Baggage and marriage. When you wait until you're 34 to get married, you can bet you'll have plenty of baggage! And certainly both of us did. I was a fairly new Christian trying to quickly learn how to fit into my new life, like any other new bride. I was also a bit of a feminist, trying to fit myself back into a strict and narrowly defined patriarchal social structure. His baggage would run deeper than anyone's I had ever met, but I would discover that little by little as time went on. I was only just beginning to
feel the weight of what I had done, more than I consciously
thought about it, though at that point. Still, I was excited that I had been able to so fully embrace this religion that I had most of my life feared and hated, and that I had been able to fall in love with a man who would keep me safe and secure within its social structure, patriarchal as it was. I was too busy being thankful to notice how from earlier back in September until early June severe damage had already begun. Plus, I was headed off on an adventure; one I had been hoping for, it seemed, for most of my life. Granted, I had not been pining away for a trip to the Middle East, but we were planning on making a stop in Europe on our return trip, and so I had that to look forward to. This first part of the journey (and the longest part of it) would be for
J. I would more fully enter his world in hopes that I might be able to share in what he so loved, and in hopes that he would love me more for sharing in it with him. We boarded the plane around 9:00 p.m., as overseas flights often leave later, and from the moment I stepped onto that plane (we were flying Royal Jordanian Airlines), I left behind me everything that I had known up to that point. I had wanted a life of adventure, a life that would change how I saw the world, a life that would open me to ways of loving what I didn't understand. What I was about to learn were lessons from the desert, lessons about laying down your own will, and about loneliness. And just like with archaeology, a discipline that requires that one not search to find, but requires instead that one wait and let the dirt reveal what lies underneath it, so my life would be for the next sixteen years.
