Driving 50 miles through a blisteringly-hot desert with a terrified goat in the back seat,  doesn’t happen very often. You will agree that this is a good thing, once you think about the liquid and solid implications of holding on to a live, scared,

un-house-trained goat in a bumpy, moving, confined space for over an hour, suspecting that it will end up as dinner, and hoping that your hosts are able to clean it up properly before the slaughter, and that the outside of the goat will somehow be kept very far away from the inside of the goat. In fact for us, the weird foreign family from Ireland, it has only happened once in the last 8 years. Actually, despite living in an exotic Arab country, which has an annual sandstorm season, turkish baths, a dead sea, camels, a desperate water shortage which is both acute and chronic, belly dancing, oud perfume, a 5 times a day call to prayer, and tea so wincingly sweet that 30 % of the adult population has diabetes, most of our lives are fairly mundane. We go to bed too late, get up too early, sit in the rush hour each morning, trying to get our 3 children safely to school. In the office, we juggle impossible deadlines, unreasonable clients, ill-motivated staff, and an unrealistic boss. Out of the office, we balance crisis management, play-date politics, teenage scheduling conflicts, homework and dishes. Apparently, working, professional life in one big city is much like working professional life in any other big city, even if it is a different part of the world.

Admittedly, the city we live in has some interesting challenges. Sheep, for one thing, staggering government bureaucracy, for another. As a fast growing city in the developing world, it is trying to balance the need to attract new wealth and investment, with the needs of the poor and the ordinary. Keep the park, or build a skyscraper? Affordable housing, or a shopping mall? Refugees continue to flock here, but where will they live? More houses are needed, but that means more roads, more cars, more smoke, more noise. Prices rise, but incomes don’t.

And what are the people like? Some are veiled, others in mini-skirts. Some are traditional, others restless. Some are staid and resistant, others creative and vibrant.  All mix together in a stew of confusion, frustration, fear, complaining, restlessness, searching, hoping. Enormously tense yet dynamic. A very exciting place to be a part of, and we love it.

Before we arrived, we had no idea what we would do when we came here. We knew we weren’t going to be preaching to attentive little children under trees in the jungle, (there are no trees, no jungle, no attentive little children…….). We knew we weren’t evangelists and that we hated the term ‘missionary’. We thought we had skills which might be useful (turned out we were right, but they weren’t the skills we thought would be useful). And it seems we have ended up involved in a normal, ordinary, life, albeit with better weather….much better.

So what’s the point, you might ask? Since you’re surrounded by people from a different faith, you should be preaching, evangelising, leaving no stone unturned, until all have heard, etc, etc. Well, for others, maybe (or maybe not). But for us, it seems we have a role in getting people to think differently. In a country where the majority faith is so formal and external, and where people are convinced not only that what they believe is right, but that it is better, its actually hard to get across verbally how we feel about our faith. We are received with sympathy and pity, more often than anger. We are recognised as good people, but with a faith which doesn’t go far enough, isn’t complete enough. It is provisional and transitory, not like the finally revealed truth that the people here have been given. And yet, for such a formal, external faith, much of society here doesn’t reflect what that faith teaches. People often don’t practice what they say they believe in. So one of the most powerful things we can do is to practice what we say we believe in. By living the fruit of the spirit, and being open about our faith, we demonstrate a consistency in our lives that is often missing around us. And that sometimes speaks louder than we can. Especially to people who know us the best, people we spend time with, are involved with, work with, socialise with. In other words, living a normal, consistent Christian life, is actually quite a big deal here. Some people call it ‘mission’, others call it ‘wholistic ministry’, but it’s no more than the intentional, consistent witness that we are all called to. Bringing the glorious Sunday morning truth into the Monday morning staff meeting. Making the routine of daily life speak something of the glory and majesty and purpose of the Creator. And if we’d listened properly to all those sermons back in Ireland, we wouldn’t have needed to come all this way to find that out.

A family from Ireland, living and working in an Arab Country in the Middle East.