I did everything to not have anything to do with missions. And I sat very calmly through most of my youth time in conferences where we would be nudged or hinted towards, like, “How much of your life do you want to spent for Jesus or his cause?” I comfortably sat and ignored all of that because I had paid off everything. It was not for me.

One of the things that I was a bit scared about was that I’m not very girly… I really was a bit scared that if he throws me in with a bunch of women, and there’s a very segregated context, that I don’t know how to be girly with him.

Every time I make a good connection with a woman, I say OK, God is in this, because this is not me.

We learn more from imitation than from studying.

It’s not really about who you are; it’s about your behavioral codex. Do you fit in? Are you actually doing the things you’re supposed to do, at the time you’re supposed to do it, towards the person you’re supposed to do them to?

You can do something wrong every single second. It matters who agreed first. It matters who you sit next to. It matters when you sit down, who sat down first, who grabs a date first or second, who is offering to whom. Everything has a behavioral codex, which they know, but we in the beginning, and I have absolutely no clue about.

One of the most difficult things is to kick out the foreigners because they just don’t get the clues.

They don’t want to fall short with their hospitality just because you don’t like coffee. It’s not up to you at that point.

You have to spend a lot of time to become friends? You cannot just visit once a month and expect the friendship to grow in trust and depth.

In the beginning, you think a casual wave towards the door is enough. It’s definitely not enough.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the liar in this… I’m really asking a lot from them, and I don’t even share why I’m here.

If I speak to the local language, their face is changing. It communicates to them that I really value them, that I want to know them, and that I must’ve spent time here already, and that they mean something to me.

You always think you’re the special one that made a connection with your teacher.

My teacher told me that she never experienced a student that leaves language school and still improves afterwards.

I always have my pillow in my car, and it might be that I stay over for the whole weekend or I go home.

If you want to have friendships with Arabs, you have to be proactive.

If you haven’t been in touch with them for two weeks, they ask if you’ve died.

We want this. We want relationships. They’re not really waiting for us.

Being entertained by foreigners can be done in one or two tea sessions.

In the beginning, I felt like it took a lot of energy from me and not from them.

In the beginning, it’s difficult to find when is enough and what is too much.

I’ve never become more of an introvert because friendships here, relationships, take everything of you. It’s a 24/7 effort.

A lot of times when I was at my limits, physically at my limit, God did something amazing.

She asked me are you sad? And I got tears in my eyes, and I said, “No, I’m just exhausted. I’m so tired. I think I just need to sleep.” And she alerted her other sisters and was like, “Oh she’s crying because she’s exhausted. We are boring her!”

In my exhaustion, God opened up the most amazing opportunity.