Dangerous Territory

by Amy Peterson

  But here’s another thing about grief: no one else can understand yours. When you have a headache, you’re the only one who feels the pain. You might find some words to describe it, but ultimately it’s just pain—a feeling—that no one else feels at the moment, or can fully comprehend. Grief is like that; you’re alone in it. I couldn’t understand theirs, and they couldn’t understand mine. It wasn’t something to be taken out and examined, compared, contested. Grief is ultimately personal and incommunicable.

  And even when it leaves, you still feel guilty, as if your happiness is a betrayal of your loss. If I were happy now, wouldn’t that be unfaithfulness to Veronica and all those I’d left?

  Some mornings, though, I did wake up happy. The rainy season had passed, and we weren’t in the hot season yet. Everything was a rich, leafy green, lush with growth. Patrick called me late one Saturday afternoon.

  “I just wanted to see how you were doing,” he said. “We haven’t hung out in a couple of days. Do you want to go for a walk?”

  We took a motorbike taxi to the park by Independence Monument, Patrick behind the taxi driver, and me side-saddled behind Patrick, an arm around his waist for balance. Strolling around the oval-shaped park, we watched Khmer women power-walking, old men doing tai chi, adolescents flirting awkwardly and taking cell phone pictures of each other. We stopped in an English-language bookstore and browsed, buying novels and pointing out favorites to each other.

  “I’m working on plans for my birthday party,” Pat told me. (Only his sister and I called him Pat, a nickname he wouldn’t tolerate from most people.) “You know I’m turning forty on January 1st?”

  “No!” I exclaimed. “You were born on New Year’s Day?”

  “Yeah,” he smiled. “I’m planning a dinner party on the outdoor deck of Friends Restaurant—just our team, and Heather and Bill.”

  “And Camille?” I asked. My old country director was coming to visit me, Heather, and Bill. She’d known them since they all lived in China a decade earlier.

  “Oh, will she still be here then?” Pat asked. “Yes, of course, Camille, too. But anyway, I’m working on a party favor—I want to make a mix CD of songs that have been meaningful to me over my life, and burn copies for everyone. Do you want to help me with it?”

  The next day, after church, we went to the Foreign Correspondents Club, a historic three-story restaurant painted peachy-pink. We put our laptops on a heavy wooden table near the balcony, ordered Cokes, and looked out on the row of palm trees edging the Tonle Sap River. Even hooked up to the FCC’s Wi-Fi, downloading songs through iTunes was painfully slow. I worked on the design for the CD label, preparing song titles to be printed next to a picture of Patrick’s dog Sam.

  I’d never heard most of the songs on his list—proof that we were from different generations—but I liked them, especially the mellow James Taylor vocals and the melancholy Bruce Cockburn lyrics. Listening to David Wilcox sing “How Did You Find Me Here,” I realized again that I was sitting with a kindred soul. Patrick had known grief and loneliness too, and it had hit him the same way it had hit me. Sometimes I had the sensation that I was about to disappear, but Patrick made me feel like maybe I’d be found before that happened.

  * * *

  Camille arrived. She brought me a handwritten letter from Veronica, full of Bible verses and spiritual questions and longing, but few details about what was really happening in her life. She brought a bag of clothes I’d left in my old apartment, too. It was like Christmas. Actually, it was three days after Christmas, a Christmas that had seemed all upside down. I’d played only holiday songs with reggae beats, and my teammates had given me a Cambodian Barbie doll in traditional dress. But with Camille’s arrival and Patrick’s impending birthday party, I was content.

  On New Year’s Eve, we dressed up for Patrick’s birthday. I wore hot pink linen, a dress I’d designed myself and had one of the seamstresses in the Russian market sew for me. It was like a dream—dusk, twinkle lights, big platters of food passed around one long table on a private patio, all of us laughing and talking over each other. A pop song from the seventies came on the speakers, and Heather stood up and started dancing. “Come on!” she said to Pat, and they pulled us all up to dance in a circle around the table.

  Later, we took a riverboat cruise down the Tonle Sap with Bill and Heather and their kids, and visited traditional weavers in villages. I sat next to Camille on the deck, and she caught me up on what had happened since I’d left her country.

  Camille brought the kind of companionship I’d been missing—the kind that knows you and sees you, the kind that gets you. I’d missed that, but now, as we talked, it didn’t feel like I’d expected it to. It felt like she saw through me, through my pretensions to my fears.

  “How are you doing?”

  That was all she had to ask, something nobody had really asked me in the previous four months.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I did this play at the school, you know, and I’m starting to feel right here.” Camille had that counselor’s trick of allowing silence to deepen so the other person feels compelled to keep speaking. I continued.

  “It’s not the same, though. I miss you guys, and . . . I don’t know.”

  She didn’t say much, just kept her sharp blue eyes focused on mine.

  “Are you really okay? You’ve been through a lot this semester.”

  Her one simple question shifted a single stone, just enough to begin the rockslide and move the rubble I’d heaped over the empty places in my heart to try to hide them. After she left, I slipped into the hole again.

  * * *

  While I vacillated between grief and joy, the truth was that I wasn’t unhappy in Cambodia. By the end of the semester, as I took stock of the year, I realized that I’d become comfortable in Phnom Penh.

  And the comfort and contentment lasted as long as I avoided self-examination. I’d entered Cambodia grieving, but when school started, there was no time or place for my grief. So I’d buried it, and stopped praying, and stopped hearing God’s voice. I’d stopped asking God for things because I stopped believing that God gave good gifts. It felt like the previous year, I’d asked for bread and been given bread; but before I could eat it, it turned to stone in my hands.

  I wasn’t even sure God existed, or, if he existed, that he was good. Only a week earlier, an earthquake in the Indian Ocean had resulted in the worst tsunami the world had ever known. More than a hundred thousand people in Indonesia were dead, and five hundred thousand were displaced. Where was God in all of that?

  I felt like Elijah, who had been zealous for the Lord, and ended up running for his life as a result. He himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying, “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” And he lay down and slept under a broom tree.

  My prayers, launched like arrows, hit a blue bowl of sky, splintered, and lay in shards around my feet. I lay down and slept under the broom tree with Elijah.

  At church the Sunday after New Year’s, our local pastor Wai Mung suggested that maybe our only resolution ought to be, “Have your way in me, Lord.”

  But God had had his way in me in the last year, and it had left me broken. How could I ask God to do that again?

  part three

  Surrendered

  You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  25

  A Whittled Arrow, Hidden

  Today it would appear that we Christians prefer to talk of a measure of commitment, the length to which we are willing to become involved, rather than the depths of God’s immeasurable love in which we long to become immersed.

>   Helen Roseveare, missionary to Congo

  Before leaving for grad classes and the conference in Thailand, I took a personal retreat. For one thing, I needed to finish up some assignments. But it was hard to complete homework about the Holy Spirit when I wasn’t sure the Holy Spirit was to be trusted.

  For another thing, I was desperate to hear God’s voice again.

  I knelt on a queen-size bed in an air-conditioned hotel room just outside the city, with books and journals spread in a circle around me, trying to make some sense of it all.

  I was committed to God. I had already decided that I would serve him: on the mornings when I woke up believing and on the mornings when I woke up and couldn’t manage to muster any faith, I would continue serving him.

  But commitment was different than surrender. Commitment was about me, what I would do for God. Surrender was about God, what he could do in me.

  What if God wanted to do something in me, and did not want to use me at all?

  Dr. Helen Roseveare, a medical missionary in Africa for twenty years in the mid-twentieth century, wrote about her recognition that God might choose not to use her, quoting from Isaiah 49:

  Listen to me, you islands;

  hear this, you distant nations:

  Before I was born the LORD called me;

  from my mother’s womb he has spoken my name.

  He made my mouth like a sharpened sword,

  in the shadow of his hand he hid me;

  he made me into a polished arrow

  and concealed me in his quiver.

  What if God was whittling me into a polished arrow? What if he was hiding me away, teaching me to be as content in the quiver as I would be when aimed in a stretched bow or flying through the air?

  What if God didn’t want me to be useful? Could I surrender to that? Was I willing to be useless for God?

  I slept and woke, and in the morning I changed into my swimsuit. The outdoor pool at the hotel was empty, and I swam laps until my limbs were shaky. In the hotel room again, I made coffee and ate the banana bread I’d brought with me.

  There was something about God’s sovereignty that was defeating me. I felt my own purposes and desires and plans had been thwarted by God. But perhaps I had to be defeated—to fail in all the ministry I had hoped and planned to do—before I could recognize my own need to surrender. God does as he pleases, and doesn’t have to explain any of it to me.

  And he certainly wasn’t explaining anything to me. I climbed back into my hotel bed and read C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, the emotional account he published under a pseudonym after the death of his wife, Joy.

  “Meanwhile, where is God? . . . Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is he so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in our time of trouble?”

  I wanted to surrender to God, but I didn’t hear his voice at all. How could I surrender to an absent, silent Lord?

  But maybe I had never known who God was, at all. Maybe my idea of who God is was just a card-house construction, ready to be knocked over at the first hint of adversity. After all, as Lewis wrote, my idea of God was not a divine idea: “It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.”

  When Lewis began to reconstruct his faith, the most he could say was that he sensed a chuckle in the dark.

  I asked the chuckle in the dark to help me surrender, then packed my bag and left the hotel.

  26

  Falling in Love

  Unity, like prayer, like life, may be compared to a musical chord, and I think it must be that our God, who knows beforehand whom he has chosen for us, tempers and tunes us the one to the other long before we meet in the flesh. Constantly we are astonished at the lovely commingling of the very various notes that make up our chord.

  Amy Carmichael, Gold Cord

  The week before I left for Thailand, I got a chatty and friendly e-mail from Jack, apologizing for how long it had been since he’d written, and hoping that we’d get to hang out and catch up at the conference.

  I shut my laptop, fuming. Really? He hadn’t e-mailed me for three months, with no explanation for the sudden disconnect. Now he thought he could drop me a message and be my best chum again? And wasn’t he dating somebody? I e-mailed back petulantly:

  Hey Jack,

  Yeah, I’m looking forward to Thailand. I’m sure I’ll see you there!

  Amy

  * * *

  I arrived in Chiang Mai two days before classes started, and hung out in the YMCA lobby reading books and watching for my friends, jumping up and hugging them hard when they came in: Adam, the dramatic blond; a dancer with a pixie cut named Lissa; soft-spoken Jenny and camp-counselor Hope; finally, my best friend, Rebekah.

  Rebekah dropped her bags in her room and came back to the lobby. “Want to go for a walk?” she asked.

  We meandered down the dusty road away from the YMCA and toward the Chiang Mai mall. In the food court, we could buy one of the things we’d been missing most—fresh strawberries, washed and sliced and sold by the cupful. Over bites of berries, we caught up, talking about boys, teammates, and students.

  “So, are you going to come back next year?” Rebekah asked as we threw our empty cups into the trash can and headed back outside.

  “No,” I said, “at least not to teach in Cambodia. I think I’m going home.”

  I hadn’t known the answer until she asked, and it surprised me, showing up full-formed like that in my mouth. I wasn’t coming back. I loved my life in Phnom Penh, but I wasn’t going to come back.

  Journaling about it later, I realized that I needed to figure out, before I returned, what exactly I believed about missions. A year and a half overseas had made me wonder if meaningful cross-cultural exchange was even possible, or if it was always too fraught with complexity to be beneficial. I had said no, and they had heard yes. I had said “thank you,” and they had heard, “we’re not friends.” I had begun to learn a few words of their language, and they had heard, “I’m actually a CIA spy.”

  Sometimes, too, I worried about the power differential between teachers and students. I didn’t want to talk about Jesus from a place of authority, or in any way that would be coercive.

  I didn’t feel called to teach in Cambodia; in fact, maybe I didn’t believe in the work we were doing in Phnom Penh. I might have continued to request support to teach English in a closed country, but if I were going to ask people for money to go to an open country like Cambodia I wanted to do something more directly helpful or evangelistic. What seemed most needed in Phnom Penh was either development work, correcting the unjust systems that left so many people in various kinds of bondage, or the work of training and supporting indigenous Christians who went into the countryside as missionaries to their own people. If I ever came back, I’d want to be involved in one of those efforts.

  But maybe I could support those kinds of work better by sending money from the States.

  I stopped at an Internet café to send some e-mails, while Rebekah went back to the YMCA to unpack. An hour later, at twilight, the streets were quiet as I walked back alone. On either side of me, houses on the residential street were hidden behind gates and flowering vines. Ahead of me, I could see a tall, skinny guy walking in my direction. We were the only two people on the street, and we recognized each o
ther long before we were close enough to speak, leaving us with a long, silent minute of an awkward approach. To make eye contact or not to make eye contact? To shout a greeting or to wait? To speed up or maintain an even pace? To smile or look away?

  He smiled widely, and I managed to curve my lips upward. I felt my linen skirt flipping against my knees.

  “Hey! How are you? Where are you going?” Jack said.

  “Hey. Good, yeah, just checking my e-mail then going back to the Y,” I said quickly, without fully stopping in the road. “I’ll see you back there,” I said, continuing.

  My cheeks flushed as I passed him. This was okay. He was still cute. But my crush had been over for months now. I was cool.

  I was cool for about a day and a half.

  The next morning, at breakfast in the YMCA cafeteria before classes began, Jack brought his tray over to the table where I sat with Lissa, Rebekah, and Adam. He sat down next to me. “So, what are we doing today?” he asked.

  “There’s a new coffee shop inside the mall—Black Canyon Coffee,” Adam offered.

  “I have to go to the mall after class to pick up a few things anyway,” said Lissa. “Maybe we could meet at the coffee place around four?”

  “As long as we don’t stay too long—I’m supposed to have dinner with my teammates,” Rebekah agreed.

  “Sure,” I managed. “Sounds fun.”

  As we finished our scrambled eggs, toast, and fruit, Jack turned to me. “Hey, I brought a couple of mix CDs for you,” he said. “I need to go the Internet café to print out the track lists, but I’ll try to get them to you tonight.”

  “Really?” I said. “Wow. Thanks.” He had brought me two CDs, and track lists on a thumb drive? Maybe he really had been thinking about me. I wondered.

  And so our two weeks of grad school fell into a pattern: every morning at breakfast, Jack would ask what we should do that day. Then the two of us, with our rotating groups of friends, would spend the afternoons or evenings together. We went to eat Italian food at a restaurant on the river, sitting at long picnic tables with paper lanterns strung above our heads. We sang karaoke—by now we knew the European pop stars that our Asian students loved best, so we sang songs by the boy band Blue and the female duo M2M.