Dangerous Territory

by Amy Peterson

  When I skipped breakfast one day, Jack called my room in the afternoon and asked if I wanted to go for a walk. We went to a thrift shop, looking for secondhand shirts, and planned a surprise birthday party for our friend Jenny. At the mall, we ordered an ice cream cake and got her a present.

  One night Jack found a film festival at a Thai university. They were showing Metropolis, a silent German film from the 1920s, on the rooftop. A dozen of us crowded into two tuk-tuks to ride across town, then climbed the stairs to the roof of the college art department. The night was cloudless and cool, the movie quiet and astonishing, but I wasn’t sitting next to Jack, so I was distracted. Wishing our shoulders were touching, I suddenly found that I wanted nothing more than to sit beside him every day for the rest of my life, watching classic movies in black and white, finding beautiful and surprising things in foreign places forever.

  But he hadn’t said anything.

  Other people were saying things. They began to use the plural “you” to talk about us, like we were an us. You like to linger over your meals, they said when they passed us at Lanna Café.

  Adam asked, “Is there something you need to tell me?”

  Hope confided, over lunch, “My friend—who has her master’s in psychology—asked if there was something going on between you and Jack.” I told her I wasn’t sure if he liked me or was just being his normal kind, generous self. I’d noticed from the first time I met Jack that he was always including those on the outskirts of groups. Maybe that’s all that was happening here. Hope didn’t agree, citing more of her friend’s observations. “She said that she can tell that he’s always very aware of what you’re doing. And Shannon said you always look happy, like you’re in love.” Shannon was a second-year teacher working in China. “Shannon doesn’t even know about Jack.”

  That very first night, he’d given me the CDs he’d brought. We were all playing cards in Adam’s room, sprawled over the beds and on the floor, snacking on a carton of mango slices from the small shop across the street. Adam was teaching me the rules to Hearts when Jack came in.

  “I’ve got your CDs,” he said. “Actually, let’s put one on. Where’s your computer, Adam?” He slipped the first disk into Adam’s laptop.

  “This song is amazing,” Jack told me. “Have you ever heard Joanna Newsom?”

  It was one of those moments, like in a movie when the rest of the scene fades away and everything goes quiet except for the one sound that matters. I stopped hearing instructions for Hearts, and heard only Joanna Newsom’s weird, creaky, freak-folk voice waver out from the speakers. She played the harp, and sang:

  And some machines are dropped from great heights lovingly

  And some great bellies ache with many bumblebees, and they sting so terribly

  I knew, from that first night, really, that Jack understood. He understood that beauty was strange. He understood that Someone dropped machines from great heights on our dreams, crushing them—and that sometimes, this was love. Jack had made friends with sorrow; he was attentive to the beautiful and terrible things in the world, and he was unafraid. I didn’t admit it to myself, but I loved him right away.

  * * *

  On the last night of grad classes, we all watched a movie in my room. Everyone filed out, sleepy, as the movie ended, except Jack. “See you tomorrow?” he asked as he opened the door to leave.

  “Yeah, maybe.” I was always trying to be the elusive one.

  “Maybe?” he asked, and I smiled.

  “I would like to see you tomorrow,” I amended.

  “We’ve been seeing a lot of each other,” he said, closing the door and coming back in, perching lightly on the bed. “I’ve really enjoyed it. I’d like to keep spending time with you.”

  It was the moment to awkwardly define our relationship. I admitted that I wanted to get to know him better too, but I was scared. That girl he’d been “sort of” dating at the beginning of the year—hadn’t that relationship fizzled out because they hadn’t been able to keep up the long-distance communication? Why would it be any different for us?

  “This is just different,” he said. “I really want to try to make this work. Do you?”

  I worried that he was too quiet and private. I worried that we were too alike, both introverts who took forever to open up. I worried that he wouldn’t like me once he really got to know me. I worried that he wasn’t really interested in me, specifically, but just looking for someone to marry. I worried that he was suffering from what a friend called “the fencepost syndrome”—the way that, after being in an isolated setting for a long time, away from any romantic prospects, even a fencepost begins to look alluring.

  But I knew this time that I wanted to choose courage instead of self-protection, daring instead of doubt. I wanted to give up trying to control or rationalize my feelings, and instead just let them exist.

  I wanted to try love.

  27

  Being the Beloved

  God has made me a new man! I have not got to make myself a branch, the Lord Jesus tells me I am a branch. I am part of him, and have just to believe it.

  Hudson Taylor, reflecting on John 15:5

  At the opening session of the conference, we read Isaiah 42:

  Behold my servant, whom I uphold,

  my chosen, in whom my soul delights;

  I have put my Spirit upon him;

  he will bring forth justice to the nations.

  He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice,

  or make it heard in the street;

  a bruised reed he will not break,

  and a faintly burning wick he will not quench;

  he will faithfully bring forth justice.

  He will not grow faint or be discouraged

  till he has established justice in the earth;

  and the coastlands wait for his law.

  As we read the familiar verses aloud, I finally understood where I fit in the picture they painted. I was not the one chosen to bring justice to the nations. I was not the one for whom the coastlands waited. I was the faintly burning wick.

  The fiery passion I’d taken overseas had been nearly extinguished by the realities of cross-cultural work, by God’s silence in response to my despair over what had happened to Veronica. I was a faintly burning wick, in a lamp nearly empty of oil, but here was a promise: I would not be extinguished. I held on to that promise.

  After the Scripture reading, we sang a hymn, and then the speaker took the stage. He led us to Leviticus 6, a chapter including instructions for the priests who tended fires on the altar where burnt offerings were made to God. After an offering had been reduced to ashes, the priest was to carry the ashes outside the camp—to clean off the altar before the next offering.

  “Your lives have been a living sacrifice, burning on the altar to God this year,” the speaker said. “We need to take some time to clean out the ashes, to deal with the past—the wounds, the failures, the joys, the successes. We must pause and deal with the past before we move on.”

  We would take a day of Sabbath rest: no programming, no meetings, nothing but time to mentally and emotionally and spiritually clean out the ashes and rest with God.

  I sat on a dark wooden bench in a gazebo, surrounded by yellow chrysanthemums, delicate orchids, and trailing roses, and watched the shadows of the willow trees dance on the green hillside. As I contemplated the ashes of the previous eighteen months, I felt the sad emptiness that Job described so well:

  “How I long for the months gone by,

  for the days when God watched over me,

  when his lamp shone upon my head

  and by his light I walked through darkness!”

  Job 29:2–3

  I, too, mourned the loss of intimacy with God that I had experienced, the loss of spiritual success. Why had God absconded? Like Job, I blamed God and his sovereignty
for everything that I’d lost:

  “He throws me into the mud,

  and I am reduced to dust and ashes.

  I cry out to you, God, but you do not answer;

  I stand up, but you merely look at me.”

  Job 30:19–20

  When I cleaned out the ashes of my sacrifice, I found that I had nothing but them to offer. Surely God was a consuming fire, and all my virtue had been burned away.

  * * *

  That evening, we met for music and the Eucharist. As I slipped out of my seat, into the line of people moving toward the front to take the bread and the juice, I felt hollowed out, empty.

  I did not feel the thrumming passion I used to experience at conferences like OneDay, where the baseline thumped through my chest.

  I was not committing my life afresh to God, or promising to obey him. I was not raising my hand to pledge a year of service overseas.

  My eyes were dry—no great emotion fueled my movement toward the table.

  And for the first time in my life, I understood what the Eucharist meant.

  Eucharist, in the Greek, comes from two words—“good” and “gift.” This was the first time that I understood what it meant that the body and blood of Christ were God’s good gift to me.

  I had known from childhood that God’s love was not something I could earn. Since the age of six, I’d known that we are saved by grace, through faith, and this is not of ourselves—it is the gift of God. Not by works, lest any man should boast. And I had believed that.

  But I had never felt the reality of it, because I had never been before God with nothing to offer. I had always had my virtue, my obedience, my Bible memorization, my leadership in the youth group, the Bible studies I led, the girls I mentored, the hours I’d spent singing praise songs, the commitment I’d made to serve him overseas.

  All I had now was a semester I’d spent avoiding ministry, walking in the dark and listening for God’s chuckle. All I had was an unused altar, finally cleaned of the ashes of anger and regret.

  Now, I walked toward God with empty hands and heart, and for the first time, as I tore off a too-big chunk of bread and dipped it into the cup of juice, I understood that I didn’t deserve it.

  And I understood what I had always believed: that God loved me anyway.

  God accepted me. It was a message I had heard in churches all my life. But it had usually been followed by something—a but, an and, a so. God loves you, and in response to his great love, you will want to read your Bible more, fast and pray, tell the lost about Jesus. God loves you, so you shouldn’t worry, doubt, or fear. God loves you, but he doesn’t want you to stay the same.

  In the mountains of Chiang Mai, I finally understood, both mentally and emotionally, that the sentence didn’t need anything added. God loved me. Full stop.

  In high school I might have told you, if you’d asked, that my “life verse” was Luke 12:48: “To whom much has been given, much will be required.” I had known God from the cradle. I’d grown up in a happy Christian family and had every material advantage. So much had been given to me, and I was weighted with the responsibility of doing much with it.

  When I visited third world countries as a teenager, I recognized that I hadn’t just been given the advantage of a happy family and a Christian upbringing, but I’d been given the advantage of being American: I had opportunity and wealth and security. The weight of responsibility shifted subtly into guilt: if I didn’t find some way to selflessly give back some of my privilege, how could I live with myself? I had to do big things. I had to make a difference. I had to deserve what I’d been given.

  But now I was wondering what “big” even meant. Had Jesus made a distinction between “big” things we could do for God and “small” things we could do for God? Was “making a difference” really something I was called to do—was it even possible? No verse in my New Testament asked me to make a difference. According to Jesus, I wasn’t supposed to try to be “salt and light” to a desperate world; I already was. It wasn’t something to do; it was the very identity I’d been given.

  At church a few weeks prior, after the Indonesian tsunami, my Malaysian rector Wai Mung had reminded us that Jesus entered a world that was full of political corruption, social inequalities, unfair taxation, illness, poverty, hunger—and that when he left, thirty-three years later, there was no visible change in any of those areas.

  It is easier, Wai Mung had said, to serve Jesus than to follow Jesus. It was easier to commit than to surrender. It was easier to work for him than simply to accept my identity, and to walk in the world as the Beloved of God.

  I hadn’t been able to understand that I was loved by God until I stopped doing anything for him. I had to stop being “useful” before I could believe that I was loved. That night, I ate the bread and drank the juice, and knew for the first time that regardless of what I had or hadn’t done for God, he was delighted with me. I might be a smoldering wick, all but extinguished; even so, I was God’s Beloved.

  28

  Fireflies and Honey

  Cross-loving men are needed.

  from Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret

  Despite my infatuation with Jack, I filled my journal with the worries I had, too. There was the obvious introversion, the quiet nature that—coupled with my own—might keep us from ever really connecting. I couldn’t tell what his great passions in life were, and that made me wonder if he was too passive.

  As a teenager, I had been taught that I was supposed to find a “real man”—and that REAL was an acronym. A real man Rejected passivity, Expected the greater reward (you know, the one stored up in heaven), Accepted responsibility, and Led courageously. These sounded to me like things that all humans, not just men, should do. Nonetheless, I had, almost without realizing it, internalized the idea that if I wanted to get married, I had to find a REAL man who was strong enough to lead me.

  I had learned, early on, how to quiet myself, to make my strengths less obvious, so that I wouldn’t be as intimidating to guys. By the time I graduated from high school, I had stopped answering as many questions in class and started hiding my papers so no one could see the grades. I grew embarrassed rather than grateful when my accomplishments were announced; I was relieved to be named salutatorian, with my buddy Sean the valedictorian.

  It seemed the best way to support a man—to be “a helper,” as we were told Eve was created to be, and obviously that meant she was not dominant in any way—was to limit myself, to not take the spotlight away from him, to encourage him to be his best rather than trying to be my best. In college I felt that marriage would be horrible, an endless life of cheerleading for a boy too weak to succeed without my constant encouragement. After all, what kind of man would only be willing to marry a woman who was weaker than he was?

  When I tried to imagine this mythical Leader, I could only imagine someone whose abilities surpassed mine in every area of life: whose test scores and grades were higher than mine, who knew more Bible verses than I did, who could best me in theological argument, who was a more dynamic teacher than I was, a more charismatic personality, more disciplined, more likely to be on stage.

  Jack was certainly a nice guy, and disarmingly good-looking. But what if I had more drive and ambition than he did? Did that mean I couldn’t marry him?

  On one of the last nights of conference, we sat in a circle on the floor with Adam, Rebekah, Hope, and Lissa, playing the Dictionary Game. The game is simple enough: one person finds a word in the dictionary that she’s reasonably certain no one has ever heard. She pronounces it, spells it, and then everyone makes up a definition for it, writing their definitions on scraps of paper passed to the one holding the dictionary. She then reads all the definitions, false and true, and every player has to guess which is the real one. You win points for guessing correctly, and you also win points for writing definitions that fool other people.
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br />   The game had ended with Jack and me squarely tied for first place, Adam muttering (to my delight) that we were clearly a match made in heaven. As we walked out into the cool night air, I felt relieved. Jack could match me in verbal wordplay, at least. (To be honest, that was the only night I matched him—since then, he’s beaten me at every single round of Scrabble we’ve played.)

  “I heard there’s a coffee shop up the road,” Jack said. “Do you want to check it out?” It was much too late for coffee—the stars were out, and they were our only light on the dirt road up the mountain—but of course I said yes, anyway. As we hiked up the incline, I saw a dim light through the thick forest ahead.

  It was a Thai place, a wooden platform jutting out on the side of the mountain, a mostly open-air shop, decorated with posters of European pop stars. No other customers in sight, we took our small, dark coffees out on the deck and sat on the edge, our legs dangling over the precipice. We talked about how hard the last semester had been for both of us. Jack had spent his whole first year in the country in the honeymoon phase of culture shock, blissfully taking in all the new and delightful differences he found—but when he returned, all the newness had worn off. He found himself lonely and unmotivated.

  We talked about going back to the States. Neither of us knew what we would do there, though Jack figured he would move to California to finish his master’s degree.

  “What do you want to get out of life?” I asked. “I mean, when you dream about the future, what do you see?”

  We sat side by side, both looking into the dense tangle of forest below us. I was glad we weren’t facing each other. I wasn’t trying to get him to say that he dreamed of being married, or that he dreamed of being married to me. I just wanted to know him better. But some questions are easier to ask when you don’t have to make eye contact.