Imperishable Inheritance

Well, it’s been a lit­tle while since my last post’three months in fact! I took a lit­tle excur­sion to North Africa to dis­cern more clearly the will of God in my life. There is no doubt that I accom­plished my goals and much more dur­ing this trip. Due to the length of the arti­cle I will break it into two parts.

Head­ing Over

I started my jour­ney in the mid­dle of August. I left my job, fam­ily, friends, and life in Amer­ica for a short time. I went to Lon­don then to Spain where we stayed for a short while being briefed on our upcom­ing trip. We also received intro­duc­tory train­ing into the cul­ture, secu­rity, and we also had a chance for us to become accli­mated to one another. It was a prof­itable time, and it was here that I made a mis­take that would deter­mine the out­come of the trip. We then packed our bags and headed to our new home wide-eyed and excited.

Inten­sive Immersion

We then were sub­jected to the rig­or­ous sched­ule that would make up the major­ity of our time. We became accli­mated to our base town, and then we started the sched­ule that con­sisted of an inten­sive phys­i­cal train­ing pro­gram; class in the­ol­ogy, cul­tural anthro­pol­ogy, and infor­ma­tion related to liv­ing in this Mus­lim world; and we also started dis­ci­ple­ship that would last through­out the trip.

It was in this leg of the trip that I became very ill. In fact, at any one time 3–4 of us were sick. It was a con­stant strug­gle, but this was the worst. I missed our first excur­sion due to the ill­ness. I spent a week­end in the fetal posi­tion with incred­i­ble stom­ach pains. I even­tu­ally did recover from this ill­ness, but I would strug­gle with other health issues through­out the trip. It was one of the largest strug­gles amongst my team.

I did make it to the sec­ond excur­sion which was a trip to the wilder­ness. Here we prac­tice using GPS, nav­i­ga­tion tech­niques, and other sur­vival tech­niques. One thing I noticed was the amount of team-building activ­i­ties that we were doing. They stressed to us that the num­ber one rea­son for mis­sions teams break­ing up was not get­ting along. It was obvi­ous they were out to alle­vi­ate this sad truth that plagues much of the church. I found this espe­cially impor­tant when in a closed coun­try where the stresses of every­day life were extremely heightened.

A New Lan­guage and a New Family

We then started one of the most dif­fi­cult aca­d­e­mic things we did which was learn­ing the local dialect. This dialect is a vari­ant of Clas­si­cal Ara­bic, and it was extremely dif­fi­cult. We were given intro­duc­tory lessons in con­ver­sa­tion, but when we started learn­ing the lan­guage it became evi­dent that it was a dif­fi­cult but not impos­si­ble task. We had to travel each day over an hour to get to our classes, and that alone was enough to stress us out.

Dur­ing this time the Mus­lim pil­lar of Ramadan started. This is sup­pos­edly the month where the Qur’an was revealed to Muham­mad. They spent the month fast­ing from the first prayer (4:00 A.M.) to about 6:30 P.M. It was inter­est­ing to see how every­one in this cul­ture becomes instantly reli­gious; it’s sim­i­lar to Christ­mas and Easter here, but it’s much larger and more promi­nent. This was the first time that Ramadan wasn’t just some­thing I prayed for, but it was some­thing that had a direct and sub­stan­tial impact upon my daily life. Even though we didn’t fast, the cul­tural change around us impacted us greatly.

We then took a trip to the reli­gious and cul­tural cen­ter of the coun­try. It was here that I got to see the coun­try as I imag­ined. Up to this point I saw only touristy cities, but this city was dif­fer­ent. Ramadan wasn’t just a cul­tural event here it truly made up the whole of life. Devout Mus­lims were much eas­ier to find here as opposed to our base town that was a tourist spot full of nom­i­nal­ity. We were all split up into home stays where we stayed with a tra­di­tional fam­ily that spoke as much Eng­lish as I Arabic.

It was here that I truly expe­ri­enced Ramadan. When I got the courage to go out at night after Fitur (the daily break­ing of the fast), and when I opened the front door there were men pros­trat­ing right in front of the house! The Mosque was so full that the men had spilled over into the streets for prayer. As I watched the cer­e­mo­ni­al­ism I was bro­ken even deeper for these peo­ple. It was one of the most hum­bling expe­ri­ences I had while there. I then met with men at the cor­ner cafe right after their prayer, and we talked for hours on phi­los­o­phy, sci­ence, reli­gion, and I got to share the Gospel with them. It was an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence I won’t soon forget.