Cairo #1 – the fast and the absence

I have long desired to tell of my journey to the slums of Cairo and my journey since then. However, the journey I have been on since coming back into the States has been extremely difficult. My friend Jon told me the culture shock that I would experience on my way back into America would be way worse than going there. He was right.

But before I get to that point, I want to go back to the beginning and attempt, with God’s help, to tell the important points of this story.

I went to Cairo hoping that I would have some incredible “spiritual experience” just like all those high school mission trips with a bunch of tears and yet another “born again” experience where everyone had a face to face encounter with Jesus and wept together. I was hoping that God would rock my world is some new way and I was really excited to meet Him in Egypt.

But He wasn’t there. For about the first 3 weeks I experienced a total absence of God. He was gone. I couldn’t feel Him, pray to Him, worship Him, because He was absent.

We all have our devotions as Christians. We have our prayers or readings or simply our dispositions towards life that cause us to feel and experience God. Many of us have routines or special rituals that are unique to us that connect us with God. I am no different.

But everything that I used to do in America—as I was doing these things to seek God in Egypt—He wasn’t there! I couldn’t understand it, it freaked me out! It wasn’t that I felt that He didn’t exist, it was as if He had literally left and gone away and I was left alone without Him. Why had He done this? What had I done? What was going wrong? I thought this was supposed to be a spiritual high. Where is God?

My hopes for a great “spiritual experience” were being dashed very quickly.

On top of this, our whole team was experiencing extreme fatigue all the time and at least one of us was sick each day (the first day of work three people were in the hospital). I only worked about 3-4 hours a day and I was exhausted all the time! How could this be? Where was God in all this? This was not what I had hoped for…

And then there was the food: we ate three square meals a day, and lunch was the big one. The bad part was that Breakfast and Dinner were exactly the same. Every day.

Pita Bread

Three Cheeses – Buffulo, Goat, and Cow

Plain Yogurt

Jam

Goat’s meat

(most of the time) tomatoes and cucumbers

So what you’d do is you’d take the Jam and put it in the plain yogurt to make it taste good, then scoop the cheese into the Pita Bread with veggies and dip it into the Jam-Yogurt (I refrained from the goat meat).

Sounds good right?

Maybe the first or second time it was good.

After that, I was sick of it. That got really old really quick. I hated getting up in the morning and eating that pita and yogurt! We’d assemble around the table and solemnly pronounce a prayer of thanks over the meal.

But I was not thankful.

All I wanted was Cracklin’ Oat Bran. Did we really have to eat this for breakfast? I didn’t really think that this would be something that I would really struggle with—but I did. It was probably the biggest struggle for me.

Do I sound snobbish? Perhaps gluttonous or selfish?

Yes.

It hit me: am I such an American glutton that I can’t even thank the God who gave me life for such a portion, when thousands will starve today? Am I such a wretch that when we bow our heads to the Almighty I am muttering under my breath! Oh My God! I’m so selfish, my God is gone, I’m tired as ever and I’m NOT having a spiritual high at all but I’m miserable. When will this end? And I miss my family so much…