recommended listening: silence, by jars of clay
A week later, the women return. Now it’s Abraham.
“I don’t understand,” Jamie says, “why he promised Abraham anything. Abraham didn’t do anything great before God chose him. So why did God choose him?”
Rachel: “But God loves everyone, right? That’s what I always thought. But if God chose Abraham and Isaac, and not any of the other people, does that mean that God loves some people more than others? I don’t get it. This isn’t what I thought it would say….”
Almost midnight, and the prayers are still being broadcast from the mosque up the street.
It’s the Night of Power, so it will keep going all night. The good news is that the month of fasting is almost done, so soon there will be no more chants on the loudspeaker at five in the morning, or costume-less kids trick-or-treat chanting in Arabic at sundown every day. No more days without food or drink from sunrise to sunset.
Tonight, people stay awake to pray for dreams.
Gas stations have lines eight cars deep. The government just won’t stop torturing people, or allow freedom of the press, or a vote, or…, so several big foreign groups have threatened different penalties, so they say the government’s stockpiling gasoline for a twenty-first century siege.
Caleb’s strolls around the yard with his hands clasped behind his back, like all the locals do. The he squats to play with a bug he’s found. Neither of the kids would think of sitting in the grass; they squat, like everyone else here does. Caleb switches languages mid-sentence depending on who he’s talking to or what he wants to emphasize.
On Tuesdays, Lauren packs her bag: the white coat, the stethoscope, the Physician’s Desk Reference, and Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine. Most of her patients will die within the next ten years, but she goes. Mary, a local doctor, works there and wants to be trained. The trouble with Mary is that she’s twenty years older than Lauren, and ten years of age in this culture are considered more than equal to six years of formal training. Lauren has become adept at saying, “Hmmm. I haven’t heard that theory before,” when confronted with statements like, “That child has a rash, so you should test him for gallstones.” But officially and unsuccessfully training Mary gives Lauren an opportunity to unofficially and successfully train Mary’s young and energetic assistant, Sophia.
The Highway Department called: the English school will be forcibly removed from its current location if we don’t meet the deadline to move out; the deadline hasn’t been set. Officially, no foreign organizations are allowed access to college campuses, but we’ve been unofficially offered a new space on campus, twice as large as the current space, and unofficially told we should move everything in very soon.
I sit in the courtyard (too many drinks again) wondering what it all means. Only that our eighteen or so months here means we’ve survived here longer than all but about a couple thousand non-military foreigners in history. Not enough to die for. Eighteen months ago ago, I wasn’t helping my wife mourn as if she’d miscarried. I wasn’t wondering if I could become an alcoholic. I wasn’t worried that our marriage might not make if we got back to the U.S. I can’t remember the last time someone outside of my family or team talked to me without trying to get money. Eighteen months ago, I hadn’t given up on having friends. It’s come down to survival.
A church I’d visited just before leaving the U.S. had a plaque above the sanctuary entrance reading, “We exist to promote corporate worship in our local and worldwide community.”
Where in hell did they get a slogan like that? Who’d go through this for that?
We pray for dreams.
The next week, they return: Moses.
Rachel is shaking her head. “I always thought I knew about God. I thought I knew all about it, that if you did bad things, then God would punish you, and if you did good things, then God would save you. But here, it says that God made people blind and deaf and mute. God did it. Why didn’t God say that Satan did it? But God says he did it, and he doesn’t give a reason….”
“And what does it mean,” Mary joins in, “that God made the King of Egypt’s heart hard? It says it here, before Moses goes to Egypt, and here, in this chapter, and here, and here, and in chapter eleven, and in the chapter right before they leave Egypt… Can God make it so that you cannot believe? Why would he do that?”
“I don’t understand it,” Rachel says. “I always thought I believed it, but now I know that I don’t even understand anything about God….”
Jamie smiles. “What I don’t understand is how interesting this is.”
