40+ heures dans le désert (1re partie)

Yes, the translators among you got it right. I did recently spend more than 40 hours in the desert. Literally.

...And yes, it's true, it was an actual, geographical desert.
With a city in it.
In the United Arab Emirates.
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...euh...en fait, dans 2 déserts.

If I want to be really technical (which regrettably for millennial readers I always do), the fact is that I had time off to wander not 1, but 2 deserts last month. With the second one being more of a metaphorical desert...

Those of Protestant Christian faith - like me - who know or care that there are countless places & people groups outside Australia where the Church struggles to persevere, grow or produce its own native-speaking local leaders - may have heard about Europe.

That in spite of a long history of Christendom, the European Church is not doing very well spiritually or missionally (compared to the Australian Church esp. in Sydney).

Western Europe in particular has been recently described as a "spiritual desert" by several Aussies who lived there as long-term cross-cultural missionaries (for 5-25 years). And this was, therefore, the other desert in which I wandered in early September. Of course, as friends would have expected of me, the bit I went to was in France.

Yes, while God's people in early Israel's history wandered 40 years in the desert (cf. Exodus through to Deuteronomy in the Bible), I wandered in the desert (first one, then another) just for 40 hours - and then a bit more.
But in a good way, if you can believe it!
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After a challenging 8-month run of living between paychecks all year, feeling like I was scraping the bottom of the barrel, the arrival of my tax return in late August meant I finally had a chance to take a week's break from working and go on a proper holiday. And for the first time in 7 years, I could afford flights overseas on my own income (with plenty to spare for present & future utility bills. Merci Seigneur for tax returns!).

So in early September I took the week off daycare and flew to my first desert destination: Dubai.

Désert #1
A modern city financed with oil and built on the shores of the Gulf, Dubai has the kind of advanced air-conditioning that I shall recall with a mixture of great fondness and even greater envy on Sydney's next 34-degree-or-hotter Australian summer day.

I'd hoped to visit this desert city since finishing College with my one-year Diploma. (To much personal grief on my part, God has now made it clear that going to France to join French Christians long-term is not currently an option without a 3-year theology degree. I don't intend to explain this further right now, perhaps in the future I'll blog about it...) When I knew that my September 2018 finances would stretch to overseas airfares, choosing Dubai as a break destination was a no-brainer. Part of going there was to survey, albeit briefly (I stayed only 3 days & 3 nights of my week off work), whether I might find the city personally liveable for up to 2 or 4 or 5 or even maybe 10+ years...

That's because I've never seriously considered remaining in Sydney after graduating from College. Because experiences I had nearly a decade ago - meeting and partnering with French Christian ministry trainees/workers who wanted to reach unsaved university students in Paris (visited 2009-2010) and Strasbourg (visited 2011) - challenged me to re-think my involvement as a mission supporter outside the English-speaking West. Now that studies are done with me, I've spent 2018 thinking through & exploring some options for serving gospel-poorer peoples - including French-speaking Europeans - away from my home city. Options like working as an expatriate in a foreign city, like Dubai, where churches are needier than almost anywhere here in Sydney. (Or even in Melbourne, where churches are, whilst less needy than in Dubai, more needy compared to Sydney.)

Dubai.

One of the tourist guidebooks I read called it a "jewel of the Arabian Desert".

All such tourist literature also supplied blatant warnings about climate extremes, reminding any careful reader of the city's location:
In. The. Desert. (Read: HOT.)

It certainly sounded extreme enough on paper, yet until I got off the plane in Dubai, I could never have previously known or understood what "desert" really meant!

The day I arrived in Dubai, the temperature alone was 46 degrees.
(That's 13 degrees higher than what I'm comfy with in Sydney!)

It was late summer in Dubai, maybe even autumn - but still, gosh, was it HOT! And dry. And hot. And dry. And...

Without its modern comforts - air-conditioning in every building, cheap but good/drinkable bottled water, or world-class city plumbing systems -
Dubai really was, quite literally, in the midst of
"a dry and weary land where there is no water".
(Quoting David the psalmist's sentiments about the desert of Judah in PSALM 63:1.)

Now if you ever want to experience - really experience - a true definition of what "desert" feels like, I highly recommend Dubai in summer!

As for me:
I left for Europe as scheduled after 3 days wandering about in Dubai. (Mainly because I had only a few days left of my week-long break before returning to work in Sydney.)

In terms of where I'm up to in my thinking, I feel fine about continuing to apply for work in Dubai, and remain open to any future leading from God into that city, in particular any educational/residential role that gives me adequate time to join other believers in reaching gospel-poor expatriate peoples (70% of Dubai's population). I would like to believe I would be happy to go, whenever the time comes...

So my stay in the desert ended up being time well spent. I'm so thankful to God for the opportunity to be in Dubai. And for those first 4 days of rest from daycare work! Much more refreshing than one would have expected from a desert.

And then, it was time to revisit the spiritual desert of Europe. Well, the bit of it in France I was going to. But that's for next time...

L/T.