to go to the dentist. Do I do that here or in the US? My side is aching again. My jaw seems to be getting worse. I have to wait until the summer when I can see the doctor in the US. We don't have enough money to go see a doctor in an English-speaking hospital here and I'm terrified of going to a government hospital. They look really sketchy. Why does my back ache when I sleep? 

My family is so far away. So are my friends. I need to write a book. Learn Turkish, Kurdish, Farsi. How long will my remote job last? What do I do when that ends? I'm scared of trying to find a job here. Should I work more hours? I need to do laundry, cook, wash the dishes, clean the bathroom. The ants are in the guestroom again. The soapy mixture helps a little but they still come. What if the municipality water isn't clean enough to drink, even with our filter? Why did we buy the cheapest filter? Do I need to buy more tissues? Is it going to rain again? I should research PhD programs and actually start one. I wonder if I should check the work chat again. Will I end up living under a bridge one day? I don't have a proper job, no consistent retirement, no concrete plan. I don't even have a country to live in, for goodness sakes!

I sat and listened to my daily Bible reading as I tried to knit a few rows on the sweater that was agonizingly slowly starting to take shape. I'd been working on it for more than a month, but after having to undo practically half of it to pick up a dropped stitch, it looked like I would probably not finish it until the end of the next winter at the rate I was going. 

Then it was laundry, dishes, dusting, vacuuming, mopping, the garbage, cooking, time to grab a quick bite to eat, changing the towels, tidying the house, updating the accounts, two trips to the Friday market, and 4 hours in the kitchen washing more dishes, making a salad and salsa, boiling corn, 2 hours of which included peeling kilos of green fava beans to put in the freezer. I couldn't care less if we had green fava beans in our freezer or not; I'd just as soon buy them from the supermarket. But my husband wanted to stock up so we would have them when the season was over. He liked them in rice with dill or stuffed inside tomato dolmas. 

It was 11:30 pm when I decided I had had enough for the night. My right pinky finger had been cramping for the past half hour, even though I stopped periodically peeling the beans to stretch my fingers and give them a chance to change position. My heels ached from standing so long on the tile floor, a remnant of my plantar fasciitis that flared up with poor shoe support, a lot of walking, or long days like today. My legs were so so tired. I'd tried to sit on the bar stool-height chair to peel the beans, but the small kitchen table was just too high and I had to go back to standing so I wouldn't get a cramp in my back too. 

I put the sweet corn in a plastic bag, popped them in the fridge, and scrubbed the grime from my fingers. After turning the gas pipe's metal handle from its parallel position to the pipe to the 3 o'clock position, I turned off the light over the stove. I left the beans on the table. They would be all right until morning, I guessed. I could hear Instagram shorts being scrolled through, one after the other, in the other room. They had probably been going for the past hour but my lavender headphones had blocked them out. 

It had been a long 12-hour day and I had done all I could manage for the day. I'd fulfilled my duties. Hopefully tonight, my mind would let me sleep. 

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