Visionaries

Let sorrowful longing dwell in your heart.

Never give up, never lose hope.

Allah says, “The broken ones are my beloved.”

Crush your heart. Be broken.

Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil Kheir

This morning I woke up late, tired from a night spent in Chicago with a friend of mine. This friend is unique—she traveled Egypt with me, we only have seen each other twice since then, and yet we still share enough of a connection to be real together and to share life with each other. “Tory,” she said last night, “last year you were a stick in the mud.”

I think she was right. Last year, in Egypt, I was so serious it wasn’t even funny. Every situation was life or death, every conversation was life changing, and every person I met was destiny. Now, I am not saying that I am any less serious nor or any less intense…but I do think I have mellowed out. Yesterday I spent the whole day in Chicago, a 45 minute train ride from my small town college, getting lost, wandering around, and breathing the stench of a life that I long for. I am so restless. This morning I woke up and hated where I woke up. I hated the bed I was in, I hated the people in my apartment that I woke up next too, and I hated the town I woke up in...With all of my heart I wanted to have woken up in dusty old sleeping bag in the middle of the Himalayas, I wanted to wake up before sunrise to the sound of the ancient call to prayer, I wanted to be surrounded by the reality of life thousands of miles away…and I woke up here. It took a couple of hours to shake myself out of the disappointment.

It’s a hard thing to become content. Especially for a cold hearted, passionate cynic like myself. It’s hard to love those around you, even if they are ignorant, white, upper middle class evangelicals with no more concern on their minds then how they are going to ask their crush out on a SAGA date. And yet, somehow, these are the things of life as well. Something I’ve discovered with my girls—and when I say “my girls,” I mean the 10 freshmen women that God placed in my life during a wilderness trip—is that my vision is not everyone’s vision. I cannot place or force my passion on anyone else. I can try and let it catch—and believe me, I want to with all my heart. I want people to wake up next to me and to meditate over dozens of cups of “chai,” I want people to long for the simplicity of living off of hospitality, I want people to understand the heart of Islam and the heart of Christ…but sometimes I have to ask myself: why do I want them to understand the heart of Islam and the heart of Christ that I understand? Why do I want them to meditate over chai when many of them will learn to sit in silence over a cup of coffee or a bottle of beer in a tattered bar. Insha’allah. Again, this post is just my random thoughts. I don’t even know what I’m trying to articulate but for the simple fact that I cannot judge my brothers and sisters here. I cannot judge the hundreds of perfect looking people coming from perfect churches that walked past me this afternoon as I knelt in some bushes reading about Pakistan and Afghanistan. I cannot judge their designer clothes, their thousand dollar cars, and their tendency to go shopping. Nor, do I believe, should I fight it right now.

Is there a time for silence? Is there a time for simply sitting back and letting the antitheses of all you believe in wash over you? For some reason I have committed myself to not articulating my opinions as passionately as I used too. I don’t know why except for the fact that in Egypt I learned how little I actually know.

I was riding the El with my friend last night and we ended up talking about why Egypt was so meaningful. We couldn’t quite put a definite reason on it, but one thing we thought of was that we encountered something different. We lived among a people, a faith, an environment, a social culture, a political culture, and a belief system that were so wildly different than anything we had ever encountered before. The shock of finding our opposite, of finding our antithesis broke many of us; it made many of our hearts shatter into a thousand pieces. I wrote once from our flat in Cairo that my identity had been shredded and was now laying, like trash, amidst the slums and dirty fields of Egypt. I was rather melodramatic at the time, heck, I still tend to be rather sensational…but the reality of my words struck a chord deep within all of us there. Encountering something wholly “other” made us see ourselves in a whole new light. And we walked away forever changed.

Last night as I sat riding the Metra, the El, and the bus system, I remembered my time of exploring. I miss it so much. I miss hopping on a train simply to see where it will take me. I miss asking people in broken native languages how to get to such and such location. I miss walking through broken neighborhoods, playing with the local kids, and smiling innocently at the women. Ironically, I have inherited from my mother an abysmally poor sense of direction. It doesn’t matter if I have a topographic map and compass, a systematic map of the subway system, or mapquest directions, I never fail to get lost. So it was last night. My friend and I spent an enjoyable time together; all the while I wildly and discretely was trying to figure out where we were.