When two teachers in Lebanon were warned to evacuate before an oncoming airstrike, they had no idea how they’d get out of their neighborhood. Neither did they know how their experience would deepen their connection with their students.
"You had to evacuate also?" Reema's eyes widened, searching Keren's face.
Keren nodded, noting the subtle change in her student's gaze, telling her that, in Reema's eyes, she was no longer just a foreign teacher .
But the question brought back a rush of memories, starting with the phone call from one of the East Mediterranean Region (EMR) leaders.
"You are in an area targeted for an airstrike, and you have one hour to get out. You need to grab your emergency bag and leave for Middle East University (MEU) right away!"
Keren and Eliana, teachers at Adventist School Mouseitbeh (ASM), had spent weeks witnessing the upheaval in their students' lives as they fled their homes. Now they were about to experience it for themselves.
Keren immediately texted Eliana, then tried calling. No answer. She packed quickly — passport, emergency bag, the things that mattered — and then started putting Eliana's things together too, praying that she would arrive soon.
Eliana, meantime, had been sitting in a dentist chair in a different part of town. She had noticed a warning flash up on the TV monitor — the red circle radiating out from an area marked on a map. She felt a pang for those who would have to flee, not realizing that the area included her and Keren's neighborhood — until the phone call came from EMR.
"Where are you?" a voice asked urgently.
"I'm just leaving the dentist's office," she replied.
"Get to your apartment as soon as possible, collect your emergency bag, and you and Keren need to come to the university — you have one hour…"
Eliana opened her driving app, looking for a taxi. She was downtown, a 45-minute walk from the apartment. The app showed twenty-five drivers nearby. Twenty-five little icons, and not one of them answered. She raised the offer — higher, higher — and still nothing. She tried another app. Uber: currently not available in this area.
She started walking, following the directions on her phone, an anxious eye on the dropping battery life — until Google Maps stopped loading altogether.
Lord, help me. I need to be calm.
The screen came back, and she kept walking — against a current going the opposite direction, the crowds and traffic thickening around her. Pausing to call Keren, she urged her to go on to MEU without her, but Keren wouldn't hear of it. "I'm waiting for you," she said.
Twelve blocks from the apartment, Eliana began passing people carrying furniture out of their buildings, mattresses balanced on shoulders, cars stacked high with whatever could be grabbed and taken. Some were setting up camp right on the street.
Arriving at the apartment, Keren and Eliana began the search for a taxi that would take them to MEU, but, again, no one was willing to risk going anywhere near their neighborhood.
Then the Middle East and North Africa Union (MENAU) volunteer coordinator, aware of their situation, had an idea. Perhaps he could make it there and back from MEU on his scooter — a motorbike his family used to get around campus.
Starting off, he wove his way against a wall of bumper-to-bumper traffic to reach them, lifting the scooter over cement barricades where the road gave out entirely, stopping more than once to explain to armed civilians standing guard that he wasn't trying to break into their neighborhood, but only passing through.
When he finally reached the young women, they squeezed themselves and their backpacks onto the bike and joined the traffic once more — this time moving away from the threat instead of toward it. Even so, the road fought them the whole way: four lanes of cars squeezed into a width built for two, bottleneck after bottleneck each time the street narrowed. On the last hill leading up to MEU, the scooter sputtered and gave out. Keren and Eliana climbed off and finished the climb on foot, while he coasted down the hill to a mechanic who was able to revive it.
Never had they experienced such relief as when they finally arrived, safe, in a room already filling with other displaced volunteers.
As the coordinator and his team gathered a growing number of young people from different projects, they focused on how, even in such terrifying circumstances, God had provided glimpses of His care and protection throughout — encouraging them to let the experience they were living become a memorial to God's faithfulness, a grounding for their faith as they continued to serve Him, rather than an unprocessed trauma that would hold them back in the future.
After a ceasefire allowed teachers and students to return to school, it became clear to Keren and Eliana that, for all the ways they had sought to connect with their students, sharing in their lived experience was the most profound.
When Reema asked Keren, "You had to evacuate also?" Keren knew her own fear that day was nothing compared to what her students had already lived through, some of them more than once. But it had given her a small window into their world, and an increased capacity to relate to them. It also gave her a deeper appreciation for Jesus, who came as Immanuel — God in the flesh, living among us and sharing our life as one who understands.