Iesh Ismak?

I walked into the hotel cafe just barely a hundred yards away from my house. Climbed the bowed staircase into the open second floor lobby. I walked to the same four-chair, maroon covered table just off-center from being the middle of the room. I waved to the server as I sat down, and received a welcoming smile and a "hello" that were becoming commonplace.

Today, I had a few leftover afternoon tasks that I didn't finish before I left the office, so I came here to work on them.

So I sat down, opened my laptop, and looked up to find the server bringing my tea and a cup of water to the table. He was still wearing his smile from ear to ear. It is always fun to come to a place long enough that they know your order or your name.

Now, I have to add another task to my time here tonight. I have to learn his name.

Excerpt from a journal

Here is a recent journal entry. It is a quick view into some of my thoughts lately.

Two summers ago I sat here in the cafe of the hotel on the end of our street. I wrote about passions I believe God planted and nurtured in my heart and mind. The dream of going to Mosul has faded for the moment. It is a city of pain, discord and ethnic diversity. This is a city brimming with violence and, beneath the surface, teeming with a capacity for beauty.

Proof that I'm working: a collared shirt and a moleskin

I would give much for the opportunity to help her inhabitants draw the beauty from the midst of their discord. Now, though, this is impossible. We are often given dreams, visions, hopes and desires for specific people, places or actions and these dreams do not always come to fruition. They are at times, simply stepping stones rather than the next destination. Sometimes we are given hopes so that we might learn to let these hopes go. In my mind this correlates with dying to myself. I hope the gospel is at work in my willingness to lay certain hopes and dreams at the feet of Jesus. I offer them to Him that He might return them to me renewed with His purpose or replace them with His greater glory.

I don't know the purpose of this passion for the city of Mosul. I am forced to trust God with the pains and joys of her citizens, people who are both so near and so very far from me.

A Single Bowl of Pipe Tobacco

I've never felt claustrophobic. I am not sure I ever will. I can understand the fear of small places though; a fear of walls and barriers keeping you from stretching. Much of my first week felt that way. Until yesterday, when I discovered something while sitting on my balcony connecting to my third-floor bedroom. I wrote this down:

The light of the sun slowly fades behind the buildings, leaving the colors outdoors softer, gentler than the twelve hours prior. The moon slowly  pulls itself above the dust ridden mountains seemingly just beyond the edge of the city. 

Tonight the taste of dirt lingers in the air, almost as if this arid city were a harbor town to a gritty, dense, chalky ocean. 

In october, the brief moments of sunset are this city's most captivating. the sun and the moon sit parallel on the horizon and enough light lingers to see the mountains hedging the city, protecting three of its sides. Brief moments of beauty in this harsh landscape measured by the same unit of time it takes to smoke a single bowl of pipe tobacco. 

 Amidst the toughness of adjusting during a move, I was reminded of the beauty of the Creator. His work is never far, mostly its right where you stand. Especially when you don't know it.
                                 --------------------------------------------

You make beautiful things, you make beautiful things out of dust. 

You make beautiful things, you make beautiful things out of us.

                                                                                                      Gungor 

Almost There...

It is late August and I am in a coffee shop in Dallas, Texas. I have officially moved out of Waco and finished all obligations there. I return to Iraq in less than one month. I left Iraq just over one year ago and I am anxious to return. Things look a lot different this time. I am not an intern. My responsibilities will be greater, and so will my opportunities.
This past year has changed, and I think, grown me in ways that will benefit Preemptive Love Coalition. I'll appreciate your prayers and conversation in the next few weeks. So, feel free to call or email me.
And if anyone is interested, I've picked up Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

insight from the sole

Earlier today, Sarah Cook and I were speculating on all things important in the world. Being a future novelist, and the closest thing I know to an expert on Russian Literature, she brought some colorful insight to a subject I have yet to really engage. A person's feet have a lot to say. Essays could be written on the character or current emotional state of a person citing only the location, placement, choice of shoe. 

Currently, I have one foot sitting atop a hard wooden table. The other foot is resting just above the floor on the panel reserved for local magazines and dust collection. Four-year-old, white Nike running shoes, stained silver by a year of work with steel, are held on my foot by soot-stained laces in a loosely tied single knot.

I don't know what this says about me … but that's because because I loath internal analysis (and elipses).

It could speak of my emotion toward my last leg of life in Waco. A moment of rest after five years of hard work and investment in a community so near to my heart that I am completely comfortable and at ease, even at home.

My feet, though, do not tell the whole story. At least not yet. If Providence allows, and September ever comes, someone will observe a pair of brown leather boots covered in a pair of white-washed wranglers waiting in a terminal at Heathrow or stepping foot in Germany for the first time. They will be on the way back to Iraq.