Travel Scribblings: Loving What's In Front of Me

As an aid to the reader, here is a list of the new names that appear in this post:

• Delaney, Gena, and Heather, my sweet roommates
• Dylan, Ryan T., Ryan O., Jashubi, Chris, and Kai, a few of the guys
• Professor Moore and Dr. Sanchez, our first two professors on the trip
• Grace and Kelsey, my first two friends outside of my room

...

            “I don’t want to leave you people!” I was sitting in the hallway on my floor, and someone had just mentioned with resentment that I was going to Israel at the end of the semester. Everyone was sad that this season was ending, but I felt it more deeply than the rest. I was tired of endings, of goodbyes. No one had warned me that college would be so full of them.

            “There will be new people,” someone said softly. But this was exactly the problem.

            “I don’t want them!” I moaned. “I want you guys!” No more new ones. I was tired of relearning how to invest every semester. It was too exhausting.

            Normally, I’m excited to make new friends. But with each new season, I have found myself stretched thinner and thinner to reach all of the people I love, and lately, everyone’s been concerned that I won’t be able to find balance. I’m concerned, too, because balance means I have to actively choose between people, and that sounds terrible.

            The obvious solution was to not make any new friends. Stop reaching out. Fade into the background. In this new group, I would not be the note-writer, or the advice-giver, or the support-provider. I would be pleasant but shallow, kind but aloof. I would turn off all of the parts of my personality I used to cultivate friendships. Easy.

            If you know me, you are laughing—and you’ll be surprised to know that I succeeded for a few days. I entered Israel with a hardened heart. I looked at the people around me through tired, narrowed eyes. I played the introvert and didn’t initiate conversations. I avoided eye contact and shut down the joy that usually came from learning new personalities.

            But when you do that, people respond in kind. Stop building bridges for long enough and you’ll find yourself an island, stranded and isolated from all the good that goes on around you. I succeeded at not pursuing friendships, but it wasn’t easy. It was miserable.

            By the end of the first week, though, something was changing. I found myself smiling earnestly at Grace as I recited my passage for Performing Scripture, and jumping at Kelsey’s invitation to go out with her and a few of her friends, and wanting to call out “That’s my roomie!” when Heather was announced as the lead role in our play. And I remembered again that God had brought me here, and handpicked this entire group. So maybe…He actually wanted me to love them.

            What a novel concept.

            Maybe it didn’t matter so much whether I had the capacity or courage to make friends here. If God had called me to love them, wouldn’t He help me to do it? Couldn’t I trust Him to give me the resources I needed for them and whoever came after? He had always given me enough before—why not now?

            A warning went off in my head somewhere, saying something about wisdom and stewardship and boundaries. Whatever it said was important, and I would come back to it. But in the spirit of the whole adventure, I decided to be a little reckless, and live into His gifting and calling to love broadly.

            The God Who loved the whole world could teach me to love these few right here.

…

            My lessons began in my own room.

At the hostel in Jerusalem, we squeezed four to six people into rooms smaller than my dorm room at Moody. We were thrown together on the first night, most of us having chosen each other on the flight over, and all our belongings for three months were piled up on every shelf, and drawer, and desk. Our mood swings, our pet peeves, our likes and dislikes, our germs—all were suddenly mixed into one small space like some wild chemistry experiment.

I prayed we wouldn’t explode.

We had an odd collection of personalities in my room, but somehow it worked. There was Delaney, my roommate from last semester, who was bold and brave and entered far more easily into other cultures than I did. She pushed me to look outside of my worldview. Then, there was Gena, one of my very best friends, who was reflective and artistic and devoted. She, too, expanded my horizons, showing me a side of God I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. And then, there was Heather. None of us had known her before, but I had heard stories and knew she was much beloved by all who knew her, so we asked her to live with us in the airport in Austria. She was funny and adventurous and part of the reason the other three of us could thrive together.

These were my three. They were the ones I looked for when the professors called role. They were the ones whose moods I paid attention to and whose germs I caught. They were the ones who experienced my crazy and heard my complaints, and, eventually, I guessed, would see my tears.

The small room was a blessing in disguise—it was too little to hide from each other or stay mad for long. Things would come into the open, and as they did, we would learn to love as He first loved us.

…

            Every semester I have been at Moody, I have known my standing with the guys long before I have with the girls. I’ve tried to figure out why that is. Maybe because girls are usually a little petty and have to give each other the once over before really accepting each other. Maybe because what you see is often what you get with guys and there aren’t all the mixed signals that come with females. Maybe it’s just because I care more about what girls think than guys. But for whatever reason, I find it easier to come alive in front of the guys first, and it was no different in Israel.

            “So, Miss Counseling Major, do you believe in nature or nurture?” Dylan was one of the first to ambush me, in a rare moment when I wasn’t hiding behind Gena or Delaney. He was confident and talkative, and asked good questions, so I humored him and came out of my shell as we walked around for miles on one of Dr. Sanchez’s tours:

“Nurture, mostly.”

We chatted off and on throughout the hours about psychology and literature, roommates and professors, and by the end of the day, I had somebody else to sit next to at breakfast.

…

            “Jessi, how do you spell your last name?” Ryan T. was behind me as we walked the olive groves on the Temple Mount and apparently his question was urgent.

            I rolled my eyes, thinking it was a joke. “B-E-E…Like the insect.”

            “Wait, your last name is just ‘Bee’?”

            “Yep.” I grinned at him. “And now that you know it, you will never be able to say just my first name again.”

            He smiled from behind his glasses. “I have to call you ‘Jessi Bee’?”

            “You just won’t be able to not. My entire bro-sis calls me ‘Jessi Bee,’ and they don’t know how to stop.”

            He laughed, and from then on, every time we passed in the hallways, I got a smile and a “Jessi Bee, how’s it going?”

            Somehow, it made me feel at home just to have him say it.

…

            Professor Moore, our Performing Scripture teacher, told us to finish our exercises and find our seats. It was a giant game of musical chairs in that class, so I found myself a new seat next to where Ryan O. had been and arranged my backpack on the floor. “Is it okay if I sit here, Ryan?” I asked, worried I had taken someone’s place.

            “Yeah, go for it!” He picked up his books and settled next to me. “Sorry—what’s your name again?”

            I smiled. “Jessi.”

            “Jessi—cool, nice to meet you.”

            Ryan had been here before, last summer, and told me a little bit about it as we sat there. He listened intently to everything I had to say, chuckling in affirmation at the end of every remark, and I relaxed.

People always felt scary, until you got to know them, and realized they were usually just as scared as you were.

…

            I fell into a seat across from Dylan and Jashubi as we organized ourselves on the bus to the Israel Museum, and they promptly started talking about video games. Chris sat down next to me and gave me a look. “Do you have any idea what they’re talking about?”

            I laughed and shook my head. No clue.

            “You play video games, Jessi?” Jashubi finally asked.

            I furrowed my brows. “Do I look like I play video games?”

            “PC?” he tried again.

            “Nope.”

            He shrugged. “Well, I just thought maybe you’d surprise us, ya know, that would have been, like, pretty shocking.”

            “I do like to surprise people,” I said, arching an eyebrow and nodding. “But not those kinds of surprises.”

            “So, like, what are your hobbies?”

            “I write.”

            All three heads nodded with moderate expressions of interest. “Do you write, like fiction, or…?”

            “Ummm, I used to.” I hated this question. I didn’t know what to call my genre.

            “Do you journal?” Dylan asked.

            “No! I hate journaling.”

            “Really?” they all asked.

            “Yeah, journaling isn’t pretty. It’s usually just a word vomit.”

            “I tried to keep a journal once,” Dylan offered. “It was super emo.”

            “See, this is why I don’t like it,” I said. “So now, I just write about real life, but not—“

            “So, a journal?” Dylan raised an eyebrow at me, trying to find the hole in my argument.

            “No. I have a blog, though.”

            In an instant, they were pulling out phones and looking it up. Dylan skimmed it first. “Okay, so it’s not a journal. This is stuff you actually show people.”

            “Yeah.”

            He handed it over to Jashubi. “It’s a blog,” Dylan said with a shrug, implying it was like all the others.

            “That was good!” Jashubi said after sixty seconds.

            I laughed. “You didn’t even read it!”

            “I skimmed it! I liked—“

            “You don’t have to tell me what you liked, Jashubi.” Now my defenses were up. I wished I had just kept staring out the window, not talking about video games.

            “No, but I really liked something.” His sincerity surprised me, and I let him finish. He offered his compliment as the bus came to a stop, as we all piled out, I stepped out smiling, my heart softened yet again.

            People were worth loving.

…

            On a lazy afternoon, I snuck down to the dining room for a cup of tea and caught Kai standing near the hot water. He was one of our resident introverts, made even more elusive by a bad cold the first week of the trip. I had the advantage of knowing him through Delaney, though only by name until now, but today I was feeling especially antisocial and intended to slip in and out unnoticed. By the size of his noise-canceling headphones, I guessed he was feeling the same.

            I was surprised, then, when he slipped one side of them off and said, “Hey, Jessi.”

            “Hey, Kai,” I responded, barely smiling, too startled to even ask him how he was. Not wanting to start a conversation, I slipped out the door before he could say anything else, feeling a pang of remorse that I hadn’t showed him how much his greeting actually meant.

            Later, the whole crowd of us was in the dining room when it started to snow. It seldom drops below freezing in Jerusalem and we had just finished our first night of worship together, so we all ran out into the side yard as if we’d never seen snow before. When I had been sufficiently chilled, I came back into the house, smiling through the window at my classmates as they started a snowball fight.

            “It’s a Jerusalem miracle!” Kai said from behind me, also gazing out with a contented grin. He sat down with his fifth cup of tea for the day; I hesitated a moment before pulling out the chair beside him. You should be in bed, my responsibility whispered. But he had been kind to me and I wanted him to know I appreciated it.

            Dylan and Delaney joined us, and we got into a rousing debate about community and what it meant to be a healthy person, laughing loud and not harboring hard feelings at the end. Little by little, I was learning to enjoy this place with its people, and maybe—just maybe—I would be willing to keep a few of them when we all went home.

…

             You see, I could be friends with the guys after one conversation. But friendships with the girls came in increments, small interactions here and there, taking more and more ground until suddenly you found yourself the proud owner of a place in their heart.

            Such was the beginning of my friendship with Kelsey. She read my lament about all of the goodbyes and it resonated, so she messaged me. “Hey girl! I just read your blog post and wanted to let you know how much I appreciate it. Thank you for putting into words so many of the things I’ve been feeling as Israel approaches.”

            I read her words and felt an infinitesimal softening towards her. This one was a kindred spirit—maybe I could invest in her. But she was the only one.

            So when a friend of mine told me about Grace, I shut the door. No way. Of course she was lovely, and of course, we would get along. There were, like, thousands of other people in the world I would get along with. But I couldn’t be friends with all of them. And I couldn’t be friends with her.

            It was unfortunate, then, when she started treating me like she knew me. I had forgotten about that one class we’d had together, when we had been friendly toward each other for the first half of the semester. For the other half, everyone had succumbed to stress and I had started ignoring the guys she sat next to, so she had faded from my attention.

            Now she had it, though. I read my monologue for her the first week of class and she gave me her warm smile and a nod of affirmation when I got nervous, and in spite of my efforts, the softening came again.

            And then came the day of Hezekiah’s Tunnel.

            Hezekiah’s Tunnel was dug in the days when Israel was anticipating a siege by the Assyrians, to divert the water from the Gihon Spring to within the city walls. It runs underneath the City of David for over seventeen hundred feet, pitch dark and filled up to a grown man’s knees with cold water. The space is small enough to be claustrophobic, and as Dr. Sanchez hyped it up throughout the week, I watched Grace grow nervous.

            It was a little thing. She was courageous and made it through to the other side without any obvious fuss. But I checked in anyway, because I’d spent a lot of time being afraid and it was a hard thing to be alone in. I had given up and started caring after all.

            When we’d finished with the tunnel and sufficiently explored the Pool of Siloam, which lays at the tunnel’s end, I met Grace’s eyes as we started up the hill to the Old City. She surprised me by putting her arm around me. We made small talk as we walked and the next day I found my place beside her a couple of times, finding comfort that wasn’t there before.

            I texted our mutual friend a few days later, with gratitude. “I think Grace will be one of the friends I get out of this trip,” I confessed, rolling my eyes at my own inability to stay closed off.

            I found myself in line for dinner with Kelsey the other night and we gave each other the customary Christian “how-are-you,” wanting real answers but not expecting them in front of everyone. “We should catch up,” she said finally.

            I laughed. “You say that like we’ve been friends for ten years.”

            “Yeah,” she said, smiling. “I’m prepping to be friends for the next ten years.”

            It was official: I couldn’t stop enjoying people, not even here. My endeavors were hopeless. So I invited Kelsey to sit on my bed that night and catch up, and I smiled over the thought that maybe, someday, we really would still be sitting across from each other, reminiscing on ten years’ worth of sweet memories. Only the Lord knew, but whatever came, it was worth the investment.

…

            There are others. Lots of others. I could tell lots of stories, all the sweet little moments I am treasuring up and pondering…but dear home front, please know that I haven’t forgotten you. Returning will still be sweet.

When I return, I will bring with me my ever-expanding circle of loved ones, and all the terrible choices and hard lessons that come with them. And God will teach me to navigate that season. But in this season, I’m growing ever fonder of the idea of simply loving what’s right in front of me—because it’s pretty stinking great.