Reflections from the Middle East – summer 2024 to today

Though extremely late, I have finally written my post-trip reflection of my short-term mission trip to the Middle East from last summer. The delay was partially due to my painfully slow writing – I write like I speak, fortunately or unfortunately, thinking through every word before it comes into existence (which also turned out to be a big theme in the trip). But to not hide behind this excuse alone, the delay was also a result of how conflicted I felt on if and how to share about the difficult moments that I faced.

To avoid sharing felt disingenuous to me, but I also found myself wanting to minimize my experience out of shame. I hope to conquer some of this shame in the act of sharing. Thus, here I present my testimony of how God met me in this trip and how I am attempting to respond to Him still today.

The challenges of prayer walking ministry

As a quick refresher of the ministry focus for this trip: our team was sent to a city in the Middle East where there were no churches or known followers of Jesus. Our primary goal was to cover the entire city in prayer, because when we pray, God works! We would split up into different sub-teams each day to cover as much ground as possible. Our secondary goal was to see if there were any persons of peace in this city who we could connect to the local long-term workers. A “person of peace” is someone who God is positioning to open the way for the gospel to enter the surrounding environment (based on Luke 10). We were given some tips on things to look for when trying to identify a person of peace, but even so, it was way harder than any of us anticipated. How do you wisely direct the conversation without saying something offensive? How do you know if you should keep pressing in or if it is time to walk away? Then try to collectively make a decision with three other people, who all have their unique way of discerning with God, while the potential person of peace is standing right there in front of you…

We felt the attack on our team unity from the day we landed in the country, and our cracks really began to show during our three days of prayer walking. Both sub-teams experienced divisive situations on day 1 when attempting to identify people of peace that left us feeling hurt, discouraged, and even uncomfortable, but we chalked it up to the learning curve and hoped for a better next day.

The spaghetti women

On day 2, my sub-team set out on an uphill ascent along the outskirts of the town. We definitely looked strange to anyone we passed by, considering that we were clearly foreigners and traveling through an area that no one would have a reason to visit. A family of women stopped us, invited us into their home to rest, and replenished us with plenty of water and coffee and snacks. Our team affectionately refers to them as the “spaghetti women” because they were making spaghetti noodles to store for the winter when we ran into them.

After talking for some time, the women asked us if we had lunch plans and offered to use their noodles to prepare a meal for us. It was already 1 pm, and we were still far from the area of town where we had planned to eat lunch. I thought being welcomed into a home was already a good sign of a potential person of peace, so being invited for a whole meal felt like an opportunity to stay for. The rest of my sub-team thought that it was better for us to leave. With the prior day’s experiences fresh in my mind, I decided to listen to my teammates since three same opinions did not feel like worth fighting against at the risk of not loving each other well.

When we left and continued to make our way up the hill, I asked my teammates to explain what led them to want to leave. I made it clear that I was asking this from a desire to reach a place of understanding rather than to debate on what was the right choice, though I was also open about not agreeing with all of their reasoning. Eventually someone asked me for my perspective on why I thought we should have stayed. I took a few moments to collect my thoughts, as I nearly always do, to which someone else made a joke about team conflict that did not land well. My intention to consider others was turning into a point of contention. From there, it felt like all of my carefully placed dominoes began to fall as patience wore thin and the conversation escalated. Truthfully, I do not remember all the words that were exchanged, except for the line that broke me: “You should have said something when we were at their house. I don’t know what you want me to do. I can’t help you.”

An encounter with little Jessica

Growing up, I was led to believe that my voice did not matter. One way this took shape was when often I would share out loud something on my mind, only to be met with a judgmental look from my parent that said it all. I did not need to hear words to know that whatever I said was received as being dumb, stupid, weird – though there would usually be a verbal confirmation from my parent, just to be sure. After experiencing that enough times, I learned that it is easier to just not say anything at all. I did not realize how much this influenced me still as an adult until a couple years ago. In a random conversation with one of my co-interns in Guatemala, I began to preface something I wanted to say with, “This isn’t really important, but––” to which she cut me off with something very profound (to me), “I want to hear the ‘unimportant’ things from my friends. You don’t need permission to speak.”

I have been trying to unlearn this belief that my thoughts do not matter or that they do more harm than good, when in reality I do have agency to speak freely without fear. Though in the aftermath of the spaghetti women, the enemy immediately jumped in to amplify my self-doubt:

"See, this is all your fault. You really are helpless, and you are always going to be this way.
You will never be able to express yourself... not that it matters, because no one actually cares.
You always ruin everything. This is why you can never belong anywhere.
Everyone would be so much better off without you."

Interestingly, this was one of the clearest moments that I have ever been able to “hear” the enemy’s voice. It was loud, but it was also distinguishable, so that I knew that it was the enemy speaking in the chaos. But it was so loud that it felt inescapable, even if I could name it for what it was.

I emotionally collapsed into tears under the weight of everything going on, which caused our sub-team to have to stop at the top of the long, unshaded hill in the sweltering heat. Although I had struggled with how to articulate why I wanted to stay with the spaghetti women, I at least was able to describe to my teammates the childhood memories being brought up and how the enemy was trying to keep me stuck in the lies and isolation. We took some time to realign ourselves and pray, and then continued on. But as more incidental triggers came up throughout the day in my heightened state of vulnerability, the enemy would not stop taunting me.

I felt weak and humiliated for being the burden on the team who could not hold it together. I felt hopeless and pathetic, like nothing had changed since I was a little girl. I felt helpless and alone.

When we finally got back to our lodging, I was granted 20 minutes of solitude (a rarity during STM trips when you are with your team for every waking moment) and used the entire time to just cry in my lament…

“God, why am I like this?“

But it was in this defeat that God met me with His Word:

"You have kept count of my tossings;
      put my tears in your bottle.
      Are they not in your book?
Then my enemies will turn back
      in the day when I call.
      This I know, that God is for me.
In God, whose word I praise,
      in the LORD, whose word I praise,
in God I trust; I shall not be afraid.
      What can man do to me?"
Psalm 56:8-11

This was perhaps the most comforted I had ever felt by God’s Word from a place of true dependence. These words became my rescue and strength to put aside my own self-judgment for the time being and finish our prayer walking ministry. 2024 was a year of growing my passion for the Bible (it started with hearing this message from David Platt), and this raw moment between me and God cemented my desire to really know His Word and let it have its rightful authority in my life. While the spaghetti women situation was not fun, I am thankful that from it I was able to receive this clarity.

"Teach me to suffer / Teach me to hurt / Teach me to love You for better or worse
And when shame tries to haunt me / Remind me of Your grace / 'Cause Your love has never changed"
"Run With The Horses" by LSC Worship

The unfinished battle

I originally finished writing this reflection a couple of months ago, concluding it with the moment of breakthrough from the psalm. I had subconsciously wanted to convince myself this was all that God had wanted me to learn from this experience so that I could move on, but something inside me still felt unsettled.

In the couple of months since I first finished writing, our church was ramping up this year’s summer STM season, which for me was confusing at best and painful at worst. It became clear that I had neglected to address the deeper lies about myself that were revealed to me as a result of last year’s trip, and even lies from since I returned from my one-year missions internship in 2023. Instead, I let this idle time and my self-contempt become the enemy’s feeding ground, and oh did it have a feast.

All this to say, I am not going on an STM trip this year, my first time since I became a Christian in college. It was a hard decision for me to make with STM having been such a core part of my yearly rhythms (though I do have mixed thoughts on this as well) and because I have major FOMO, but I cannot deny the more important need to reconcile myself back to God in this particular area.

I currently find myself sitting with many unanswered questions – Why do I do what I do? What do I actually want? And who am I even without all of these things?

This might all sound kind of cryptic or incoherent, but that is because this processing is happening in real time, right now… I feel quite lost, but in a hopeful way? As I prepare to spend my summer (or however long it takes) to focus on honestly answering these questions, I genuinely believe that this season has the potential to earn a sticky note on my life map. I am not sure what God is doing, but He sure is demanding my attention. I know He is doing something. And I look forward to sharing whatever that is when He has revealed more of it to me.

A bonus personal takeaway

In addition to what happened from the spaghetti women encounter, another point of personal reflection from the trip came from a pre-wedding party that we got invited to (yes, we were invited to someone’s wedding after meeting their family while prayer walking!). This opportunity prompted me to confront my fear in my dancing, which I would have never expected to come up in the Middle East of all places. This reflection is already so long, but I still wanted to include a note on this topic below.

Dance reflection (click to open)

In some Middle Eastern cultures, a bride and her female family and friends will gather the night before her wedding for a henna party, like the equivalent of a Western bridal shower or bachelorette party. The women on our team got to take part in this special celebration on our last night in our prayer city. What a way to end our trip with this potentially once-in-a-lifetime experience.

The party is filled with non-stop traditional dancing the entire night! We were not in our seats for very long until we were asked to join, a moment I had been anticipating since our team decided to attend this party. As God’s timing would have it, literally 12 hours before my STM team met at the airport for our departure, I was leaving from a retreat for our church’s newly formed dance ministry. I realized at the retreat truly how afraid I am of being seen in my creative expression (a mix of a fear of rejection plus a complicated view that I have of my body). As much as I love to dance, I feel paralyzed when I am put on the spot in front of others… but instead, I want to be free from my fear of man. I want to be a bit more daring and reckless and alive like David dancing before the ark of God. I want to be willing to make a fool of myself for the sake of the Gospel.

And so, I danced. And I enjoyed it a lot! I thank God for this opportunity to make such a memorable cross-cultural connection with these women while momentarily freeing me from my inhibitions. It was the fun I needed after all the spiritual exhaustion from prayer walking. I even had the privilege to dance with the bride herself, an exchange that convinced me more and more of Jesus’ heart and love for His Church.

Overcoming this fear is still very much a work-in-progress, but this new core memory has at least nudged me in the right direction.

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Thank you

This was a long one! If you made it to the end, I am quite impressed and touched. I am also a bit nervous, as I confess I have some fearful thoughts. Will I be judged for being too emotional, too problematic, too selfish – for being too much? Will people think that I am unfit for a future in long-term missions and not want to support me? Will anyone even want to read this, or am I being presumptuous in thinking that I have a story worth sharing?

While I am tempted to let this reflection collect virtual dust in my drafts, I instead pray the words of Psalm 56: In God I trust; I shall not be afraid.

I do want to close by noting two things specifically: 1) Prayer walking is seriously great! It made me see how literally anything taken in by my five senses is a prayer prompt. 2) Despite all of the difficulties, or perhaps even more because of them, I am immensely grateful to have had the privilege to go and experience the presence of God in the Middle East. It is an honor to think that one day the name of Jesus will reign in the land where our prayers were sown. Thank you for supporting me and my team!