Since I was a student in high school, I’ve wanted to make a difference. If I saw a need, I was never one of those people who said “someone should do something.” I always tried to find a way to help. That’s probably one of the reasons my extracurricular activities in school far outweighed my grade point average. Service was a whole lot more fun than studying!
My sophomore year in high school, I joined the school paper and one of my assignments that year was to visit the ESL (English as a Second Language) class and do a story on what it was like for students from other countries trying to fit in with a new language, new culture, and oh yeah, try and learn something. What I discovered in my reporting was that it was hard and challenging, and after I wrote my story, I started a tutoring group for that class and brought in some of my friends to help tutor and connect with those international students. It made a real difference for some of those students and it was awesome to see those students succeed and cultural understanding develop between the American students and the international students.
But, REAL writers don’t get involved with their stories. We’re supposed to observe, to report and that’s it. That’s what I was told anyway as I started writing more over the course of the last six or seven years. And I wanted to be a REAL writer.
The story I’m about to share is one that I’ve never told. But it’s something that really affected me and my attitudes and my life over the last few years. I think I’m ready to share it.
After I came back from Baghdad and started working on my first book, A Greater Freedom, I couldn’t get the Iraqi pastor we’d met out of my mind. Maher had started a church there in Baghdad, and I told him before I left that I would try to do what I could to help him. I had never had any experience with fundraising or asking people to help donate but I thought maybe I could present the case to some of the folks I knew around the Christian publishing company I worked for. So I sent an email out asking if anyone might help. One of the few responses I got back was from the publisher who was publishing my book – “so,” he wrote, “are you in the humanitarian business now?”
That email stopped me cold. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was just supposed to write – I wasn’t supposed to get involved with the story. Besides, people would read the story I wrote, and then maybe THEY would be motivated to donate or raise up collections. Writing was enough. I didn’t have to do more. Or so I convinced myself.
So, I didn’t do anything to help Maher. But I still tried to keep in touch, and he resented it. I learned the hard way that in the Iraqi and Arabic culture, if you say you will try, they hear that you will and they take you at your word and your word is your bond. I didn’t understand his culture and he didn’t understand mine, and we ended our friendship with him feeling very angry that I had not helped him as I told him I would. I would never get the chance to help him because later that year, he and his church staff and family disappeared on the road between Ramadi and Fallujah and were presumed killed.
I fooled myself into thinking that writing was enough. But what I was missing was that writing needs to come from experience – experience can’t happen from writing… unless you’re writing fiction. And, sometimes the experience weighs far more than the writing.
So, that brings me to why I’m even writing about this. It’s because I’ve seen in recent months what it means to let the writing come off the page. Over the years, I have interviewed military wives. I have heard their stories. I’ve written their stories. I’ve seen what it’s like. But until I lived it, I really didn’t know.
And so now I’m doing more than just writing about it. God has given me a passion to help military wives, and last night, at our Wives of Faith event, we got to see Him work!
We had more than 58 military wives come from all over, including Ft. Campbell! We had some great entertainment, a great speaker through Amy Stephens, and we had some wonderful donations for our door prizes. In fact, we had an incredible story from that – our big door prize of the night was a computer that a local rental store gave us to give away. Before my friend Kim announced who won it, she made a point to tell the group that we have all been praying for who might receive the big prize. When the lady’s name was announced, she put her hand over her mouth and started crying. Turns out she has a military ministry at her church and they have been praying for a computer so they could hook up a web cam to it so their military wives could do web cam with their husbands overseas! Isn’t God GREAT!
If I hadn’t started writing about the military, I would never have written about military wives, and I might never have seen the need for a Wives of Faith. Who knows where God will take this, but I don’t plan on not writing, but I also don’t plan on not serving others. And the next time someone asks me if I’m the humanitarian business, I will smile and emphatically say YES.
We should all be in the humanitarian business. Wasn’t Christ?
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