“Thanks, but no thanks” was the gist of it.

I was a college student about to graduate, and the recipient was a real-life company. Where adults work. Offering me a “position” with a “signing bonus”. It was the only offer I had.

Now, I know, a $60k starting salary is nothing to brag about. It was below-average for my graduating class, if you must know. If I wanted to brag, I would brag on my wife, who walked away from a $100k/yr consulting job under similar circumstances. She is the attractive one and the smart one.

But I won’t get into that, because this is about me. She can start her own substack.

To this day, I’ve never felt more crazy than in that moment, sitting on that couch just to the left of the front doors. Everyone around me was doing CV backflips -proverbially- to get noticed by adults at the career fair, and I had just declined the only offer I had. Why?

The short answer is I just knew, deep inside, wherever people know this sort of stuff, that if I’d taken that job, it would have been disobedience.

The long answer is the rest of this post…

As I remember it, the first time I read my Bible and enjoyed it was in the spring of my Sophomore year of college. It was the book of Hebrews. I remember muttering exclamations out loud in my room, unable to believe what I was reading. Something was happening to me.

At an internship the following Summer, unable to find any useful work to do, I read through half of a systematic theology textbook at my desk. Grudem’s, for any other nerds. Over a few semesters, I became increasingly convinced that God was real, that He was worthy of all glory, and that it was important I honor him with my life.

I read Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis around this time. I was impacted by Lewis’ meditations on joy, and the self-forgetfulness that always precedes any real experience of joy. I became convinced that to be happy I needed to think about myself less and delight myself in worthy objects. In this way, daydreaming, I began to drift ever so slightly off the normal path.

In a lot of ways, my love for learning is what really got me into this mess. I daydreamed my way into a course called Perspectives being held at a local church. I’d heard about this course from some of the upperclassmen I knew and respected. Other than that, I had no idea what it was. It was a class and I was a nerd and nerds like classes, so I took it.

This was probably the nail in the coffin.

Before this class, I’m not sure I could have told you why some people became missionaries. The cynic in me would’ve thought maybe they just didn’t want a normal job, or liked to travel. I would have allowed that many felt “called”, but I wouldn’t have known what that meant. Well, I would know soon enough. I learned things there I couldn’t unlearn.

First, I became convinced from scripture that the God I so desired to please had a plan to build a Church composed of people from all nations. It was so clear to me I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.

Second, I began to understand the current state of the world as it relates to God’s plan to build the church. A large part of the world’s “nations” still have little-to-no access to the story of Jesus. But that wasn’t what got to me. The part that upset me was learning how little of Christians’ focus, time, and money goes toward giving those people and places the access they are lacking. I had a deeply emotional reaction to this information. It angered me. I could feel the injustice of it in my bones.

A few months later, I was sitting on that couch on a Friday morning, typing out a crazy email. I would graduate with my Mechanical Engineering degree and work, not for LANE Construction, but for Starbucks. As a barista. I needed to stay in town while I prepared to move overseas.

Eventually, against my wildest expectations, I would count myself among the so-called “called”. And you know what, the traveling isn’t bad either.

“Overseas” for me turned out to be the east coast of the Mediterranean in the beautiful country of Lebanon. For the last 6 years, it’s been the closest thing I have to home. It’s where I met my wife (the smart, pretty one). It’s where our two kids (and counting!) were born. It’s where we are trying to belong.

It may be that I am a little crazy, but I’m less crazy than the person who claims to believe the Bible and then lives as if this life is all there is. Or at least, I’m trying to be.

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This post is part of a series. Read Part 1 here.

Phew.

Phew. Phew.

Phew.

At only 16 and still new to the sights and sounds of war, Fadi couldn’t easily identify the direction of the gunfire based on the sound of the bullets whizzing past him. He looked around frantically for any place he could hide, and his eyes settled on a small metal dumpster some 10 yards away. He ran. Still not sure of the direction the shooting was coming from, he jumped down on one side and made himself as small as he could, pressing the side of his face against the asphalt.

In this position, his gaze fell on an object lying on the ground a few meters away. Fadi inhaled abruptly and his breath caught in his lungs. He was frozen, unable to move, unable to scream.

His friend was lying on his side, bleeding from a hole in his chest.

Local militias on both sides of the Syrian Civil War saw an explosion in recruitment in the early days of the war. Militias, financed by wealthy Syrians or even foreign governments, were often better supplied than the Army. One could expect a higher salary and better food and weapons. The militias also tended to be localized and therefore appealed to those whose primary motivation was to defend their own villages and homes. When Fadi wanted to join the fight, the obvious choice was to join a militia. Plus, they didn’t quibble over something like child soldiers.

The 6 years Fadi served with the militias, from 2012-2016, were some of the fiercest fighting of the entire war. The first friend he lost was next to that metal dumpster as he lay frozen with his face on the asphalt. He would quickly grow accustomed to such scenes.

His deployment structure was 20 days on, 10 days off. For 20 days, he experienced all the sights and sounds and traumas of war. Then, for the following 10 days, he would sit in his old classroom listening to his friends ask questions about math problems.

While most of his time fighting was spent near his own village, he also participated in the years-long campaign for control of Aleppo. This included some of the most intense and consequential fighting in the entire war. The fight for Aleppo lasted from July of 2012 to December of 2016, with the pro-government forces finally succeeding in taking control of the city.

During a period of fighting in Aleppo, Fadi and his division pushed back a group of rebel forces from their position. While sweeping the captured houses, Fadi’s compatriots helped themselves to any valuables they came across. The fine line between looter and liberator was deteriorating. Fadi, though at first reluctant, made it back home to his village with a nice, big Bluetooth speaker. These people are fighting to kill us, after all. Don’t we deserve a reward for risking our lives?

Fadi’s father wasn’t convinced.

“Min wen jibta haydi?” he asked. “Where’d you get that?”

“Aleppo”, answered Fadi.

“What, did you pay money for it?”

“No, I found it in one of the houses…”

His dad blew up. “What!? Somebody else worked hard to buy that, and you just took it!? Ya ibni, I can’t believe you!”

“But Baba, come on, they’re trying to kill us!”

“Ya, and if you’re going to be just like them, then they are right to fight against you! Get rid of that thing, or you leave with it. Either way, it is not staying in my house!”

Fadi was blessed with a father who wouldn’t turn a blind eye to wrongdoing, no matter the supposed justifications. To his credit, Fadi listened. He dumped the speaker down a cliff in the village, and that was the last thing he ever took.

Fadi’s father began to feel uncomfortable with the effect this war was having on his son. The changes in Fadi were obvious, if difficult to understand. His father began to press him hard to leave the militias and seek an official government position within the Syrian Arab Army. After many arguments and years of mounting pressure from his father, Fadi finally relented. He enlisted in one of the government security agencies.

This decision was not without its own difficulties and dangers. His appointment in this agency would take him 450km away from his home village. To a city on the edge of the wilderness, surrounded by desert sand as far as the eye can see.

The city of Deir ez-Zour.

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On the small square table between us, two small glasses of maté straddle a bowl of sugar, metal straws extending upward in a salute to camaraderie. My friend has just gone to pick some mint to add to the maté, says he hopes I’ll like it. I do like it.

His eyes are red and swollen, and his voice catches. He’s just been kicked out of the closest thing he had to a home and, with no place to lay his head, he is at his lowest. Now he is here, under my walnut tree.

Poor friends can be an inconvenience. They have the tendency to need you.

Material poverty, I’ve learned, is not always remedied by a little bit of hard work. The problem for the poor person is that all his friends are poor, and poor friends can be an inconvenience. They have the tendency to need you.

Recently, my friend (Fadi, who I’ve written about here and here) saw a modest payday and proceeded to buy a new phone. He then had two phones, as his old phone was still in fine working condition. I was surprised at this seemingly unscrupulous use of funds. Surely there were better ways he could use that money.

As it happens, Fadi gets asked for money even more than I do - because he has more poor friends than I do. This being his situation, he knows that if he keeps any money on him, it will soon be asked of him to help cover someone else’s emergency. If he wants to see the benefit of his labor, he needs to spend it now. Saving money isn’t an option for him, unless he is prepared to lie to his cousin when he asks to borrow money.

When I probed about the phone purchase, he surprised me by saying that he viewed the phone itself as a savings account. It comforted him to know that, in an emergency, he could sell it and get his hands on some cash quickly. It was a way of benefiting from the money now, while hedging against the future. Then, when his cousin asks for money, he can honestly say he doesn’t have any. In this way, the only real savings account available to my impoverished friend is one which loses value over time.

I am not sure whether to pity him or envy him. If I do envy him, it must be very little, seeing that I have it in my power to live the impoverished life with him and choose to remain decidedly unimpoverished.

No, but I do envy him. I envy that when he reads that “foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head”, he actually knows what that feels like. I envy that he clings to Jesus’ words like a lifeline. That he needs it to be true that God cares more about him than he does the birds and the flowers. That surely, then, he will be fed and clothed. To me, Jesus’ words against worrying help me find rest even when the stock market has a bad day. For Fadi, they are his only hope. He reads the words of Jesus differently than I do. Desperately, like a thirsty man looking for water.

Far from despising my poor friend, I admire him. I feel not pity, but envy. Not scoffing, but ashamed.

Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I’m left counting on there being a way for this rich man, too.

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Gunshots.

Fadi’s heart was in his throat.

This is it, he thought, they’ve found us.

“Get out of the cars, ya khanazir! Ya kafar! Face down on the ground, now!”

Dozens of cars now stopped in the middle of a desert road 100km west of Deir ez-Zour. Out of the cars poured what was left of the Syrian Arab Army - 300 unarmed men in civilian clothes fleeing in borrowed cars. One of these cars, a 90’s red Opel Vectra, held Fadi and a few other men. Fadi, numb, reached for the cracked plastic handle in obedience to the faceless voice.

He threw himself onto the desert sand. Still obeying the voice, he crawled forward until he found himself kneeling on the side of the road, at the edge of the desert, staring up into the barrel of a gun.

The air was cold and dry, yet his face was dripping sweat. He felt dizzy. Every fiber in his body was screaming, “Run!” but his knees stayed glued to the sand.

Fady did what so many others have done in similar circumstances. He prayed:

Ya rub- Oh Lord - It’s true I don’t know you, but please get me out of this and I’ll spend my whole life searching for you.

A terrifying sound rocked the desert and echoed off the mountains around him. He recognized it immediately as the sound he had been dreading.

Gunfire.

Northwest of the city of Homs, among a rolling landscape caught somewhere between mountain and plain, lies a small agricultural village. There the days are marked by the movements of the shepherds, and the months by the harvest of whatever is in season. Ful, then hummus, then m’ati, then wheat and barley, then olives. It was here in the early Spring of ‘96, while the ful was heavy on the stalk, that Fadi was born. His family, along with most of his village, is Alawite. Alawites are a Muslim minority group distinguished by their devotion to Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law. Distinguished among the Alawites is the Assad family, the ruling family in Syria since Hafez al-Assad’s rise to power in 1970.

Like many Alawites, Fadi’s father chose a steady, though meager, salary as a member of Assad’s Syrian Arab Army. Military service was often viewed as preferable to risking one’s prospects as a farmer. The Syrian military was therefore full of people from the poor, rural villages. Fadi’s mother, for her part, spent her days caring for her children and her home. She would bake bread in an outdoor oven and tend the garden.

Life for a child in a poor village is full of excitement and adventure, buoyed by the advantage of not knowing you are poor. Fadi would have spent many hours playing football in the streets with other children, or climbing the fig tree in his yard, or the mulberry in his neighbor’s, depending on which was in season. From a young age he participated in the agricultural life of the village, helping with harvest and processing. He would walk to school with his older brother and dreamed of going to college to make something of himself. His family was loving and close-knit, having everything but money.

Then one day, in 2011, the clean country air was filled with the smell of gunpowder. Fadi’s idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end.

One man’s Arab Spring is another man’s Winter, and for Alawite communities like Fadi’s, the changes brought by the Syrian Uprising were largely negative. For that matter, the uprising and what followed wasn’t easy on anybody.

During March of 2011, in the southern city of Daraa, a group of teenagers inspired by the Arab Spring were arrested and tortured after writing anti-government graffiti. Days later, security forces opened fire on protesters after Friday prayers, killing several. The chaos spread rapidly and Syria devolved into civil war. By the end of the year, armed opposition groups began to form and the violence grew increasingly sectarian. Alawite communities, viewed as pro-government, received the brunt of it.

From the perspective of a teenage boy in the village, the world was coming apart. The adults he once looked to for comfort and protection were now afraid even to go outside. His family, his whole village, was in legitimate danger. In such times, young, able-bodied men feel the weight of responsibility to protect the community.

Fady, only just old enough to be considered a “young man”, felt this responsibility acutely.

He knew what decision he would make.

He laid down his school backpack and picked up a rifle.

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It was almost 6 years ago, and ever since, Lebanon has been trying to get rid of me.

I moved here in the middle of Covid-19. One month before I landed, the street outside my apartment had been blocked off with burning tires as the people protested a corrupt political system. In my first few years, I watched as the country sank in what would become one of the worst financial crises the world has seen in more than two centuries. During my second summer, there was a fuel crisis. At times, we would lose power for 24 hours or more. I bought a good battery pack and got familiar with the underground market for gasoline, paying a steep markup to keep gas in my car.

Then, almost 3 years ago now, the events of October 7th sparked a wave of “regional instability” that has yet to subside. The country I call home has been at war, more or less, ever since.

In the midst of these wars and rumors of wars, we bought a little piece of an olive orchard that we hope to live on. As it is, I feel compelled to account for the purchase.

We did it, primarily, because we believe God talks to us and, as best we could discern, this was what he was directing us to do. Jeremiah 32 - in which God tells Jeremiah to buy land in the midst of a siege - was a pivotal passage and kept showing up. Friends would randomly share things that encouraged us in the direction of buying land, and in our prayer times we increasingly felt God was asking us to take this leap of faith.

The purchase of land was also in keeping with ideas of belonging and place that I had been considering. I want to own land here because I want to live here. Life and land are becoming increasingly connected for me. Belonging takes time and commitment. It means putting down roots, and owning allows us to do that in ways that renting does not.

We came to the Middle East to impact the culture, and culture is, by definition, local. The surest way to impact it is to participate in it. Purchasing land here is an outworking of our participation in the local culture.

As for the investment prospects, I do cede to their general…instability. On this point I appeal to Jim Elliot’s famous words: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” If I do prove to be a fool, it will not be because I did not always seek to leverage my financial investments for material gain. The birds of the air and the flowers of the field are, after all, notoriously poor with their finances.

No, if I am a fool it will be for any other of the many possible reasons, but then, I’ll be a fool with an olive orchard.

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This gardener is a certain peasant from Palestine who would go on to be history’s most successful claimant to divinity - Jesus Christ.

Many a first-century working day would have found the God-man out working a field of cucumbers, or ploughing a garden patch, or harvesting grain. We should not suppose that Jesus’ extensive agricultural knowledge, peppered throughout his parables and teaching, came merely from reading books on farming, or from sitting on a hillside watching other people work. I’ll grant that Jesus is admiringly observant and contemplative, but no first-century villager could have been a stranger to farm work - and certainly not a Galilean. Jesus was a carpenter, not a farmer, we hear. His trade was carpentry (or perhaps more accurately, construction), but he almost certainly spent time in the fields as well. Specialization was rare then. When it came time for the grain harvest, everyone pitched in -cobblers, builders, metalworkers, children. The privilege (or, what’s more likely, curse) of divorcing ourselves from any concern with soil has only been widely available since the Industrial Revolution.

Humans, like it or not, are strongly and mystically connected to the soil. Adam, the first man, is the only one of all creation that God made “from the dust of the earth”(Gen. 2:7). The Hebrew word for man, adam, has the same root as the word for dirt, adamah. Adam’s job is to tend the garden that God himself planted (Gen. 2:8). The curse, too, is illuminating:

“…cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Gen. 3:17b-19)

How often do we read this and immediately translate it to the toils of a 9-5? Consider that the majority of humanity throughout history, including God incarnate himself, would have understood the implications of this curse firsthand. They would have battled actual thorns and thistles, would have sweat real drops, while struggling to obtain the grain they needed for their daily bread. Today, many of us can go weeks without even touching dirt. We are well aware that not everything about our modern way of life is good for us. I am suggesting that distancing ourselves from the land is harming us in the long run. We, adam, were not designed to live apart from the adamah.

Jesus, the complete man, was intimately familiar with the soil. Those of us who want to be like him would be aided by some experience with soil ourselves. So be like Jesus. Go plant a garden.

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At the edge of our property, a flock of 150 Ross 308 broiler chicks sits in the dappled shade of a walnut tree, hiding from the midday sun. At not yet 3 weeks old, they are already pushing 2 lbs. Their white feathers, unable to keep pace with the body’s explosive growth, leave patches of pink skin exposed. With legs too big, heads too small, and breasts almost scraping the ground as they walk, they make an interesting sight. This is the bird the world consumes as “chicken”. It looks more like what might result were a 5-year-old to describe a chicken to a forensic artist.

Interspersed among these monstrosities are 7 black and yellow muscovy ducklings. Their fuzzy bodies are of a more natural size and shape. Life among the broilers is a product of hatch date and my own preference for function over form. They waddle around, altogether unlike their rotund nestmates. I find myself drawn to these little ducklings, not least because I see myself in them. They stick out.

I too live in a place I do not belong. For as long as I live here, I will always be foreign. I can paint my feathers and disguise my waddle, but in the end I am always found out. I stick out. I cannot make myself belong here, nor can I turn the Mediterranean olive groves into the Piney Woods of East Texas.

This experience has deepened my appreciation for local culture. I never loved my home so much, never knew what it felt like to live in a place you truly belonged to, before I left it.

To be local is a gift.

Not all hope is lost for me, though. Look to the words of cultural sage Creed Bratton:

Indeed. “…a miraculous gift to make that place home.” The ducklings won’t ever be chickens, but they can learn to swim in the waterer. The miracle of local culture is that it is not merely inherited, it is cultivated. Wendell Berry discerned as much when reflecting on a galvanized bucket hanging on a fence. “A human community too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into an account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself—in lore and story and song—which will be its culture.” Culture is like soil in that it builds up over time, if you care for it.

I miss the people and places I know best, and who know me. The people who look and act and talk like me. The place I feel most comfortable. Where I am accepted as local. Yet God has planted me in an olive grove east of the Mediterranean, where I often feel out of place and unknown. Taking Bratton, Berry, and the ducklings as my examples, I’ll do the work of building a local culture, of making it home - one lore and story and song at a time - and count on the miracle coming through for me too.

Tomorrow morning, those seven ducklings will waddle out between the broilers feeling just a little more at ease, a little more at home. And I expect I will too.

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Every 4 years, Lebanon is transformed for the summer into a battleground of parading, flag-waving factions. Allegiances are divided between Germany, France, Brazil, Argentina, and others. Lines are drawn. Villages, neighborhoods, and even families are divided. It can get brutal.

I was greatly confused when I first experienced this phenomenon 4 years ago. I, patriotic American that I am, couldn’t fathom cheering with such intensity of emotion for a country not my own. I’ve learned, though, that there is a lesson to be learned when I am surprised by the culture around me. What is there to the Lebanese people’s vicarious FIFA fandom?

I am reminded that all fandom is “vicarious” and an exercise in “collective delusion”. Is my willingness (nay, excitement) to get up at 3 am to watch men play a game any less crazy because their jerseys bear the name of my passport country? Is my participation any less vicarious?

I love sports. They allow us to experience displays of beauty, courage, sacrifice, and the downright miraculous that are otherwise rare in everyday life. Should I begrudge the Lebanese people for their participation just because their national team can’t make the World Cup?

The Lebanese are good at finding reasons to have a good time. They’ve had to be. Life here is hard on many of them. Many have seen real battlefields, experienced real loss. There are around 700,000 Lebanese who have been displaced. The reported total population is 5.9 million, meaning one out of twelve people have fled their homes in the last two years and still have not returned. If every 4 years they want to go crazy cheering for a contender, I say good for them. Let them have some joy and experience of victory, vicarious though it be.

Go crazy, Lebanon, I can take a detour.

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You wouldn’t know by looking at it - a web of thin, spindly branches each ending in a single white flower the size and shape of a thimble - but it is a nectar-producing powerhouse. It blooms in the middle of summer during what would otherwise be a nectar dearth. This midsummer nectar flow is just enough to allow the native Syrian Honeybee to store up enough honey to get the colony (and the beekeeper) through the winter. It’s a wonderfully elegant cycle - the ants and the flowers and the bees - that has been going on since before Jesus and Solomon used them in their own analogies.

Last night the ants and flowers and bees in a village about 100 miles south were rocked by explosions. The country I live in has been consistently rocked by explosions for the better part of two years now. My family and I have been spared from the sights and sounds of this war. The only ones that have reached my eyes and ears are those to which I electronically avail myself. Many others I know have been severely affected by the war. Lost lives and ways of life. It’s terrible and we pray often for the wars to end and peace to reign. Something is happening, though, in the midst of these explosions that doesn’t show up in the news. Over these last two years of war, people have increasingly become aware of the emptiness of what the world offers and turned to find life and truth in Jesus. I know of dozens of stories personally. This is how God works. Look to the Cephalaria. Out of hard, dry ground springs a nectar-rich flower. It happens year after year. Our God loves to make broken things beautiful, to surprise us and turn evil on its head. Let’s keep praying for wars to end while expecting God to turn evil on its head and make this world even more beautiful for having once been broken. When the ground gets dry, you know that Cephalaria is about to bloom.

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On or around December 8, 2024, as the Assad regime in Syria took its last breaths, a group of young men stood in a field somewhere in the southeastern province of Deir ez-Zour. Another group of young men knelt in front of them with their heads bowed. The first group -rebels, or terrorists, or liberators, depending on who you ask - were in the midst of dispatching their captives, members of what was until very recently the Syrian Army. Just then, a warplane flew overhead. This created enough chaos to allow some of the kneeling men to escape. Of this number, some made it back to their homes in Syria's western provinces. Of those who made it home, some chose to flee into the neighboring country of Lebanon, leaving everything they knew to become an unregistered refugee in a country already full of them. Of these, one helped me build a wall. His name is Fadi.

Around the end of 2025, my family and I, along with another American family, feeling prompted by the Lord but not knowing exactly where it would lead, purchased just over an acre of land on a plateau in northern Lebanon. As far as investment practices go, purchasing land in a foreign country entangled in war and financial crisis is… unorthodox. That is maybe a story for another time. For our purposes, it is enough to say that we wanted to build a rock wall/fence around the property. We asked around and were quoted $15,000 for hiring out the work. We decided maybe we didn’t want one so bad after all…

Fadi had found his way to a mosque in a village about 5 miles from our land. The courtyard of the mosque had been fashioned into temporary housing for refugees, and a free meal was provided daily by a local NGO. It was a welcome, if not cushy, living arrangement for a single guy starting over from nothing. Unwelcome, though, was the searing pain that shot through Fadi’s lower back and left leg every time he tried to move. Fadi’s body was left beaten and bare by the experiences of those last days of the Asaad regime. He had lost some 40 pounds from his normal weight. Add to that the fact that he was unaccustomed to the exertions expected of a day laborer, the only gainful employment available to a man in his position, and he was left in a situation he could no longer sustain.

It was at this moment, broken and despairing, that God broke in to Fadi’s darkening world. Unknown to him, his close friend Hadi had been following Jesus for about a year and was part of our spiritual community. He convinced him to come receive prayer and a medical massage from our group, which helpfully includes a licensed sports masseuse. These prayers and massages healed his back and opened his heart to hear the amazing news that is God’s heart and plan for him. It was a message he always thought was out there - he’d even prayed to find it with his knees in the dirt in that field in Deir ez-Zour all those days ago. Our amazing God had answered and broken through for Fadi.

And, wouldn’t you know it, Fadi knows how to build rock walls.

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It was a normal Fall evening at our home in northern Lebanon. My wife was resting with our 3-day-old baby in the living room. I was showering with our 2-year-old when all of a sudden, the lights went out. Electrical outages in Lebanon are commonplace, so I thought nothing of it. What I did think something of was the high-pitched screams from the living room punctuated by the word “Fire!” I ran quickly to see what the screaming was all about. This was without, you guessed it, taking time for my traditional post-shower routine of dressing. Seeing a fire at our electrical box, I, quick-thinking, ran back and grabbed my wife’s prized Turkish bath towel to fight the fire with. Perhaps I subconsciously remembered the Turkish bath story? Being struck with this towel had little observable effect outside of ruining our most expensive towel. I admit I was at a loss at this point. I knew water was no good for electrical fires, had just discovered the same was true of Turkish bath towels. Just as I was contemplating the efficacy of a bucket of sand from our sandbox, my wife, feet still glued to the same spot whence she had sounded the alarm, saved the day and our house.

She reminded me (in her high-pitched voice she uses only for talking to cute things and, apparently, house fires) of the presence of a fire extinguisher in our recently purchased minivan. Warmed only by the flames in the cool night air, I raced to grab the fire extinguisher, which proved more than capable of extinguishing the blaze. Thus concluded our first and thus far only experience with a house fire.

The morals of this story, as I see them, are:

1. Don’t waste your money on a Turkish bath towel

2. Every family should own a minivan

3. Never trust the electrical wiring in a rented house in Lebanon and,

4. Be polite enough not to take the last slice of pizza but not too polite to fight a fire naked, should the need arise

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