I am a sleeper. I love sleep. I can sleep anywhere. I can sleep through the loudest of thunderstorms. When I go to bed, my head hits the pillow and I'm right to sleep. However, recently I've found myself laying there with "random" things just pouring through my mind. I have a friend who God really uses as a prayer warrior who will say, "God woke me up last night and put so and so on my mind. I knew I was supposed to pray for him or her." And this happens frequently with this friend. I chuckle and think, "Good thing God doesn't ask me to wake up and pray at night. Yipes! Good luck waking me up." :) Well, I think the joke is on me because I've slowly come to realize that God's not going to bother waking me up. Nope. To get my attention He doesn't wake me up, He just keeps me up. I toss and turn for what seems like forever, unable to quit thinking about that "random" thing that is for some reason on my mind. I have to admit though that it's taken several knocks on my door for me to understand what God's doing and sit up and pay attention. Last night was one of those and I didn't realize it until this morning.
I dreamt last night that I had this amazing conversation with Jesus about an experience I had on a mission trip that I really hadn't thought about at the time as a lesson to have learned. I woke up this morning and realized that while I thought I had gotten up and written about this lesson learned, I had in fact not. Apparently I wrote this really amazing blog entry in my sleep about this lesson but my brain never typed it up for me. ;) So the lesson for me now is going to be when God knocks, get out of bed, listen, and actually write down what He's telling me to write down and share with others. So now I'm going to play catch up and hope I can recall what I "wrote" last night.
When I went to bed last night, my mind kept going back to a mission trip I went on with two friends the summer after my senior year of high school. Laying in bed, I couldn't figure out why I couldn't fall asleep. Couldn't stop thinking about this trip - the things I saw, the things I learned, the people I interacted with. If you had asked me one year after that trip what I had learned, I would have talked about faith in the darkest of dark places. I would have talked to you about freedom - personal and religious. I would have talked about not judging or stereotyping people by a label given to them. I would have talked to you about the great team I served with and the several wonderful families I got to know. And last night my thoughts did revisit these things but one thing that kept coming to the forefront was the home of one of the families we got to know. But to get to that home and my experiences there, I have to back up and start at the beginning of the trip.
It's 1997, the summer after my senior year of high school. Two friends and I embarked on a mission trip to England with Operation Mobilization. To England? Yes, to England. To a city that at the time had one of the largest mosques in the UK. To a community that had seen a large influx of Muslim immigrants from India. To a church that was doing its best to serve this community in building relationships and pouring out Jesus love on the people in the neighborhood nearby. It was to this place we went. And it was in this place where reality knocked the sheltered naivety right out of an 18-year-old girl from Western PA.
This community was vibrant. It was alive with people and activities, markets and parks. However, I was a girl. I was a girl who had come to serve in a community that had a culture that was unlike anything I'd seen or experienced before. It was a dark, dark place. Oh, I had heard about spiritual darkness and spiritual warfare. But experiencing it and feeling it....there aren't any words to explain it. To this day, looking back on that experience, I still couldn't put appropriate words to what it felt like in several specific spiritually dark places within that community. I was there willing and eager to be the hands and feet of Jesus, but I was just a girl and girls didn't get to have a voice in this community. Women walked behind the men. Women didn't make eye contact when passing by a man. They spoke when spoken to. Men got to make the rules. Women got to do as they were told. This didn't sit well with a certain independent, small town, American citizen teenager. While the guys on our team got to out into the community and talk to the men and visit the mosque, the gals on the trip were tasked with fostering relationships with women in the community. I wanted to do more. It didn't seem fair that the guys got to do the "mission work" and the girls were just hanging out. What I didn't realize at the start of the trip that I did realize at the end was that less can be more when God is at work. There were groups of Muslim women already engaging with the local Christian church under the guise of sharing afternoon tea or talking with women from the church while their children played together at the park. We joined those efforts and in the process met an amazing family, two of the sisters being close in age to us.
The brothers and sisters of this family were not as devout as other followers of Islam in the community and the older sister welcomed us into her home. We shared time together learning about each other's culture and beliefs. I was devastated to learn that arranged marriages were still a thing and it didn't matter what country you were in or how young you were or how old he was. If your family arranged it, you said 'I do'. We shared time together in the park. They took us to the market. They invited us to share a meal with them in their home. When the older sister hurt her hand in the garden requiring stitches, we worked with other family members to finish the garden work while she was at the hospital because we knew she'd come back and want to finish it if the task wasn't done. They welcomed three Christian female teenagers into their home and embraced us like family.
And as I lay thinking about this family and the time spent with them at their home, God asked me one very clear question. "How did you get into that home?"
My snarky, tired, really wishing I was sleeping response was, "Through the door." Really? Was this really what God was keeping me awake to talk about?
Yet as I laid there I realized that what I experienced in that home and with that family really shouldn't have happened. That door shouldn't have been open to us. A night prior to being welcomed into this home, as we canvassed the community handing out copies of the Jesus video to whomever would open their door to us and listen to our spiel, we had a LOT of doors closed on us. We got used to it after the first couple doors shut on us. But for the question He posed last night, God wasn't asking me about the main entry door from the outside. It was a doorway inside their home. A doorway that we never should have made it through. In the Muslim culture, there are various zones in a home including the public front room where they receive guests and then beyond that are the private quarters of the home. We weren't just strangers in this family's home. We were foreigners, females, and Christians. Strikes one, two, and three. But God had a plan for each of us there. He took us beyond our "woe is me the girls get to do nothing for the Kingdom on this trip" and He opened the door for His Kingdom's work. For the three of us from our team - for what He wanted to teach us through our experiences with this family. For this family - for what He wanted them to learn about Him through our interactions with them. Twenty-four years later, I apparently still have more to learn from that trip. And last night's lesson was on the door. God opened that inner door of this family's home and He does the same for the door to His Kingdom.
The only thing is, the door to His home hasn't just been opened; it's been taken off the hinges. The veil was torn. The barrier removed. Love made a way. We walked through the inner door in the home of a Muslim family despite being foreigners, despite being girls, despite being Christians. We got to come as we were. No lies. No pretenses. No need to sneak in unnoticed. No mask to wear. We were embraced and our time together was blessed. Jesus does the same. He stands in the doorway and beckons us to come as we are. All who enter are embraced not as guests but as family. Come to the Father. Come weary. Come burdened. Come hurting. Come empty handed. Come brokenhearted. Come with nothing and be blessed by a God who doesn't need me or you, but wants us. The door is open. Come.
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