Another season done

I wrote this last Friday afternoon at Starbucks.  Hatice was here with the boys, playing with them while working her cleaning magic on my house.  

I love that woman!

It's hard to think and write at home.  The time when my mind is ready to write, it's also ready to go to bed - bed always wins.  So I took the laptop to Starbucks to post this, but the internet there was down, so it sat on the laptop until now.  

Seasons come and go. This isn't new news, but with each season that comes also comes the fight against anxiety about the unknown. During that season beauty can be seen from every angle, regardless of pain, if I choose to see the beauty. Leaving the island was remarkably painful. The simplicity of life there and the community of fellow believing brothers and sisters we were surrounded by had helped it become home. The sound of the ocean became familiar enough to feel as if I'd been listening to it my entire life, but I was able to spend the two years there never taking for granted the immense beauty of the sunrises over the brisk Atlantic waters. The crude shape of the black lava rock as a foreground to the shimmering gold curls of water as the sun made it's grand (and it was grand, indeed) appearance each morning was enough to make any heart sing. That season came to and end and we made our way across Europe and Asia to land where we are now. And with the end of that season and the beginning of this one came the all too familiar pain of loss and battle against anxiety of what the next two years in this place would look like.

We gave ourselves some time to settle in and unpack and then persued a few people we had grown to know and love about starting a small group that we would host. Our first meeting together was on our back deck and as I looked around the table at the few that showed up, I knew only two of them. The rest had met only Josh. I sat and listened to ideas be tossed around about which book to work through, if any at all, and fought to stay in the present, with them, intead of harking back to the cherished memories of our group on the island – those precious friends we spent so much time with. The two people there that I knew I knew very little of – only the details they'd shared with us in the short amount of times we'd had together. We knew enough about them, though, to know we wanted to be in community with them, doing life together. The rest were foreigners to me and with each move we've made I've been hesitant to dive in again – to open my heart again – to share life again. Each place we've been we feel it's taken nearly a year to really get a core group together that is open and honest and raw and feels safe to be those things. Here, on this locked down base in the middle of a culture that the majority of us struggle to relate to and surrounded by a people that have vastly different beliefs than we do it became clear that the need for intimate community was there. Active duty members are sent here and told to leave their families behind for reasons that we don't fully understand. Marriages are failing and families are splitting, according to one of our treasured friends who's still working through this tragedy in his own life, because of the palpable and inadmissable spiritual warfare that is in this place. In his words at that first meeting, everything is working against family and marriages. We have been locked in to these barbed fences for nearly 8 months now – not fully understanding why – so there's no travel, nothing outside the gates to distract us and call us out. It's been a perfect environment to hunker down and share the hurt and joy and life with eachother. We need eachother - we are built for community and community is what our hearts desire. So we dove in.

The Lord is beautifully intentional about his placement of his followers. We came to Turkey open to whatever he had written on this puzzle piece, but as always, have been surprised by the piece and how differently it looked from what we imagined. It's much more beautiful, as it always is, than what we could have imagined. OH how excited we were to explore the 7 churches, and climb the ruins, and learn the history and see it with our own eyes. OH how we long to get into the heart of those mountains we can see, lying snowcapped in the distance – a deep shade of blue breaking the horizon. How we desired to know and love on the people of this culture and experience as much as we could the lives that they live beyong these gates.

I listened to stories these strangers were telling me about their current lives, their hurts, their needs, and their gratefullness for the development of a small group to be safe and raw in. Really, almost immediately a core group began, and what a neat thing it has been to share life with these beautiful, broken, hurting and joy filled believers! We haven't been able to travel. We haven't been able to experience the culture in ways we desired, but how crafted that was – intentionally designed by the One that knows the end, that knows the hearts, that knows what we truly need – that knows the growth and the pain and the people. If those gates were open our availability would decrease significantly. I'm humbled by his timing and his hand in every aspect of our lives. We needed these people. We needed their stories and to share their pain – we needed them to share our pain – we needed life together and life together is the only option on a tiny plot of land where there's so little else to do.

This coming Sunday is our last Sunday together as we've known it for the past 7 months. Those of us that started out in group together are spreading out for various reasons. Some for trips back home to the States, some for the birth of a new baby, some for a change of assignment – a permanent change. The group is changing and we are watching the end of a season approach just as quickly as it begun. And it was only 7 months long. A beautiful, real, honest, open, messy, raw 7 month long. We've been privelaged to hear stories of personal tragety and desperation, along with triumphs and immense spiritual growth.

I'm not ready to say goodbye to this season. I'm not ready to continue our group without these key brothers. I'm not ready for this to come to an end, but I never am. Just as when we were leaving the island I getthis image in my head of myself sliding down a hill – I can see the end in sight – the end of something beautiful, and I dig my heels in as deeply as they'll go. But I know it doesn't work that way. I know my heels, my heart, can't stop what our Creator has put in motion.

For everything there is a season.

Ecclesiates 6: 8 &10 – Better is the end of a thing than it's beginning. Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.