November 2016 2
The Comfortable Lie. For the Mudroom.
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.
Remembering and Looking Forward
It’s funny that the changing of the seasons speaks of consistency to my soul. Our lives may look a little different each fall, but there will always be the smell of cinnamon in the air.
My heart skipped a beat when I saw a little hue of red peeking through the green leaves this year. The first colors of fall are appearing even though the sun is still high and hot in the sky. The yellow butterflies that show up this time of year are dancing across my vision and the mornings are getting a little more brisk. I know my favorite traditions are on the horizon, such comfort comes with the taste of pumpkin and the smell of hay. Except that this year, each falling leaf is speaking to me of something else, a haunting reminder that like the seasons that we can’t hold back—my life is changing forever.
I am trying to create every fall memory I can to sustain me because I know that next year changing leaves will be replacing with the latter monsoon rains. My family is preparing for an international move to a place where there is no autumn. Next year there will rickshaws instead of hayrides and new faces instead of family. Continue Reading
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