Some Jordan Stories

So I have a few stories that I would love to share about my time in Jordan that I find pretty awesome.

The first story I would like to share is the story of my first date. I have a student named Dua'a. She is one of my younger students so I click with her well. Well she invited me and my friends Katie and Anna over to her house to hang out for a bit. In this culture, it is always polite to get who invites you a small gift, so I made her a coffee. Bad idea for so many reasons. One, she was on a diet. Two, we weren't walking to her house, we were riding there… in her brothers NEW CAR I might add. He was very excited about his new car too and they quite enjoyed talking about it. So I offer her the coffee and she doesn't want it. Well I'm a broke missionary so heck yeah I'll take it if she doesn't want it. Once again… bad idea. So we get in the car with this boiling hot coffee and disaster just slowly begins striking. The driving in Jordan is very, let's go with hectic. Yes, people swerve everywhere when they drive. So I'm getting this hot coffee all over my hands, and dang, it burns! The only cure I can see to this is me drinking the coffee as fast as I can, or dumping it out the window, which for some reason never crossed my mind. Well my friend Anna is just laughing so hard watching this happen, which then causes me to laugh. Well let me tell you, laughing and swallowing coffee at the same time is a REALLY BAD IDEA. Man, it triggered my gag reflexes real bad and I vomited all over his new car. Some how, the dated ended up being awesome and some how life went on. But boy did I learn my lesson.

The second story I want to tell is the story of my friend Eman. The Director there introduced me and my friend Joanne to her one day after we were done with our coffee bar shift. Eman had just joined the center and wanted to meet some people to practice her English with. So she prated with me and Joanne. We all slowly began to get to know each other really well as time went on. One day when I was praying, God gave me a word for her. I got this picture of her looking in a mirror and taking off her hijab. When she did her face went from smiling to a frown. I felt like God wanted her to know he thought that she was beautiful and that he loved her. This was a big deal to her sense they wait their whole lives from some sort of revelation from God. She therefore went to the director to get a translation. After that, the director asked me to maybe consider inviting her to do a Holly Book study. This meant that we would read from the Quran and the Bible and compare stories of the prophets. So I asked her and sure enough she said yes. So the 4 of us ended up having our study and started off by sharing our testimony. Turns out her Dad had passed away. ALSO, and this is where it gets cool for me, she had very previously been engaged. She had signed the contract and everything. But when they sign the contract they have 6 days to take it back. Well her husband changed his mind 4 days later and took advantage of her emotions and just really hurt her and was bad to her. After that she felt really unbeautiful and felt like God didn't love her. That was encouraging for me because it meant the word I had for her was perfect. After that I got to share more stories of how God had talked to me before. I never got to finish the studies because I left to soon, but her and the director are still doing them to this day.

Another cool story was one of my students met me one day to tell me about what he believed as a Muslim and I shared what I believed as a Christian. That was my first time sharing the Gospel and it all just worked out so well. One there was another staff there who spoke Aerobic and had a Quran with her and helped me answer questions I didn't know the answer too. It was just perfect how God worked the timing out.

One of my favorite things that happened there was Girls Night. God gave me this idea to do girls night there to show the girls how beautiful they are. The culture there is very hard on them when it comes to self worth. Families will literally introduce their children as "the smart one", "the pretty one", "the dumb one", "the ugly one"… They say it as it is. It's awful the death that they speak over each other. So I wanted to get to show them how beautiful they were. So we did girls night. It all ran so smoothly and God really just was there that night. We even got to do Original Design for some of the girls. This is where we prayed that God would show what He loves about them and why He crated them. It was so neat.

One time also when I went on a date to my student Dua'a's house, we tried a very popular Jordanian food called mansuf. I got so full and just when I thought I could eat no more the Mom takes some more and puts it in my mouth. It was so funny!

I also had many chances to just break down stereo types they had about us as Americans and chances to learn about them. I do hope one day I get to go back to Jordan and experience all of this again.