Into the moonless night of the desert outside the Chilean town of San Pedro de Atacama, our party of eight excitedly clambered out of the car. In the daytime, Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) exhibits barren, unearthly scenery and rock formations in a kaleidoscope of pastel colors. But at night, as the car engine clicked off, we were submerged in vast darkness.

The familiar sense of adrenaline filled my 10-year-old body. Looking straight ahead, I could wave my hand in front of my face without a flicker of detection. Closing my eyes or opening them, there was no difference—but keeping them closed made the darkness feel smaller and safer.

In 2004 we were on the cusp of our move from Chile to South Africa. Not only a new home, but a new continent. The fourth one within my first ten years of life. Maybe my insistence on keeping my eyes closed reflected my refusal to accept the fact that we really were leaving. Self-imposed darkness seemed easier to handle than the darkness of the unknown. 

I heard whispers around me—my sister, three years younger, had not gotten out of the car yet. “Where is the flashlight, Daddy? I can’t see anything.” Although slightly panicked, she whispered out of shared reverence for the night. It seemed natural to respect the dark, as if noise would disturb the vastness of it.  

Some keep quiet because we are trained to assume sleepiness in the dark; or the implicit correlation of secrecy with nighttime activities. When we work in the dark, people assume we have something to hide. But many useful things happen in the dark. Newspapers are printed and delivered, streets are cleaned. My father studied the stars.

“Just give your eyes a chance to adjust,” he replied, like I knew he would. Ever since I can remember, turning on a flashlight in nature at night bordered on sacrilege in our family. My mild-tempered, soft-spoken dad, an astronomer, never admonished us directly, but instead guided gently with information.

“It takes hours for your night vision to become fully activated, as the rod cells in your eyes are very shy and will only activate properly once they’re totally sure it is dark. Every time an unnatural light source hits your eyes, your eyes assume it is day and go back to daytime vision. The night vision process must begin again. And that’s just a waste of time, isn’t it? Time where you could be enjoying the view.”

A comforting hand squeezed my shoulder. Did he know my eyes were still closed? “There’s no view,” I sighed, “we are surrounded by darkness.”

But that is not how my father saw it. What he saw was light that had traveled thousands of lifespans to reach us exactly where we were. When he explained this to me, I knew there was no point walking around with my eyes closed, wrapped up in my own unfruitful darkness. So, I held my breath and opened my eyes wide, welcoming in the light. Because that is what eventually all natural darkness reveals—the faintest of light. 

Looking up from the Chilean desert, slowly we watched the other world start to open. My pupils dilated to receive the night sky. Stray dots connected into a constellation, a sword hanging from Orion’s belt. What was a blanket of black suddenly revealed the streak of the Milky Way as it folded within the light of other smaller and further galaxies. 

Christian jargon and everyday speech have taught us to walk in the light and stay away from darkness. We are called to “bring light to the dark places,” to “drive out the darkness of evil with the light of truth.” But it is also true that there is no greater joy than that which comes after suffering, there is no starker truth than that which stands out from the confusion of lies. The beauty of life often comes from contrast. 

When everything around us is too bright, it becomes difficult to see the small lights. A city on a hill is not easy to hide, but how often does a single window in a skyscraper catch our eye? I found out that darkness was a gift because it discloses the light.

In my childhood there were many nights like these. At times we would be looking for a specific cosmic event. At other times we would hunt for satellites. The one who spotted first received the honor of wielding the laser beam, which seemed strong enough to reach all the way to the skies. 

I thought satellites were more fun to spot than shooting stars. They lasted longer, and I could share the joy of my find with others and track one across the whole sky instead of that flash of a shooting star that disappeared before I could put it into words. 

We would lie on the beach in Cape Town, or on a hilltop in Santiago, and my dad would describe, in the vein of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry´s The Little Prince, how we were at the cusp of the planet, on the very edge of a giant mass hurtling through space at 220 km per second. We would lie there in awe, staring out into the expanse of universe spreading out in front of us. We imagined we could feel the speed in our fingertips, entranced with how stable the constant motion seemed.

Those nights impressed on me how small I am in the face of the universe. How far I am from its center. How near I am to its Creator. 

How great our Creator must be to hold it all in his hands. As a child, I believed him to stand upon on a cloud somewhere. Then I imagined a physically massive presence holding the universe in his hands. Eventually I just accepted that he is, in all and through all. 

Those distances between galaxies that are impossible for humans to traverse, he holds together; those black holes that stretch existence into oblivion, he oversees. Through years of research and study, my earthly father understood many of the things that occur in space, but my Creator Father knows the beginning, middle, and end of all things because he is, has been, and always will be.

Perhaps my father sensed my apprehension that night in the Chilean desert. Taking the laser beam, he directed it at the Southern Cross, the constellation of stars that directs us to true south. “You can never be totally lost if you just look up to what the darkness does not obscure.” 

This realization helped me in the next move that followed. Even though Cape Town was a new and foreign city, when we sat on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean watching the sky grow dark, those familiar lights started to reappear. The planets, Jupiter and Venus, reflected the sun. Sirius, the brightest star, hinted at where the Southern Cross would soon appear. I couldn‘t be lost when so much had stayed the same. Not all the light could be blocked out by the darkness of uncertainty.

My father’s passion for the universe intertwined with our everyday lives. We traveled to see eclipses and vacationed with telescopes. We lived at the South African Astronomical Observatory, and waved at the Hubble telescope passing by in space. I lived these things and knew no different. I assumed it was a normal life, and only when I left home did I finally grasp the rarity of my father’s profession, the uniqueness of my own upbringing. 

As an adult, I feel the lasting imprint of my childhood as an astronomer’s daughter. I categorize people in my life as either shooting stars or satellites—those who are a brief, bright presences versus those who patiently plod alongside for longer. 

I now live in Austria, on the opposite hemisphere from where I grew up, but I still orient myself by the stars. And now, when others say that it is too dark to see anything, I look up at the sky and I wait for my eyes to adjust. I do not own a flashlight. 

Instead of the Southern Cross pointing me to true south, the Big Dipper helps me figure out which way is true north, and I sense the Creator more clearly than I ever have. I look up and know that there are constants in life. I look up and know that I am not alone—that behind the universe is a changeless Creator who is higher and greater than all that I see.

In 2018, my husband and I baptized our 17-year-old son in the Red Sea at a dusty beach off the coast of Djibouti. One hundred meters behind us was the International Airport of Djibouti and the security fences of Camp Lemonnier, the American military base. 

On that humid morning, we gathered together as a church community made up of people from Madagascar, Korea, the United States, Kenya, and the Congo. As the sun rose over the ocean, we shared communion, baptized my son in warm, salty water, and then ate breakfast together. 

I don’t know what stories the Djiboutian airport guards told their families that evening–maybe something about a teenager getting shoved into the water, followed by a lot of singing from a strange, international gathering of people. But I do know the Malagasy couple and the Congolese family in our church have been a part of my son’s life since he was four years old. And I do know the Korean family, new to Djibouti, had tears in their eyes when they thanked me for inviting them. “God is with this church,” they said. 

The story of our community is one of faithfulness and hope. But it’s also one of compromise. My family has lived in Djibouti since 2004, and for most of these years, we have attended l’Eglise Protestante Evangelique de Djibouti, or EPED. Main services are on Sunday evening and predominantly in French. 

Even though French language and culture permeate our church, the transient community includes almost no French members. At potlucks, we feast on Indian, Djiboutian, Ethiopian, and Burundian cuisine and tangle up the Malagasy names of our fellow parishioners, which often include up to 25 letters. 

Our current pastor is from Senegal, the choir director from Madagascar, the administrator from Congo, the drummer from Korea, and the guitarist from Kenya. The parish council includes eight members who hail from five different nations and eight different denominational traditions. We gather in our only common language, native to few. We come out of our weekly work contexts–where our neighbors, teachers, coworkers, and friends are Muslim–and enter the church compound eager to share what unites our small, complicated community: a commitment to Jesus. 

It might be tempting to call our church a little slice of heaven and quote from Revelation 7:9-10: “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” 

We are in fact Christians from many tribes, peoples, and languages gathered to worship God, so that picture is true to some extent. But it is also simplistic. Every time we come together, each of us brings with us not only linguistic and cultural differences, but also theological and stylistic preferences. Those clashing perspectives can make it challenging for our church to worship together. 

They can also affect me personally. At the end of a demanding week of cross-cultural life, I might feel exhausted by services in which I strain to understand the sermon, where I may not feel moved by the music, and where fellowship requires effort. But only if I attend church expecting wholly to receive.

“It can take practice to find God in the midst of our differences and not just bemoan the more wearing parts of the adjustment,” writes Mark Labberton, President of Fuller Theological Seminary, in Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today. “We may say we want to be part of a vigorously multiethnic congregation and that we want it to be economically mixed, but this can make church more complicated. It means adjusting our expectations.” 

This insight is situated in a chapter about the church in exile, where Labberton addresses Christian community as a counter-cultural group set against the secular world of American consumerism or, in my case, a surrounding Muslim culture. Christians are welcome in Djibouti, but we are an extreme minority, so the imagery of exile hits close to home. The idea of adjusted expectations also resonates deeply with me. 

The compromises we make at our church have enabled us to experience vibrant Christian life. As a congregation, we consciously choose to set aside personal preferences, honor one another above ourselves, and hold fast to primary theological issues while we “agree to disagree” on secondary ones. To a watching world, we offer a radical testimony of humility, love, and the power of God. 

The world around us is watching. On high holidays like Easter and Christmas, French and Djiboutian soldiers armed with rifles guard the gates of the church compound. The pastor keeps a list of members so he can share openly with the government, should they inquire. My husband has been asked by former university coworkers why he goes to church—meaning they’re well aware that he does. When we enter the church building, local children approach us, beg for food or money, and ask us what we do inside and why. 

We are a city on a hill, not a lamp hidden beneath a bowl. Our good deeds—by grace, may they be good!—shine before others. 

“There is a grande richesse,” says Tshimanga Mukendi Pierre, our church’s administrator, music leader, and the longest-term member of the community. “A spirit of openness and not of judgment.” 

That ecumenism starts inside our church and extends beyond our walls. On special occasions, Catholics and Protestants in the area worship together. For a season, our church didn’t have a pastor, and when a member died, a local Catholic priest performed the funeral. The few Christians here partner for social service activities, like caring for street children, or helping out with education programs for low-income families. There’s also a women’s prayer group that includes Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, and others.

“You would never see this in Congo,” Mukendi Pierre said, who arrived in 2002 and brought his family from Congo in 2008. “But here, we live with others, and we are enriched by our differences as we put aside our prejudices and judgment.”

Social collaboration is one thing. Dealing with difficult theological differences is quite another. But by God’s grace, we’ve been able to do that too.

The pastor before our current one was a German man unfamiliar with more Pentecostal expressions of faith. One afternoon in 2005, an Ethiopian church gathered on EPED property and performed an exorcism on a young woman. While she screamed and writhed in the yard of our church compound, the pastor, who didn’t know what to do, told Mukendi Pierre to call the police. But by the time that pastor left in 2017, he had hosted monthly prayer gatherings to deal with spiritual possession and attack. 

“I came to Djibouti to teach the Word of God,” he said in his final sermon at our church. “But I am leaving Djibouti having been taught the Word of God by Christians here.”

Mukendi Pierre’s wife, Eliane, emphasizes a similar message. “We must set aside fear of something different so that we can learn and change,” she told me. “It takes courage to ask, ‘What is good for or about this other person?’” 

God has done miraculous things in and through EPED. Members have been healed of cancer. One pastor, paralyzed in half his body from a beach accident, was able to walk again after receiving prayer. A young boy at a church picnic was pulled unconscious from the ocean and saved. Broken marriages have been reconciled, victims of serious car accidents healed without medical intervention, and explosive house fires narrowly averted.

We have also seen pain in the form of death, disease, financial devastation, divorce, and disagreements. With so many of our members living away from blood relatives and support networks, we’re learning to be the family of God for each other in times of both celebration and sorrow.

“We are a small community,” Mukendi Pierre said, “but we have a big vision of God. This is what gives me hope.”

It is hard to gather in a foreign language and reach across theological and cultural differences. Sometimes I step outside during a church service, just to take a few deep breaths and get some distance from others. I’m sure they do the same thing in response to me. But I don’t go to this church for personal fulfillment. I attend because from Christ “the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Eph. 4:16).

That truth holds for all of us around the globe. As we practice dying to self, church becomes a place where we encounter God in the imago Dei of someone we might disagree with. We remain together, because corporately, we can cling to a bigger vision of God than one we could hold to alone. Right there in that space, we’re transformed more and more into God’s likeness, and church becomes a sacred gift.

This story contains content that some may find disturbing

For most of his childhood, my father lived right beside Beirut’s green demarcation line in a clumsy, battered two-story landmark with coral walls and green shutters. Though much of it has crumbled, and its walls bear the scars of war, still it stands, hidden among the more sturdy buildings on Mar Maroun Street. 

The playground of the nearby school was a stark reminder of the terror that once infected the area. My dad had told me, “When Ain El Remmaneh was besieged, whoever died was placed in a plastic bag and thrown into the playground of Seid School. That playground was filled with the corpses of those who died without a cause.”

A train compartment positioned sideways in the street blocked the passage from East to West Beirut. Sand-filled shipping containers were stacked on top to prevent snipers from shooting the passersby. People could not walk along the street to carry out their errands. Whenever they needed to go to the store, they hurried from building to building through holes in the walls.

“We couldn’t even open the windows,” my father would tell me. “We would lay out our mattresses in the inner corridor of our house whenever the shelling started. A shell had to penetrate two walls before it reached us. Once, a bomb exploded right above our bedroom, and sometimes as I looked outside, I would see bullets coming towards us and leaving their marks on the exterior walls… We had no electricity, no phone lines, and no water. Moldy bread was a regular meal. The worst part was the arbitrary killing and kidnapping.” 

Dystopian snapshots of Beirut flood my mind whenever my parents share stories of war. Like my parents, many Lebanese had to live long after the war with what Samir Khalaf called “the distinctive residues of collective terror and strife.” That series of proxy wars fought on our land ended with no clear resolution. The massacres and colossal damage were futile.

Where do I begin to recount the woes that befell this country in the past century or so? Shall I start with the 1860 Druze-Christian war that killed thousands? Shall I tell of the Lebanese mass starvation during the Great War, as the 400-year-rule of the Ottoman Empire shuddered and collapsed and the 1920 French mandate brewed underground?

In 1946, French troops left Lebanon. In retrospect, we know too well that the jubilation over the arrival of our long-awaited autonomy soon turned to mourning. A series of calamitous events mixed with external interference led to the 1975 Civil War—that piece of history that is left out of our school textbooks because it is too controversial. I was not there to witness the atrocities, but their shadows still follow me and will follow generations to come.

I was born in December 1991. The war had recently ended, and Lebanon was off to a fresh start—or so we would have liked to believe. For the next three decades, the country continued to sink deeper into the pit while rivalries festered. Every time the country tried to stand back on its feet, another blow sent Lebanon to its knees, panting for breath, begging for life.

I hadn’t always clung to my country. Growing up, I never felt I belonged here. I longed to escape to foreign lands. At 14, it seemed that my dream was coming true. A high school in Illinois awarded me a scholarship, and if all went well, I would pursue my college degree in America. My paperwork and plane ticket were ready. The school sent the I-20 form, and my host family was expecting me. But two things happened that year. 

The July 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war broke out. I remember July 12 being uncharacteristically cold and gloomy for a summer day. The Israeli army raided Lebanon, and the Beirut International Airport shut down. If that wasn’t enough to deter my travels, I was denied a visa due to my young age. I remember feeling an inexplicable serenity as I stared at the sea from outside the consulate. 

“I am so proud of you,” my mother said after we had arrived home. “You were so confident.” We both burst out laughing. Then, her laughter turned into tears, and my soldierly restraint dissolved. But in the years to follow, I no longer wished to run away. 

I was born to a Maronite Christian family, but it was at a small evangelical school that I met Christ. Whenever I think of that school, I can almost hear the faint screams of delight from children echoing through the winter playground, and the sound of their shoes squeaking on the slippery floor. I can almost hear the singing during morning chapels and the principal telling us about God’s marvelous love. 

In 2006, war was not the only thing that was ushered into my life. Amid the gnawing fear of airstrikes, a newfound peace glowed within me that summer. I had found Jesus. I meant to follow him even when my loved ones–and society at large–opposed me. As a young girl, that wasn’t always an easy task. 

The past two years have smothered many of the dreams I once had for this country. But I would like to believe that God is not yet done with Lebanon. My eyes have seen his followers’ responses to the recent tragedies. I have seen it in my own workplace. The faithfulness and compassion of the people at the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS) have left an irreversible mark on me. 

“I grew up during the Lebanese civil war when the Church was mostly silent and in hiding,” ABTS President, Elie Haddad, shared in an article right after the 2020 Beirut explosion. “If you go to Beirut today, you don’t have to look far to see the hands and feet of Jesus.”

These healing hands and feet moved into action the Saturday after the Beirut explosion, when a taxi arrived on campus with the first traumatized family. The family’s clothes were stained with blood and Betadine. They had nothing but their medicine in a small plastic bag. Elie listened to a woman as her hands trembled and her eyes welled with tears. He comforted her, and he assured her that the people at ABTS would do all they could to help.

“My mother often told the story of how she had fled her home at the start of the Lebanese civil war—a baby boy in her arms and a little girl tagging along,” Elie shared in an interview. Although this encounter brought back recollections of war, in his words, “It reminded me that we are here for a Divine cause. As long as God wants to use us, we must be ready to give our lives away.” 

Arab Baptist Theological Seminary

I cannot resort to false optimism and say that Lebanon will rise up from the dust. I cannot lecture about the need for repentance of lethargy, the need to withstand the pain so that life may spring from death. As high and resonant as it might sound, given our current circumstances, I fear that my words may border on the absurd and dismissive. Sometimes, one cannot help but think that, in our hapless state, something waits around the corner to pounce on Lebanon as soon as it becomes weak enough. When the Lebanese people have nowhere else to go, will they most willingly sell their souls to the first fraudulent voice that promises to save them? Or will they finally give their souls to the One who actually can?

What do people hold on to when everything is laid waste?

In 1922, modernist poet T. S. Eliot published his well-known poem, “The Waste Land.” The poem’s five sections portray life in London in the aftermath of World War I. To portray the fragmentation and sterility of the modern world, the poem uses rhetorical discontinuity and the juxtaposition of allusions to numerous works, including the Bible, Shakespeare, St. Augustine, Baudelaire, and Wagnerian opera. The poem also reflects Eliot’s era in its references to gramophones, motorcars, and typists.

“April is the cruelest month,” the poem opens, for spring reminds people of the stirrings of life that might rouse them from their dormancy. Coming back to life is not without its own pain. The poem ends with the triple repetition of the Sanskrit word “Shantih,” which Eliot translates as “the peace which passeth understanding.”

I find myself clinging to this hope, both for myself and for my country.