Chill

Some people just need to chill out sometimes and enjoy the spontaneity life brings. Today I was that someone, and I'm so glad I did.

Yesterday the parents of a new friend named David (the one that arranged with the owners of this house to let me stay here while they're away this summer) dropped in to check on the house and meet me. I had planned to put in an uber-productive day but was interrupted by their arrival. I spent about 2 hours with them and then went back to work, but only after they promised to come by today and bring lunch so that we could share a meal together.

John and Zakiyya are around my parents' age. They were both raised in Syria, but both were born to Christian parents that fled persecution in Armenia. They had eight children, two of which died, and the past ten years they have been living in the UK under asylum. Some of their children are here, and they were apparently so concerned when their son David told them I was here without my family that they wanted me to know that I can consider them as family. This is why today they made me lunch.

Actually, they came by around 1:30 and John fired up the barbecue - not with charcoal or gas, but with sticks and twigs left from the gardening he'd done when they came by here yesterday. Zakiyya and I worked on salads and skewered veggies while we talked about life and family and got to know each other. For a while I kept thinking about how I was going to get back to work, but somewhere around 2:30 I realized what a fool I was and told myself to chill and just enjoy the day. So I did.

I love moments like these, and so often I'm too distracted to treasure them as I should. Today I made myself chill out and embrace this experience and these new relationships as part of the new life I'm diving into over here across the pond. And later, when two of their sons and their son-in-law came by I found myself sitting around a table, surrounded by near-strangers, listening to a language of which I know maybe three words, and yet I felt so very connected to these beautiful people.

Part of my sense of connection is obviously just the simple fact of sharing life through a meal together, and some from the deep connection of a shared Christian faith, but there were a couple of other things as well. I was being invited to participate in a culture completely unknown to me. The only Arab people I've known back home were Muslim men that regularly met in the shop where I worked back in my Starbucks years. As a western Christian woman I could never have hoped to have the open conversation I had with David today about the Middle East, Arabic culture and faith.

As we sat down for the meal, John apologized to me because his English was limited so he had to pray in Arabic. I found it incredibly moving to listen to him pray in his beautiful language, knowing what that faith had cost him, his parents and his grandparents.

The other connection I felt was as one foreigner with another. Yes, the UK and the US have a common historic root, and are culturally very similar, but there is a strange sense of vulnerability that comes from being an alien. There is a sense that part of you will never quite be like everyone else here, but things at home will continue to move on without you, so home will never be the same either. You feel part of everything and part of nothing somehow at the same time. Although I haven't had the language barrier that this family has had to work through, I suddenly realized that I could relate to their experience of adapting to a new culture in a way I never could have before. As different as we are, I found myself feeling more like them than I ever anticipated, and I found it unexpected, beautiful and a bit moving.

Today was a beautiful interruption and a gift from God. I'm so glad He helped me chill out enough to savor it.