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

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.