“And that,” I told the refugee students in front of me–tears hovering in my eyes as my hands lowered after my animated lecture–“is what I’ve been waiting to tell you.”
I drew a few deep breaths. After a semester of drawing this group of students through the storytelling of the Old Testament–half of them Muslim–I had finally culminated in showing how Jesus al Masih (Jesus the Messiah) was the fulfillment of every story.
Picture with me for a moment some soggy, Middle Eastern men on an ancient boat in the middle of the night. Their arms are slick with seaspray, jellied from bailing water and rowing against the wind.
They’ll argue about who saw it first, but unmistakably, something was silhouetted on the crests and peaks of the waves. And it sure looked a whole lot like a person.
But because people can’t really float upright on water–as fishermen, they’re confident of this–their minds vault to the supernatural: A ghost.
The cushions on our new couch were still stiff as we sat in the living room of our apartment with our team months after our family landed in Egypt. Cups of herbal tea steamed on the coffee table.
Our friends asked us how we were doing in our transition and I shared about the ups and downs, attempting some humor about a meltdown I had over burned chickpeas.
A global-worker friend from Nepal sent me a Marco Polo recently. She described a day of local handymen installing appliances in her family’s new apartment–with methods much to her chagrin.
My mind immediately tumbled back to the painter who striped our house different shades of pink and orange on the outside, so it resembled a box of rainbow sherbet.
The phone connection sounded a bit like Oliver, one of my closest Ugandan friends, was crushing newspapers on the other end. I held the phone an inch from my ear.
But I didn’t miss what made my hand fly to my chest: “Aisha…she passed. It was just too late. Things were already too bad.”
Near the end of my second short-term missions trip, I–a lowly teenager–was surprised to find that conflict with other global workers was a serious difficulty for those I was staying with.
Now, as the spouse of someone aiding conflict resolution in the field, this surprises me not one iota.
