Some complaining and some preaching

A poor sheet awaiting his fate.

The past couple weeks have been really hard. Initially after I got back from fall break it was so wonderful to be back in Rabat, but those feelings faded as soon as I got back into the grind of classes. I thought I had adjusted to life in Morocco weeks ago, but I’ve been feeling even more out of place and homesick than I did when I thought I was at the low point of culture shock. I miss Tuscaloosa and everyone there so much (and a few people in Huntsville, too).

Certain things about the culture here are just so hard to get used to. Yesterday I forgot I needed to get home for lunch by 12:15 since that’s when the men start overflowing from the mosque for Friday prayers and blocking the entrance to my apartment building. I decided to try to get home at 12:30 anyways, and as I walked up my street and saw rows of men already lined up on the prayer mats spanning the whole length of my apartment building, I got so incredibly angry. I had been sick the day before, so I hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning. I was hungry, hot, and tired, and all I wanted was to go home and eat lunch with my family. But Friday prayer trumps all in this dominantly Muslim country, and for those few moments I just wanted to storm through all the stupid men who were so rude to keep me from getting in or out of my house every single Friday afternoon. It wouldn’t be that hard for them to leave a path to my door so that I and all the other people in the building who don’t pray can have access to our houses. I stormed off to the grocery store which is the normal getaway for Katherine and I when this happens. I did my grocery shopping and impatiently waited for prayers to be over. When I finally could go home, I was still mad. I walked up to the door of my apartment building, and the men were leaving but they hadn’t taken away the giant prayer mats yet. I knew that walking on the mats (with shoes on) is incredibly disrespectful, and I thought for a split second about asking the men who were standing around to move it. But one, I already felt (as usual) very self conscious wading through hundreds of religious men as an obviously non Muslim foreign woman, and two, the thought of asking the men who I already had a grudge against to move the stupid mat that, in my opinion, shouldn’t have been there preventing me from going home in the first place was just too much for my ego to take. So I walked across it and got some very dirty looks and mutterings.

Some things are just hard to get used to. Like seeing sheep butchered and skinned.

Earlier this week was the Muslim holiday Eid El-Adha, which is kind of like Thanksgiving except instead of turkey you eat sheep, and instead of buying a frozen turkey at the grocery store you buy a live sheep (or, usually two) and slaughter it on your roof. So I got to experience the killing, skinning, gutting, and eating of not one, but two poor, poor sheep. I’m not a super sensitive person, so I watched it all happen (and documented it with many pictures), but I’m not going to lie - it was pretty disturbing. To see, in the span of ten minutes, a sheep go from alive and baaaing, to dying with blood spurting violently from its slit throat, to thrashing and trying to gasp for air through it’s severed sheep larynx in the few minutes it takes to die, to dead, to a giant piece of meet hanging from the ceiling by it’s back legs, is, well, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Then in the next 30 minutes I witness it’s skin being slowly cut from the body, so that it didn’t even look like a sheep. Now I’m eating parts of those sheep almost every day. Appetizing, yeah?

The bloody aftermath.

But honestly, the hardest part about Eid was that it reminded me so much of Thanksgiving and Christmas that I got really depressed thinking about how I’m going to miss celebrating those holidays at home with my family and friends. I was at my host grandparent’s house for two days with a bunch of relatives who didn’t speak English for Eid, watching sheep be killed, then eating the weirdest organs, and no one really talked to me until the afternoon of the second day when I made friends with my host cousins.

I know that a lot of people would give a lot to be where I am right now. People think I’m brave, living the dream, and having the time of my life. But I think so often how much I would love to just be in Tuscaloosa this semester, living at Jamestown, tending a little vegetable garden in the backyard and some flowers in the front yard, being on leadership in RUF and worshipping with my church family every Sunday at Riverwood. But if I was in Tuscaloosa, I would be complaining about how boring my life is, and thinking how much I want to go discover the world and do something exciting. It’s all a matter of perspective.

What I came to remember last night and this morning is that I’m not here by chance. I’m here in this city, with this program, living with this family and this roommate, at this time, for a reason. My Lord and Savior didn’t live a perfect life and die a perfect sacrificial death to redeem me so that I could just live life randomly, doing what I feel like, with no purpose. I’m here for a reason. Living in Morocco has ended up being harder than I planned, but that doesn’t mean it was a mistake. I miss my friends, my family, and my church, but the Lord is providing me with new friends, new family, and a new church. The Lord is using these experiences to teach me more about Him, to mold me more into His likeness, to make me long for Him even more, and for other reasons that I may never understand. And even when I feel like a miserable excuse for a Christian (which has been a lot lately), I can still rest assured that when God looks at me, He sees Jesus. And even though I don’t really believe this most of the time, I know that God is using me as I am, right now, in all of my shortcomings, failures, and depression for His purposes. I don’t have to be a better person for Him to use me. I don’t have to pretend that I’m not as messed up as I actually am, or try to convince other people that my life as a Christian is all nice and fuzzy. I am a very messed up person, but because of the work of Jesus, I am salt and light, right now, as I am, no exceptions.

"Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you your heart's desires." - Psalm 37:4