Dangerous Territory

by Amy Peterson

  For months afterward—no, for years—I would catalog my infractions, the things that might have been the cause of what happened next. I still do it, catalog and flog. There were so many things I didn’t know, so many things I took for granted, so many ways I wasn’t cautious.

  1. I shouldn’t have forwarded that e-mail about the execution of Christians in our country.

  2. I shouldn’t have let Veronica keep the Jesus film over the mid-semester break.

  3. I should have warned her more. I should have argued back when she told me that the Word of God was living and active, sharper than a double edged sword. I should have said, “Yes, but . . .” But don’t argue with your philosophy teacher about politics. But don’t lend my devotionals to your classmates. But don’t make a speech about the gospel for a class assignment.

  4. I should have been more tuned in to the other students. Were they jealous of my relationships with Veronica, Sarah, and Cecilia? Was I neglecting other friends for those three?

  5. I shouldn’t have let Charley visit the campus. He’d stayed down the hall, not in my room, but in this conservative culture, that looked bad enough. I’d only drawn more negative attention to myself by letting him come.

  6. I shouldn’t have taken the girls to that coffee shop for our last Bible study together. We’d sat on the second floor, the only customers there, and I thought we were safe. I thought it was a special celebratory ending to our year together. But we had prayed and read the Bible in public. Why had I been so foolish?

  7. I shouldn’t have let the girls go on that retreat without knowing more about it. I’d just trusted the teacher who connected me to those local Christians. I should have asked more questions. I should have been more careful.

  I should have been more careful, I should have been more careful, I should have been more careful.

  * * *

  The word translated “high places” (bamah) is repeated 102 times in the Old Testament, mostly referring to Canaanite places of worship, altars on mountaintops and under “every luxuriant tree” (1 Kings 14:23). As I sat on the roof of my building that night, I thought about those “high places” and chuckled to myself, making little jokes about my penchant for high places, jokes that perhaps only the Christian-school educated would catch.

  When the Israelites prepared to enter Canaan, Moses exhorted the Jews to “demolish all their high places” (Numbers 33:52). It was hundreds of years, though, before young King Hezekiah actually put an end to idol accommodation in Israel. Since the reign of Solomon, thirty kings (twelve in the southern kingdom of Judah, eighteen in the northern kingdom of Israel) had failed to remove the high places. But Hezekiah enlisted the help of the Levites and made sure the high places were destroyed, and that true, God-centered worship was restored in the temple (2 Chronicles 29–30).

  The Jewish temple had a high place, a bimah, of its own, a raised pulpit from which the Torah was read. Scholars are unsure whether bimah derived from the Hebrew bamah or from the Greek word bema, meaning platform. Bema, when found in the New Testament, is usually translated “judgment seat.” I used to hear pastors use the Greek word in sermons: “When you find yourself at the Bema seat,” they’d ask, “what will Jesus say to you?”

  It occurs to me now, as I rehash my mistakes, that what I’m doing is not what Jesus would do if I were to meet him at a high place.

  It occurs to me now that obsessing over my own failures and what-might-have-beens is a way of creating my own altar, a bamah to me, a high place where I worship myself as the ultimate sovereign, responsible for whatever happens, good or bad.

  Mistakes were made. I made mistakes. But obsessing over my mistakes elevates them as more powerful than the sovereignty of God. God is sovereign, and God is good, and God has forgiven me.

  It would be at least a year before I was able to believe any of those things again.

  part two

  Stripped

  But these strange ashes, Lord, this nothingness,

  This baffling sense of loss?

  Son, was the anguish of my stripping less

  Upon the torturing cross?

  Amy Carmichael

  16

  Home

  I have had a very pleasant time here—a number of calls and several invitations out.

  Lottie Moon, at the end of her first home leave

  It was one a.m. in Los Angeles, which meant it was three a.m. in Arkansas, my final destination, and three p.m. in Southeast Asia, the home I had left. The next-to-last leg of my journey was delayed by storms in Dallas, and I was wide awake, sitting on the floor of the terminal, taking it all in.

  First: I was sitting on the floor. Which meant the floor was fairly clean. No one had spit on it, or dropped ashy cigarette butts on it, or just walked in from streets where men were peeing on one side and spilling cheap beer on the other. No one found it strange for an almost twenty-three-year-old girl to be sitting on the floor. I was sitting on the floor.

  Second: I was eating a chocolate chip cookie as big as my head. Because this was America, where everything is super-sized and we don’t think desserts are “too sweet”—the more sugar, the better.

  Third: I was not the only white person in the room! In fact, there were people of all colors, sizes, and shapes here: tall white men with handlebar mustaches and cowboy boots; black, white, and Hispanic teenage girls in matching warm-up suits; Asian babies sleeping in strollers; boys listening to iPods, grandmothers in wheelchairs, teens whose boxers and bra straps were showing.

  I walked down the terminal and not a single person noticed me. No one asked where I was from, if my hair was real, or if I wanted to get married.

  I loved it.

  * * *

  Arkansas was as hot and as green as Southeast Asia, but it was so clean. I marveled at the wide, shady streets and the newness of the buildings, standing straight and tall, evenly spaced. In the grocery store, overwhelmed by the options of the cereal aisle, I began to feel short of breath. I told Mom I’d wait for her in the car.

  The car. Traffic was so orderly and efficient. Cars stayed in their lanes, and never tried to slip through red lights. In my city overseas, it had been all motorbikes and bicycles, all swerving and sneaking, all going at once, without any reference to traffic signals.

  Everything here was clean, carpeted, air-conditioned, abundant, quick, impersonal.

  I arrived home on the day before my twenty-third birthday, and we went out for Mexican food, of course, because I wanted to eat queso and chips every day for the rest of my life. I slept in the bed with my sister, and the next day Mom made flank steak, creamed spinach, twice-baked potatoes, Sister Schubert’s rolls, and strawberry shortcake. My best friend, Anna, who had just finished her first year of med school in Little Rock, came over to eat with us. We were both skinnier than we used to be in college, and I thought maybe this year, our first year of adult life, had been even harder for her than it was for me. I wanted to hold her hand all night.

  After dinner Anna and I went downtown to Juanita’s, to hear the band Yo La Tengo and eat more tortilla chips, and I felt like myself again. I was speaking regular English, not simplified English with a smattering of words in another language and a healthy dose of hand gestures. I understood all the words that people were speaking to and around me. I didn’t have to be on guard. I was talking about indie rock, not boy bands and eighties pop songs. I was wearing my own clothes, not my missionary clothes. The band manager struck up a conversation with Anna and me, brought us frozen margaritas on the house. The boy I went to high school prom with, now a tall, handsome blue-eyed med student, showed up, and we swayed next to each other as we listened to the music.

  I was young, and beautiful, and free.

  * * *

  As the extreme exhaustion of jet lag receded, I had trouble getting comfortable in my sister’s big, soft bed. A sleeping bag on our carpeted floor
felt more like the thin foam mattress I’d grown used to sleeping on, so I left the bed to her, and began sleeping on the floor.

  A package was waiting for me when I arrived home: an affectionate letter from Charley and a smattering of Chinese gifts, including an enormous Chinese sword he thought my brothers would like. I was angry. He wasn’t supposed to be doing this anymore. I was angry at myself, too: had I given him the wrong impression, again? We had e-mailed sporadically since we’d broken up in January, and our correspondence had ranged from open to hostile and back again. But it had been weeks since we’d talked at all. Had I led him to believe that getting back together was a possibility?

  It was not. I wrote him a letter saying as much, and asking him to stop communicating with me entirely. Apparently there was no way for us to just be friends. I repackaged the gifts and asked my mom to mail them back to him. When he wrote to me again, I didn’t respond.

  After the initial rush of joy at being home, I felt scattered, at loose ends. My days had no structure, no responsibilities, and I felt the stress of role deprivation: no one here needed me to be a teacher or a Bible study leader. No one needed me to do anything at all. I took my ten-year old brother to the movies, where we watched Hilary Duff trade places with a look-alike rock star in Italy. We ate snow cones and hiked up Pinnacle Mountain with old friends. I tried to schedule my days around the graduate school coursework I needed to do in preparation for the next month’s classes on campus, but I had trouble focusing.

  Jack e-mailed me, funny, sweet e-mails. He was having a hard time with all the driving. No one walks anywhere! His parents even drove from the parking lot of one big-box store to the parking lot of an adjacent big-box store. He told them he wanted to walk, and he’d meet them there. His younger sister had just gotten married, he said, and he wouldn’t be able to come visit me in Arkansas; he didn’t have a car. When I went to Chicago in a few weeks, he’d be flying to California to start his master’s program in TESOL. He missed rice and tofu, but was happy to be back in the land of sweet tea and porch swings.

  One week after I arrived home, I got an e-mail from Veronica. Something had happened. We needed to talk.

  17

  “The Police Were Following Him”

  I had often felt that God had hid his face from me, that his loving kindness had completely withdrawn.

  Lillias Underwood, missionary to Korea

  I hugged my knees to my chest, curling up in the office chair in front of our family desktop computer, Veronica’s voice tripping through the speakers on either side of me. The webcams weren’t working, but we were voice-chatting through Yahoo’s instant messenger, using new IDs, hoping that no one else was listening in to our conversation.

  The girls had gone to a friend’s home to meet Philip for Bible study. Like a circuit preacher, he’d taken the train south from the capital to meet them. He hadn’t known that the police were following him.

  The Bible study never happened. When Philip inadvertently led police to the house, Veronica, Sarah, and Cecilia were arrested and taken to the police station for questioning.

  Veronica didn’t give me many details. All three girls were interrogated together, and threatened. “If you ever meet together to study the Bible or talk about religion again, you will be expelled from university,” the police told them. “And if you are expelled, you will never be able to get a job. You won’t be able to support your parents, and you’ll bring shame on your family. Maybe your parents will lose their jobs. Maybe your younger siblings won’t be able to find work, either,” they said suggestively.

  The girls hadn’t said much to the police. They played dumb. I felt shell-shocked, but hoped it would all blow over. I wished my friend had never introduced the girls to Philip, as I remembered the questionable things he’d taught them on the retreat and wondered if he was a political activist as well as a Christian. Politics and religion were connected in complicated ways throughout the country, and as a result, the government acted as if anyone associated with Christianity was also a political rebel.

  But the questions were far from over. A few days later, police brought the girls in again, one by one. As Veronica arrived, she saw Sarah leaving, but Sarah wouldn’t make eye contact. This time, the police seemed to know more as they questioned Veronica. “Who gave you your Bible? It was your foreign teacher, wasn’t it?”

  The police went to their houses, confiscated their native-language Bibles and the blank journals I’d given them before leaving. Police took the two English devotionals Veronica had, but they left her English Bible and some worship CDs. They told her that I was the enemy. Actually, she wouldn’t tell me exactly what they said about me, just that they told her lies about me.

  Veronica was scared, relaying the accusations the police had made, the way she’d argued back, the ways she’d given in. She was stubborn, but I could tell seeds of doubt had been planted. She didn’t trust her friends anymore, because one of them must have confessed to the police and told them all about me and our Bible studies. I think Veronica must have wondered about me, too—was I a secret spy from America, trying to infiltrate her country and destroy her people’s culture?

  But most of all, she wondered about God. Was God not strong enough to save her? Did God love Americans more than her people? And if that wasn’t true, why was she being persecuted while I wasn’t?

  After an hour of chatting, we signed off. Details had been hard to pin down as language and fear obstructed our communication, and I anxiously gave too many pat, right-Bible-answers without listening closely enough to her heart. I slid from my chair to the cool wood floor of my family’s living room. It was eight in the morning and the sun was already high and hot outside. Most of my family was still asleep upstairs, but I could hear mom washing dishes in the kitchen. I lay flat on my back on the floor, wrung out, tears leaking from my eyes. I lay there and just prayed and prayed and prayed, all my angry words rushing up toward the ceiling.

  Why had God rewarded Veronica’s faith and passion with this? Why had God allowed our baby church to be destroyed before it even had a chance to begin? Where was God now?

  I went back up to my bedroom, opening my Bible to 1 Peter. I read the entire book over and over and over, trying to believe it for Veronica.

  In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. . . . Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. “Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.”

  (1:6, 3:13–14)

  18

  Instant Messages

  Conversation with Veronica, July 9, three weeks after our last chat. Messages have been edited for clarity, though I haven’t edited out the informal and sometimes confusing nature of second-language internet chatting. I have removed some of our coding, though—when we chatted, we used abbreviations for names, religious vocabulary, and the police.

  Veronica:

  Do you think voice chat is safe?

  Amy:

  Do you feel safe in that internet café?

  Veronica:

  Yes, I’m sure this place is safe.

  Amy:

  Ok.

  Veronica:

  I’m just afraid that this is secretly heard. Do you think they can do that?

  Amy:

  I don’t know . . . it is possible, but i don’t know if it is very likely.

  Veronica:

  No one knows this ID

  Veronica:

  As you know, from the beginning, the police were after Philip, but since S
arah told about us, now they want to get you and me.

  Amy:

  Right.

  Veronica:

  They even took the notebooks you gave us to write prayers in

  Veronica:

  They threatened everyone but me. They think I’m too deep in that and I’m a true christian

  Veronica:

  They flattered me so that I would tell about you more and more but they didn’t know cause I wanted to let them dream on

  Veronica:

  They imagined too much but they can’t find evidence

  Veronica:

  I want you to know some important thing.

  Amy:

  Ok.

  Veronica:

  They said to me: “When she comes back, pretend nothing happened.’’

  Amy:

  They want to use you to try to catch me doing something wrong?