Not Your Typical: Part 2

I discussed in my last blog post about the beginning of God's plan to put my wife and I in a church where we fit best, and mentioned briefly about some of the difficulties and novelties of a church in a land like Kuwait.

Once we started attending the service on Sunday night's, we did end up meeting someone who God has definitely used in our lives over the years. Her name is Darlene, and she was a huge help for us in our first couple years in Kuwait. Darlene is a spit-fire, no-nonsense Texas woman who was always on the go. She worked full-time, played on the worship team, attended several church services and did about a dozen other things in her weekly schedule.

She was very kind to us and very generous to immediately start giving us rides to church and back because she wanted to help us out. This was extremely helpful, because getting a taxi in Kuwait can be an exhausting experience. Imagine stepping outside into a giant blow dryer on maximum heat. Being outside for anything more than a minute and your clothes are wet from perspiration, so waiting for a yellow cab to approach can quickly become an exercise in patience and stamina.

Even worse than that was once a taxi approached, we needed to communicate where we wanted to go to a non-native English speaker, which can be a daunting task, especially since we lived near a very loud major highway. Additionally, the fact that we have white skin makes them see dinar(name of Kuwaiti money) when they looked at us, so we had to act like we weren't very interested or desperate even though we were about to melt into the pavement, and we had to haggle hard to get a price that was even remotely fair for a Westerner.

Typical Taxi in Kuwait traffic

The very idea of having to do this every time my wife and I wanted to go somewhere got old and difficult very quickly. Needless to say, some of the very first Arabic words I learned were numbers to negotiate price and directions to wherever I was going, which still serve me to this day.

So, the fact that Darlene was willing to pick us up and drop us off from church on Sunday, even though we had to be there early for her worship team practice, was a wonderful relief and made an indelible mark of gratitude on us.

Even so, I didn't feel like I was really fitting in on the Sunday night service. I was genuinely exhausted from teaching all day, and because people immediately had to leave after the service for the next one, it still felt pretty lonely.

Darlene also invited us to attend another church service that was held at the American Embassy on Friday mornings. After checking it out, my wife and I really liked it because our minds were refreshed from getting some sleep at the end of the week, the traffic was a lot less crowded on Friday, there was a bit more time to linger and chat after the service, and there were a lot of Westerners attending. We began making more friends and getting to know the people from the service pretty well. The service was a lot smaller, more traditional music was sung, and the pastor also had another full time job so he didn't get the same opportunity to prepare as the pastors at the Lighthouse, but we believed that this is where we could find a church family. Or so we thought.