“On Sunday rain and sleet and snow fell all day and the hills around us turned white—from a few kilometers up the road, all the way to the top of Mt. Sunnin, and along the road to Damascus. Our house was oblivious to the cold.” This is the final paragraph of a tiny section called […]
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February 18, 2015 A CNN poll has come up with an astonishing statistic: 62% of the American people want the US to be neutral in Middle East conflicts! For fourteen years this country has been sending its young people into Afghanistan and Iraq to kill or be killed. We have been fighting dictators, defending the […]
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February 4, 2015 ISIS is testing my resolve. I determined a long time ago to see everyone as part of the human race. Some people are different and hard to understand; some are mean spirited; some are thieves; some are murderers; some seem to lack all empathy with others; some are devious liars; some are […]
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January 20, 2015 Today’s news from the Middle East resonates powerfully with emotional memories for people who lived in Lebanon during the era of In Borrowed Houses, and illustrates the way current events are the down-stream flow of what happened in the past. The Beirut Daily Star tells me that early today a sea of […]
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November 24, 2014 He was just a little kid, maybe nine years old, no more. You might have seen him on television. He stood facing the camera, raised a skinny arm and his childish voice and recited an Arabic slogan he had memorized, something to the effect that what they have done in Iraq they […]
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November 4, 2014 The following essay is really a letter written to my husband, Wayne, by Tim Smith, who was a missionary kid in the Middle East when we were there. I like what he said and can’t say it better. FF ****** I have been mulling over ISIL for a while and finally […]
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October 10, 2014 So long as there is evil in the world, there will be bad people who claim to be Muslims and bad people who claim to be Christians. Nevertheless there will be religious and social principals that caution us against maligning either as a group. Though I believe in these and in lots […]
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September 11, 2014 Thirteen years ago today I disintegrated in a way that surprised me and some other people. Even today I am reluctant to tell what happened (to the extent I even know), not because I am ashamed but because anything I suffered is trivial compared to the experience of those who had loved […]
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August 12, 2014 In the middle of my morning prayers, while mentioning to God the major concerns of the world and my family, I prayed for a little girl whose face I had seen on CNN. She was one of 30 or so people who had clambered aboard a helicopter on Mt. Sinjar, most of […]
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