Beirut

The Beginning of Summer

With the end of finals earlier this week, summer officially has begun in Beirut. The reference temporal reference point for activities... "so, are you doing that before or after the war?"

I plan to travel in less than two weeks to a series of mission trips, conferences and holiday in London, Belfast and Belgium. It should be an exciting summer for me, but a real worry of what will happen here while I am gone and its effect on my ability to return hangs over my head and clips the wings of the excitement I should feel now.

I am looking forward to these trips none-the-less and it will be nice for me to taste some western cultures again. I grew up rooted in werstern civilizations and studied and lived and appreciated all that they have and have given to the world. Now I am living in the Arabic culture that claims (and in some areas rightly so) to have been the ones who introduced all these things to the Europeans centuries ago. Why are we so very different then? Why so at odds with each other?

The answers to these and other questions in my next book...