Foreign territory

A year of loss and finding the way

Jan 09, 2024

Here I am again a stranger in a strange land.

Years of traveling solo as a reporter overseas, especially covering terrorism amid the Iraq War, taught me many rules of the road. Look around. Look again. Look over your shoulder. Be aware of those paying too much attention to you. Look a new friend in the eye and smile, but don’t make eye contact with strangers. Know exactly where you are going, always, and in the local language. Don’t leave some things to chance; at the same time brace for change and expect it. Connect with a familiar face on arrival, get a few hours of rest and hot tea in a small glass before starting out. Then events can surprise and overtake any plans, but an American reporter like me may have her feet planted in whatever the new soil, her mental compass primed.

For months now finding solid ground has eluded me. The rules of the road feel broken. I wake in a house I’ve lived in for nearly 40 years with my husband and family, but I wake alone. The sun rises to greet me, and the dog waits for breakfast and a ball throw, but I float, suspended in this familiar but strange world—watching as though for the first time normal rhythms I once gave no thought to. They appear part of someone else’s life.

Since my husband’s passing in 2023, ordinary days may paralyze me, make it hard to write, and to remember to take out the trash. Nat Belz died on March 30 after a five-month battle with cancer. The days and nights were exhaustingly long, and the battle to beat an aggressive bladder cancer impossibly short. His illness was punctuated by relentless nerve pain and life-threatening infections, yet in those final hours his anguish subsided and he seemed to sink, nested almost, into the arms of Jesus.

I too was nested, kept and cared for by my children and a tireless church community, by friends, neighbors, and extended family who all drew near. Yet I have felt flung, cast out, a stranger to myself.

Nat was the keeper of our castle and guardian of our ways. He built the fires and grilled the pancakes and made sure everyone’s coffee cup was full. When he sang, you wanted to sing too. We met shortly after I became a Christian, and he taught me what it meant to live a Christian life. We always talked about the importance of pastors and others shaping our lives that way. He showed me by example every day.

That grounding made it possible to live out on the edges. We talked often about the importance of moving toward the flames, the way New York firefighters on 9/11 climbed the stairs of the World Trade Center towers, helping others escape before themselves perishing in a fireball. Nat held to the G. K. Chesterton adage: “We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening.”

Nat launched a children’s magazine called Explore! and wanted to start another called Wonder. One way I could absorb witnessing suffering up close is that I lived with a man who saw the world every day alive with invention and discovery. My son worked hard the week after Nat died to capture his spirit on video. That video (short) and his memorial service (long) are here. My friend and former colleague Marvin Olasky also captured it with an article quoting Nat in the title, “Isn’t It a Privilege to Love People?”

When I would call home from overseas, doubting my resolve as I did on a night in 2019, just before a pontoon-bridge crossing to dangers in Syria, Nat deadpan would quote the apostle Paul: “If we hope in this life only, we are of all men most miserable.” Then he’d tell me a funny story about the kids or his day. He never saw pulling up stakes at the border of a war zone as an option.

With his sickness and even after his death, I postponed reporting trip after trip, fully unnerved about stepping out without his assurances and calming presence. Over spring and summer months of life as a widow, I focused, or more alighted, on random non-official tasks, mixed with lots of reading, prayer, and time with grandchildren.

I set out tomato plants without knowing who would eat their fruit. I made plans to have several rooms painted without counting the cost of upheaval. I staggered through medical bills and fumbled overdue taxes. When I lost my keys or glasses, I panicked. The dog couldn’t point to their whereabouts. I bought a rash of AirTags and started notes to myself on my phone, creating new maps of my familiar-but-suddenly foreign territory.

I read a lot of books to keep my straying mind fixed on what God is doing in the world—in particular Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright, Answering God by Eugene Peterson, and The Secret Place of Thunder by my friend John Starke. Books on grief arrived to fill a shelf, but I’ve read only these: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, plus his essays on the death of Charles Williams.

As fall approached, I resumed travel and received with my family an alumni of the year award in Nat’s honor. We were grateful for recognition of his hidden impact. We want to imbibe his legacy as life moves forward, pulling us into its swift and unstoppable current. More deaths, sudden sicknesses, and family crises followed us into winter months. Nat’s death casts a shadow but also is bracing, as C.S. Lewis points out, stirring us to live life well and to see it for the wonderful and short epic it is:

We now verified for ourselves what so many bereaved people have reported; the ubiquitous presence of a dead man, as if he had ceased to meet us in particular places in order to meet us everywhere. It is not in the least like a haunting. It is not in the least like the bittersweet experiences of memory. It is vital and bracing; it is even, however the word may be misunderstood and derided, exciting.

You, my newsletter readers, have stayed remarkably steadfast. Many of you sent kind notes I mostly could not answer. I thank you for not unsubscribing in my long absence, and helping me to have purpose in a hard season. I aim to reboot in 2024.

I am continuing to guest-edit a project begun for Christianity Today a year ago. I hope to share more glimpses of it in coming months.
I hear there’s a war in the Middle East and I want to lend clarity where possible.
I have stories underway on nonagenarian missionaries in Thailand and about a crossroads café in northern Cyprus that brings new meaning to community discipleship.
I have joined the board of World Relief, a humanitarian organization focused on refugee resettlement. That work will take me to Africa later this year and compel me to follow more closely the history-making migration of people worldwide.

As I regain some mooring, I know that foreign territory is sometimes where we belong. We worship the God of the nations and the universe, so we can be at home anywhere. A new year of discovery and wonder is before us. My prayer for it comes from “The Gate of the Year” by Minnie Louise Haskins—

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’
And he replied:
‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.
And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.