That's the main line of a song that's been stuck in my head a lot recently. Our church has been having extra prayer meetings in the evenings since the revolution and today we prayed for strength. Things in Egypt have calmed down a lot, but people are really tired. I feel lucky that I had the chance to get away for two weeks, because the people who have been here the whole time are feeling the effects of living in tension for so long. And that's the expats! Many Egyptian Christians have much more anxiety over this than we have, and they are also struggling more than us economically.
This is the situation in so many Middle Eastern countries right now! Libya is still a mess; protests continue in Jordan and Iraq; today I heard rumors about unrest in Saudi Arabia. I've heard people say that the unrest is an answer to prayer - a shaking up of this largely Islamic region. Is God being glorified through the protests and falling governments, the fighting? Are people turning to him as we've been praying they would? I don't know; religion seems to have played such a small role here in Egypt at least.
Another group that is tired are those people who are still trapped in limbo - are they coming back to Egypt or not? If so, when? The embassy has just made the decision to keep its employees and dependents in the States for another month. Should the kids be enrolled in school where they are, or continue with virtual school based in Cairo? When will the emergency embassy staff who remained here in Cairo get to see their families who are waiting in the US for this to "blow over"? A news article in the Washington Post recently highlighted a bunch of CAC students who are waiting to come home. Other people are coming back to Cairo only to find that they won't have a job next year because so many people have left. It's not an easy situation.
In light of all that, our family is pretty well off. We're all together, we have our jobs (and Ann is sure of hers next year as well), we got to take a break from revolution tension in the States. We live and work in Maadi so we don't have to venture near any trouble spots.