Overview

Endorsed by Philip Yancey and Eugene Peterson, this title includes reflections on finding God's presence in demanding personal circumstances. It gives a sympathetic Western perspective on Muslim and Middle Eastern spirituality and culture. It shows how grasping the Bible's Middle Eastern setting brings out powerful new lessons. It is a story-based account of building understanding and friendship across barriers in religion and culture. It includes thought-provoking poems. It is suitable for women looking for spiritual reading based on personal experience and coping with difficult times, Christians seeking to deepen their own faith, as well as increase their awareness and appreciation of Muslim life and culture, and people considering missionary work. It features spiritual and personal reflections from a western woman - a wife and mother of two teenagers - living in the overpoweringly urban, developing-world, Muslim context of Cairo. She draws from her daily experiences (which include both positive and negative events) to show how God's presence can be found in the most testing of circumstances. Her reflections draw in shopping, security, friends and neighbours, her children's lives, her husband's work as pastor of a small international church in the city.

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9781841016863

Table of Contents

Reviews

I have visited the Chandlers in their 'concrete desert' and have first-hand appreciation for Lynne's extraordinary journey. She expresses it with artful honesty. Philip Yancey, author of What's So Amazing about Grace? Lynne Chandler's account of and reflections on life and work in Cairo is a plunge into stories and pain, prayer and poems, that creates in us an intimacy that is something more like embracing holiness. Eugene Peterson, translator of The Message From The Church Times - July 2010 This paperback is a series of reflections and poems about a struggle to come to terms with suddenly living in stifling and noisy Cairo rather than green America. Lynne E. Chandler's base is never named, although it is easily identifiable as the Anglican St John the Baptist Church, where her husband is the chaplain. The author locates herself in Maadi, which means 'crossing', and is so named because the Holy Family crossed the Nile here. She suggests that Jesus must have been riding on his donkey near the ever present pyramids when she was battling with what she calls the sandstorm of life. She writes metaphorically, using camels and palms in her prose and poetry, as she seeks sense in her new life. In many ways it is a description of being a clergy wife with the clergy hardly mentioned. Although her own role as director of music sometimes features, the focus is on living with Egyptians in the shifting rhythm of the Muslim year rather than with expatriate Americans and British keeping the Christian calendar. The main church service is on Friday morning, to fit with the local way of life. Lynne must use the women's entrance when shopping at Carrefour. In a life of paradoxes, Mokkattam, or the 'village of garbage', is 'physically filthy but spiritually beautiful'. The BMW must give way to the donkey car. 'I am home or am I?' she reflects during the summer break in the cool United States. She finds firsthand friendship has gone beyond just religious tolerance. Reviewed by Leigh Hatts From The Good Bookstall - May 2010 This is a raw, truthful, gritty little book than significantly out-punches its size! This is a very compelling journey into the ongoing story of a woman living in a foreign land. There are incredible flavours resident on each page. The teeming pressures of a middle eastern lifestyle are vividly communicated amidst this lyrical journey of reflections and poetry. It fosters an intimacy that calls us to holiness; to more than we know in this moment. This is encouraging reading for all who travel widely in our world, and even more for those who travel deep within... Reviewed by Johnny Douglas

Author Information

Lynne Chandler was born in Muslim West Africa and spent her childhood in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the United States. After 9/11 she moved with her family to Cairo, home to over 20 million people, to serve as the music director in the Anglican/Episcopal international church that her husband pastors.

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