by Lydia Friend
This summer I climbed a mountain I’d been avoiding for years—not one made of stone, but of memory. I began writing a memoir of my TCK years, and what I found surprised me.
I had lived one year at my grandmother’s home twenty-seven years ago. Tucked in an old journal was a poem I’d written at seventeen. I barely remembered writing it. The words were confused, and fragmented. I almost threw it away. Yet something made me sit with it. I tried to remember what I’d meant all those years ago.
Fortress
Fortress built strong and thorny must not admit Stranger Lovely.
I am the stranger, I stand outside your walls.
It is eraser that wipes me down,
Tears me apart until I frown, until I fade, until I’m gone.
Then you ask: “Why are you so closed off?
Are you built strong around, so locked deep you don’t look around?
Why won’t you let us in?”
As if I built the walls.
As if I chose to stand outside.
Suddenly it clicked and I started crying. My seventeen-year-old self had captured something I’m only now fully understanding. She saw the entire system: The fortress excludes you. Their exclusion erases you. Then they blame YOU for being closed off — as if you built the walls, as if you chose to stand outside.
Still there was something else. “Stranger Lovely” wasn’t describing how I felt — it was how fortresses labeled me. I had become anything that does not belong. No longer fully human, just a category to be managed. “The American.” “The Israeli.” In Arabic, I was the ejnabiya, the foreigner. Whatever label made it easier to dismiss me, to keep me safely outside.
Suddenly I could see them all — every fortress throughout my life that had reduced me to anything that does not belong. Too American in Israel, and too Israeli in America. Yet still not Jewish enough and still not Arab enough. I was the ejnabiya, the foreigner, always the stranger. Never quite fitting the categories.
The pattern didn’t stop with cultural displacement. It showed up in communities, in relationships, in spaces where I thought I’d finally found home. Each place had its own version of “You’re valuable, but you’re still a stranger here.”
During a vulnerable time, a long-time believing friend and the mother of a male friend of mine, came to see me. During her visit she mocked my desire for marriage and also my love for the Bridegroom of Heaven. She told me I was so holy I should just become a nun and never get married. It’s a cruel thing to elevate an MK to a status where they should not get married. The hurt ran deep, as this was not the first time in the holy city of Jerusalem this had happened.
This is where displacement became internalized shame. Where exclusion from fortresses became exclusion from my own voice, my own desire, and my own poetry. The walls I’d been standing outside of for years, I started building them inside myself. The poet in me was silenced.
For some time I considered the idea of never marrying and even prayed about it, laying the idea before God in a retreat. But I did get married within the year. Still the lies of the enemy haunted me.
In time I learned to accept whatever labels others gave me, because I wanted so desperately to find a fortress that would finally let me in.
This summer when I was sitting with that teenage poem twenty-seven years after I’d written it, something broke open. The tears weren’t just grief — they were rage. Holy, righteous rage at what had been stolen. Underneath the rage was something else: the poet, still alive, and still demanding to be heard.
Out of me welled up a shout as I faced the accuser of the brethren, the one who had shamed me for far too long.
Resurrection
You locked the door,
You hid the key,
You took away Love,
You took away ME,
You erased me,
You took away poetry,
You paralyzed me.
But now is not the time,
Today is not the day
For you to steal from me!
I am opening the door to poetry again.
I am knocking on the door of heaven.
Because I may have had dreams stolen from me,
But I know the Poet of Dreams
Who will forever romance me!
He opened the door when you would not let me in.
He opened the door and called me more than a friend.
He has never left me, or forsaken me.
He loved even when
The song was frozen on my lips
And my heart was broken
By the lies the enemy hissed.
Bridal Love for my Shepherd King
Is holy, pure and an amazing thing.
You made me think that loving God
Meant human love was sin,
But He who made both heaven and earth
Invites both lovers in.
God redeemed me by His grace
Then gave me human love as well,
The son of Mountains, not captivity.
I may not be where I thought I would be,
I may not sing what I thought I would sing.
I may not know what I thought I would know.
But I am lovely, I am known,
I am worthy, not alone.
The shame I carried was not mine.
I believed that something was wrong
With the poet in me,
For wanting Bridal Love in poetry.
Now I see the lie and I break free.
You silenced my poetry long ago,
But resurrection comes with dawn—
The Poet of Dreams
Has made my heart sing once more.
Over the following months my heart came alive as pages upon pages were written. Freedom had come.
A reader of my memoir who wasn’t a TCK shared that she deeply related — her love for God made her feel like she didn’t belong either.
That’s when I understood: We’re ALL strangers when we belong to the Kingdom of Light.
I sometimes think my displacement was just about being a third culture kid — the ejnabiya who never quite fit — but it was deeper. When you truly belong to Messiah, you become anything that does not belong in the fortresses of this world.
God’s fortress has different rules. It admits strangers. It calls them Beloved. It opens doors instead of building walls.
The enemy uses fortresses (people, systems, lies, religious manipulation) to convince us we’re the problem. That wanting to belong makes us “too much.” That our voice should be silenced. That our deepest spiritual gifts are evidence of something wrong with us. But the Poet of Dreams delights in us and sings over us.
A near-death experience in 1998 showed me eternity was real. The most important thing that got me through everything was a very real understanding that I belonged to my Beloved and He belonged to me. Yet somehow the enemy’s lies still tried to silence who God created me to be. But God can resurrect the dreamers to dream and the singers to sing.
Be of good courage, you do not need to fit in their boxes and into their fortresses, because we have something better, a Fortress of Hope:
Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope; even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you. (Zechariah 9:12 NIV)
In His fortress, there are no strangers — only family coming home. In His presence, the poetry that was silenced can find its voice again.
Others may call you anything that does not belong, but you know who you belong to.
You belong to your Beloved and He belongs to you.
So take heart, you are never alone. He is with you until the end of the age.
Check out Lydia’s new release, The Diaries of a Teenage Pilgrim: The Early Journey, at pilgrimdiaries.net
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Lydia Friend was born in Israel and has lived between the USA and Israel, navigating multiple cultures throughout her life. She is married to another TCK who is Swiss/English. Lydia holds a BA in Theology and is the director of a Bible bookstore in Jerusalem. She has been a speaker in women’s ministry, sharing her experiences of faith, identity, and belonging across cultures. She is currently living in the Missouri Ozarks and is rediscovering her voice as a writer.
