small. i feel small and at ease. so much so that i can't remember when we arrived in turkey, what date it was or day, and nothing in me needs or wants to check.
whether its been standing in an underground city or in the carved out caves that christians called home two thousand years ago as they fled persecution - or lying in the middle of the mediterranean in the dark, still night staring at the freckled sky at stars whose sparkle comes from so far away they might already be dead except no one here will know that they are for another two thousand years or more - or reading about quantum mechanics in the royal gardens of an ancient dynasty - or arriving in a new city at half past midnight and being helped by a bus driver who pulls over, asks where it is you need to go and radios back to the head bus station to track down directions that he later explains to the taksi he has hailed down for you in turkish - or being awoken at four am every morning by the call to prayer of a religion and culture you ought to know more about - or spending time reading 1 samuel and for the first time in a long time loving reading the old testament - or spending four days on a boat with eighteen strangers who are more diverse than the million flavours of turkish delight that line the streets of every turkish bazaar - or being rebuked by philippians on hubris and humility on the worst smelling five-hour bus trip of your life - or being the only tourists on the shuttle built to seat fifteen that actually transports at least twenty one, including a toddler, from antalya to olympus daily (the plastic stools stored on the front seat which initially seemed incongruous quickly making sense) - or floating just below the air space of 747s and airbuses, almost two kilometres high and watching the sun rise over the anatolian rockscape - turkey has been filled with reminders of joyful incapacity, vulnerability and vincibility and glorious minuteness, by the grace of the Lord.
i'd forgotten that life is but a mist, a passing breath that itself, once you look out and up and make yourself the size you ought to be, can and will daily take your breath away.
i prayed a lot before i left that i would be filled up and ready to come home to give more of myself away than i had been able to/desired to over the past few months. those prayers are being answered abundantly.
