Noticing (Everyday Life) 59

The lie is ingrained so deeply in my heart that I have to make conscious efforts to untangle my life from its clutches. This lie clutters my home, my very soul—the one that says comfort and contentment are one.

Life in the Middle East was anything but comfortable, any sense of ease in life gone. Tasks I did mindlessly in America took a new effort that made everyday errands mentally exhausting.

Walking through the dusty streets, careful to retrace my steps so I didn’t lose my way back home, I made my way to the internet café. Our internet was supposed to be set up in our flat weeks ago but learned that “tomorrow” often meant “whenever we get around to it” there. Connecting to loved ones became a calculation of time zones and schedules, balancing dropped internet calls and dicey sound.

At the fruit stand my broken Arabic brought smiles and raised eyebrows but I succeeded in getting the bananas I needed, though I still wasn’t really sure how many kilos to ask for when my mind thought in pounds. The smell of baking bread drew me a few streets over to where aish, small wheat flatbreads we bought fresh daily, were being taken out of the scorching oven with a wooden paddle and placed into the bags waiting to be taken home.

I climbed to our fourth-story flat, dodging the cats nestled up in the corners of the stairwell and jiggling the big metal lock on the heavy wooden door. I turned on the oven since it took so long to heat up as I flipped the switch on the electric kettle. As I waited for the water to heat for my afternoon tea, I opened the window at the end of the narrow kitchen.

The sounds of children playing and pots banging echoed as I removed the clothes from the washer nestled between the stove and the refrigerator and balanced my body half way out the window to hang them from the clothesline that hung precariously over the courtyard. I sighed into my tea and thought of how comfortable life had been before, how I had taken for granted how much work normal tasks would take in this place.

It was in that uncomfortable place, where everything from the language to how to cook rice was foreign to me, that I learned that comfort and contentment aren’t one and the same. They so easily masquerade as synonymous, especially in Western culture...

Do you find yourself living like comfort and contentment are the same? Are you ready to find contentment in God instead of a life of ease? Untangle the lie with me.