When Steve and I had been married eight days, we boarded a plane for a tiny island in the Persian Gulf, and lived our entire first year of marriage on the other side of the world.
Though I didn’t know it when I stepped off the plane for the very first time, Bahrain would become something significant to me. More than just a tour, I would come to consider the experience a pilgrimage of sorts. A journey of holy significance.
Slowly and subtly the entire essence of the foreign place seeped into my skin. And, ultimately, into my soul.
I remember our very last night in our flat. Flat 41 in the Starview Building. I snuck away and stood at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined our living room and faced the Gulf. I breathed in one more moment, one more sunset, one more look at the horizon.
I could see the men from our building—the Nepalese gatekeeper and Mohammed the receptionist and another guy who washed cars for spare change—downstairs talking and laughing about something, their shirts billowing on their backs as the wind swept by.
The orange and blue dump trucks, quiet after a day of loading and hauling, sat in front of our building like toy trucks waiting to be pushed around in the dirt the next morning. Stray dogs barked and chased the occasional passing car. The sun burned in the sky as it set. To the north I could see the cupolas of the Grand Mosque in the distance, at any moment ready to commence the call to prayer.
Before we arrived in Bahrain, I had never heard the call to prayer before. The words meant nothing to me. I remember the first time I really heard them as I stood in the kitchen at Starview. I remember what it felt like to sense that God was speaking to me through those words, as if somehow he was using something unfamiliar to break through the numbness and get my attention.
It’s strange how life often requires something foreign to connect us with something that, in the end, was so close all along. Sometimes we need a change of scenery in order to see what is really there inside us—all the parts and pieces of ourselves that have somehow been lost but are in desperate need of finding again.
Life routinely deposits us—expectedly or unexpectedly—in foreign places. Sometimes those foreign places are around the world, like an overseas tour. Sometimes they find us, right in our living room. Illness. Marital issues. Financial reversal. Job loss. Parenthood. Military life. Every one of these “foreign places” is difficult to navigate and harder still to find ourselves in.
I’m learning that life is one foreign place after another. I keep waiting for things to normalize, for a sense of ease to settle in. But equilibrium is always just out of my reach. In light of that, I must choose to look and listen for the beauty that is nestled into all the chaos. So hard to do, isn’t it.
On our last night in Bahrain, the world was buzzing with the electric shock of chaos—as it always is—and I stopped and listened to the call to prayer. Just a handful of miles away terrorists attacked. Wars raged. Bullets flew. But somehow, I just kept my eyes on the red-hot skyline. Listening. Breathing.
I am praying for all of us today . . . that we might find a bit of beauty even in our most chaotic moments, and that God might be near to us even as we walk through life’s foreign places.
Grace and peace to you as you journey.
Leeana Tankersley
@lmtankersley
Leeana is a Navy SEAL wife, a mother of 21-month-old b/g twins, and a speaker and author. Her book, Found Art: Discovering Beauty in Foreign Places, is memoir of the year she lived in the Middle East.
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