What Can I Give Him?

Greetings Cliff,
Hope this finds you and your family well and happy.
We are having quite a winter here-- 10 days of snow and ice and very cold temps. A "once in 50 years"
phenomenon for this area. Roofs are all flat here & many are sporting snow people. (:

I've written a little piece for our Prayer Partner Churches ... a reflection on being in Iran for a year & a thank you for prayer-full support. It means more than we can say in a place where rhetoric stays very bellicose.

Grace and peace,
Linda (David)

One Year in Iran
Linda Kusse-Wolfe
January, 2008

Last night an Afghani man sat crossed legged on our couch and talked about what it was like to be arrested by the Taliban and given the death penalty nine years ago. He and his wife and little girl were attempting to come to Iran to study. There crime was being born Hazari people and Shiite Muslims. Only the intervention of an elderly Pashtun man saved them. Now a doctoral student in Qom with four small children, he talks with great love of his native city (Kabul) and the hopes he has for peace and stability there.

A cleric and his family live across the hall from us. He is a middle aged man studying at one of Qom’s many seminaries for a year. He and his wife, daughter and son are such good neighbors. Just after Christmas the doorbell rang at 10 pm (a normal visiting hour in Iran). In came the whole family. Dad had a big box of chocolates under his arm. Mom gave me hugs and kisses. Fateme (15) handed us a beautiful, Christ centered Christmas card and a wrapped present. Musa (10) beamed as I opened the box and found a beautiful necklace with a glittering cross. “Christmas blessings!” they said, over and over.

We have spent a year in Iran, now, though it often seems longer. We continue to study Farsi, the Quran, and the history and thought of Shiite Muslims. Scholarship is deeply honored in this culture. We have met many pilgrims coming to the holy shrine here in Qom—including Iraqis from Karbala and Najaf—their lives broken by years of war, lack of health care, and closed schools. Shepherds still tend their flocks on the hillsides—sheep and goats intermingling, dogs helping to round them up at sunset.

We have come to know Christians from the great Church of the East—Assyrian Christians whose roots are in Iraq, Armenian Christians, Chaldean Christians. Warmly welcomed into fellowship with these brothers and sisters, it is sobering to hear that they do not consider our nation a Christian one any more than their Muslim neighbors do.

Last week David and I visited a little synagogue in a city to the south. They were just preparing for Friday prayers and welcomed us graciously. There have been no rabbis in this country for years, and their lives are very challenging. “We are one family,” they said to us again and again. “Shabbat Shalom. You are very welcome.”

To be so loved and cared for by Iranian Muslims, Christians and Jews is the greatest gift of this very challenging year. It is a life changing experience to live as “documented aliens,” part of a tiny religious minority in an Islamic Republic, in a time of great political tension. Iran, of course, is surrounded by three “failed states” – Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. One third of our navy is in the Persian Gulf. The very real threat of war colors every week for people in Iran. And yet we American Christians are universally welcomed with grace, trust, and good will.

We are learning what it means to trust God day by day, this God who sent his son not as a military conqueror, but as the Prince of Peace. We have learned again that although we Christians belong to Jesus, Jesus does not belong to us. He appears in dreams and visions to many of his beloved children, “sheep not of this fold.” We are touched and humbled when our Christian friends say “Thank you for staying with us this year, for not leaving us alone.”

And that’s what we say to you, too, at University Friends. Thank you for staying with us through your prayers, your emails and your abiding love. You have never left us alone.