Laura and I arrived late. Some of my local friends say I’m becoming more like them. Guess I’ve spent enough time in this country that you could say that. Everyone else had already been seated and served by the time we walked in.
Our friends’ house is made from mud bricks, each room built by the owner’s hands one brick at a time and painted white inside and out. Their gate is rusted, and old corrugated sheets of asbestos form a large section of the wall between them and their neighbors. It may not be much to look at, but love lives inside, and it was as palpable as the thin mattresses called tushoks that we sat down on around a long table covered from end to end with food.
It was Aidan’s birthday. And it just so happened to be mine, too. You can’t plan things like that. We were born on two different continents 27 years apart into worlds that couldn’t have been more different. He grew up in the shadow of a communist empire in the heart of a country that speaks a Turkish language and follows the way of a seventh century Arab. I grew up in the full scorching sun of the capitalistic West in a country that succeeded in making its language the lingua franca of the information age and that—in name only, mind you—follows the way of a first century Jew. By nearly any measuring stick you may choose to assess the situation, we couldn’t be more different.
And yet, we both made our entrances into this world on the same day, March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day for my Western friends and just another day for my Central Asian friends. And in a way that can only be explained by our shared hope in a good and loving God who turned heaven and earth upside down in order to save the world, Aidan’s and my heart have been knit very closely together during these past years that we’ve gotten to know each other.
And so we were invited to his house on his birthday (and mine, but it was his first). It felt like a sacred event. And they were including us. They had reached out, taken us by the hand, and asked us to be a part of an intimate family celebration with them. Three of Aidan’s four daughters were there. One of them had spent a large part of the previous day making noodles by hand. One of his sons-in-law was there with their little girl. His other two granddaughters (the children of the young woman who had made the noodles) were there, too. Other close family friends also sat on the floor around the long table stretched out in the main room of their house. There were salads and bread and tea and cookies and pastries and fruit. Then came the main course, a well loved dish of noodles and meat traditionally eaten with your fingers. Thankfully, they gave us all forks. Then more tea. At one point Aidan played his accordion. They asked us to sing songs we knew in English and Spanish, and they sang popular songs they knew in Russian and Kyrgyz.
And in a word, it just felt right. Sitting there in a house in an area outside city limits, an area scorned by most, I saw that we’ve been afforded something that most foreigners who live in this country will never experience. We haven’t had to yell from a distance, “Hey, all you local people, come here to us!” Instead, we’ve been blessed with genuine relationships slowly forged in the fire of a thousand plates of steaming rice and unending cups of hot tea and side-splitting laughter and heartfelt singing—all accumulated over countless hours and days and years, one brick at a time, just like their house had been built—and as a result, for no other reason than that they truly consider us family, they invited us to come to where they were and join them in what they were doing and be a part of their lives. Meaning all we had to do was show up.
And yet, for many Westerners who live here, if they ever even get the opportunity to simply show up, they don’t. I guess they prefer that others come to them. That’s easier, of course. It’s always easier to deal with people on the terms you set. It’s hard to lay all those bricks that result in a strong wall of a mutually trusting relationship. You step into someone’s house here and you don’t know what they’re going to plop down on the plate in front of you, and you don’t know how many hours you’ll be there, and you don’t know how many times you’ll sound like an idiot trying to correctly use all of their language’s case endings. But when you’re sitting around a table with people who consider you family, sure, you’ve got no real control over the situation, and, sure, it’s not as comfortable as sitting on a chair around your own dining room table speaking your own language, but you’ve got something better: You’ve got people—real, living, breathing, feeling human beings hand fashioned in the image of the invisible God—who love you and accept you, accent and quirks and silly customs and all. And you wouldn’t trade that for the world.
That is what we’re all after in the end, is it not? And we found it in a mud-brick house in the slums of a Central Asian capital. We would be either stupid or just plain dumb to brush such a treasure aside. Or worse, to demand they come to us when they are inviting us to come to them. Or worst of all, to never lay the bricks needed so that they might one day invite us to come to them.
When one considers the oft times rudeness of this world, it is easy to understand
why there is war. When one considers an article such as this one that you have written
and shared, it is easy to understand how peace can prevail.
That’s the highest compliment I’ve received in a long time. Thank you. There are those moments you look and think, Well, maybe, just maybe, there’s a way forward through the fog of this world. I might not have those moments often, but they’re there if we have eyes to see them.