‘To the far recesses of Lebanon’

Standing in the guest lobby of a hostel overlooking Beirut while trying to jam the ten Arabic New Testaments and assorted More Than a Carpenter booklets and DVDs our leader had just said we each needed to carry into the already overloaded pack that I would tote for the next two weeks over some of the toughest terrain in the Middle East, I started to wonder what I was getting myself into. And it wasn't just the overloaded pack, the rough terrain, or even the fact that I was getting sick that bothered me. 


When I applied to do an internship with the regional communication team of an international missions organization in the Middle East, I expected it to be just that––a comm. internship. Getting course credit, understanding Arab culture and politics, and having a grand old adventure were at the top of my priority list.
That’s not to say that serving the Kingdom of God and bringing hope to the lost––the things that I felt motivated most of the other students in the program I went through–– weren't important to me. They were important, but I wouldn't be honest if I said they were what drove me. And to be even more honest, I was afraid of them. 


It was summer of 2011, and while going to live in Beirut, one of the most volatile cities in the world’s most unstable region in the middle of the Arab Spring uprisings with a civil war next door in Syria somehow didn’t scare me at all, but the idea of evangelism did. So sitting in my room that April filling out visa applications, pricing equipment and checking flight schedules, I was looking forward to a summer that I hoped would involve a lot of work, a lot of adventure, and very little of the activities normally associated with a missions organization.


When I walked out of security at Rafic Hariri International in Beirut and met the people I would be living with on and off for the summer, things looked good. I spent the next month doing exactly what I had dreamed of: traveling through Jordan and Lebanon, working with a film crew, meeting people from all over the world, and getting to be part reporter, part photographer, part professional tourist, all while working on documentary films about the region.

This went on without a hitch up until two and a half weeks before my date to fly home. But those remaining two weeks turned out to be some of the most most challenging and most intimidating of my life. I was about to join a group of missionaries hiking the northern half of the Lebanon Mountain Trail.


I had just returned from a weeklong trip through the Jordanian desert––a story for another day––and was honestly still exhausted from the experience. I tried to put on my best face though as I met the nine or ten other people I knew I would be getting to know very well for the next two weeks. And I couldn’t help but wonder what those weeks would hold.

The Lebanon Mountain Trail is set up so that hikers start at the north end of the country, just a few miles from the Syrian Border and hike south from village to village staying at a local guest house every night. This provided a great opportunity, as many of the villages, whether Sunni Muslim or Maronite Catholic, had likely never been visited by evangelicals before, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it personally. Handing out tracks to Muslims and Catholics wasn't an activity I had ever really imagined myself engaged in. It was one of those moments when I found myself stepping back and saying: “Okay, are you really about to do this?” 


That morning we drove to a village in the far north of the country––so close to Syria that my cell phone switched over to roaming. Early the next day, after a breakfast of apricot jam, Lebanese bread, and Labneh, a sour yogurt spread, we shouldered our packs and headed out into the wilderness.


While my pack may have been full of Bibles, I was still thinking of the documentary I was supposed to produce about the trek as my main responsibility. Thus, I took lots of footage and photos (probably too many considering that it was only the first day of two weeks).

One photo was of an old Arab goat herder we met while scrambling along the side of a ridge. After I snapped the photo and thanked him in Arabic, one of my leaders, Kristine [pseudonym] suggested I give him one of the New Testaments. I did. He thanked me, and that was that. That afternoon was passed through another village and I gave DVDs to several young boys who were excitedly following us as we passed through their village and up the next mountain.


Certainly I lacked the language skill to communicate anything meaningful to them in a conversation (Kristine was hopefully able to do that) but it still surprised me. There was no pain or awkwardness (at least not any that my limited cultural perception was able to pick up) in the interaction we had. They even seemed to appreciate it.


In the end, sharing the New Testaments ended up being the least difficult part of the adventure––that award was split between spending a day hiking straight up an almost vertical ridge, being lost in a cave, everyone getting sick from the food and water (multiple times) and the general lack of a trail on what was misleadingly referred to as the Lebanon Mountain Trail.


Despite the hardships, it was a great adventure. Something I would do again in a heartbeat. I made great friends from all over the world. I lived more immersed in another culture than I ever had before. I saw some of the most beautiful places and beautiful people that I have in my life. And I faced a life-long fear of doing something that is probably the most important thing you can do.


It’s a strange and mysterious world, and God works through it all in strange and mysterious ways.