Love Anyway

An Invitation Beyond a World that’s Scary as Hell

Jeremy Courtney

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780310352426
• eBook ISBN: 9780310352433
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

For all who are displaced. For all who are weary of the way things are. For all who long for a more beautiful world. 

Preemptive Love founder Jeremy Courtney has seen the very worst of war. He's risked his life saving lives on the front lines. He's come face to face with ISIS, been targeted by death threats, and narrowly escaped airstrikes. 

Through it all, the most powerful thing he's learned is this: we're not just at war with each other. We're at war with ourselves. But the way things are is not the way they have to be. There is a more beautiful world. To find it, we have to we confront our fear--and end war where it starts: in our own heads and hearts. 

With stories of people who have lived through war and terrorism, Love Anyway will inspire you to confront your deepest fears and respond to our scary world with the kind of love that seems a little crazy. Because when we do, we become agents of hope who unmake violence and unfurl the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. 

Love Anyway is the story of Jeremy's incredible journey--and an invitation to discover the more beautiful world on the front lines where you live.

CHAPTER 1

Your Presence Is Requested on the Other Side of The Way Things Are

Sometimes I wish I could reclaim the blissful naivete of my youth, when the United States was an unqualified force for good, racism was a thing of the past, and gluten was good. But somewhere along the way, I started asking too many questions. My parents say when I was growing up, they would take me to the backyard so I could argue with the fence post rather than continue to pummel them with my endless stream of whys and rebuttals.

As the adults across the various realms of my life became increasingly unable to satisfy my curiosity, I started wondering whether they were all involved in an elaborate cover-up—that perhaps they knew the truth about the world and why things are the way they are but that they were sworn to secrecy. Like, why did adults say one thing and do another? Why did we read on Sunday mornings about loving poor people but live in isolation? Why did we all pile in with the same political party, no matter what? And was the other side truly evil, like they said?

I found myself longing for just one grown-up in my life to be vulnerable, to be honest, and to admit that most of the hard lines they’d drawn in the sand about the good guys and the bad guys, the right way and the wrong way, were guesswork at best.

I wanted someone to admit that “The Way Things Are” is a powerful regime that has existed in every time and place—an oligarchy that works to keep control over the status quo. I longed for someone to join me in questioning the regime and asking why we were protecting it, even as The Way Things Are kept breaking its promise to protect us first.

What follows is a story of leaving home, as we all must. It’s a story of war, displacement, and immigration. It tells of my wife, Jessica, our friends, and me running for our lives from The Way Things Are in search of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.¹ In the end, we find it. And we choose to smuggle ourselves back across enemy lines to help as many people as possible find the joy and freedom we’ve found on the other side.

Please be warned when I say this is a story of war. Because, like most wars, this story starts slowly. Press into it. I promise the complexity of the journey and your patience will be worth it. This is not the simple “good vs. bad” story we’ve been conditioned to expect. And if there’s one thing that the world could use a whole lot more of right now, it’s nuance and patience for the deeper story to emerge.

Some parts of my story may offend you: the person I was at the beginning, the person I have become, or the reality of how it all went down. But I hope you will still take note, because these are the real stories of what happens when our deeply held convictions about God and country and ourselves and others converge, and we cannot control the outcomes.

Why do I feel so wounded?

Who am I, really?

Am I brave enough to stay in relationship with people who are drastically different from me?

Who are the good people and bad people? How do I know?

Am I willing to pay the price for what I say I believe?

Is there a better way to live than the way that was handed to me?

Will I tell the truth if it costs me everything?

These questions have proven to be the real battlefield for me and for the people I left behind. And they are the most central questions for anyone in my inner circle today.

I’ve worked to share these stories with utmost vulnerability because that is the kind of leadership I have most needed—and had the most difficulty finding—as I’ve negotiated my way out of The Way Things Are in search of The More Beautiful World.

Writing this book was deeply healing and instructive for me. But I wrote this book for you. I’ve written every word in the hope that even though the details of your story are different from mine, you will find yourself in these pages and take one or two steps with me further into the unknown.

A more beautiful world is out there.

And I think I know the way.

CHAPTER 2

What Have You Done, Jeremy?

It was after midnight when my phone rang. A long, breathy void, echoing with the thunder and lightning outside, was all I could hear on the other end.

“Hello?” I repeated.

“What have you done, Jeremy? What have you done?”

There was no hello. No introduction. No context. Just the voice.

This was Iraq, and everything in our life was already falling apart. Our family was under attack. Our kids were being threatened. And the grassroots organization we had started in order to end war was on the brink of extinction.

I had no idea who I was talking to and no idea what I’d done.

“Who is this?” I said. I was tentative; I could not afford to be indignant. We were under siege enough already, and this call fit right in with everything else going on. I knew better than to overreact before knowing what I was up against.

“You don’t remember me?” he asked.

A bolt of fear shot through me. Now the voice was offended. But I wasn’t being evasive—I just didn’t remember.

My former right-hand man—a local Iraqi guy named Kochar—had been laying traps against me with high-ranking government security officials and in the local bazaar, saying I had been conning poor Iraqis out of their money in the name of charity. One of his lies said I had duped unsuspecting villagers into paying for their children to have expensive surgeries they didn’t need. The rap sheet of lawsuits and accusations against us was getting long: “harvesting organs for the Israelis,” “trafficking terrorists out of Iraq,” and “working for the CIA.”

A country emerging from decades of dictatorship is nothing if not extremely paranoid and conspiratorial. Rumors get traction fast. Reputations are ruined in an instant. And once a story is out there, it can be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.

I was getting calls from friends warning me that my name and my likeness were being invoked in the local barber shops and chai houses. The tall, skinny American with the shaved head was exploiting poor children and their families who were already vulnerable from war.

Then I got calls like this, warning me to watch my back.

I did not remember “Ali,” the guy on the other end of the menacing midnight call. Or more accurately, I did not remember which Ali. There were many—Alis I’d met over tea, Alis I’d visited in villages, Alis I’d had in my home. Which Ali was this Ali?

“Little Mohammad’s dad,” he said. “Do you remember me now?”

Oh. I did.

“Why have you stolen my wife’s honor?” he said.

He never raised his voice. I wished he had. Then I would have yelled back, and all the pent-up fear and energy would have had somewhere to go. Instead, his tone was way too measured. This wasn’t an impulsive call. The threat was premeditated. He was working a plan.

Calling at midnight, he was long past the point of emotional outburst. He had already done all that. He had yelled at his wife already, threatened her. He was beyond blowing off steam. He was calculating.

“We have to settle this like men.”

Ali came from a village known for its shootouts, tribalism, and lawlessness.

So I was afraid I knew exactly what “settle this like men” meant when he demanded we meet the next day.

CHAPTER 3

We Kill People for Stuff Like This

We met at noon the next day at a café below my office. A white plastic bag blew like tumbleweed across the parking lot. Did “settle this like men” require we each come alone, or was I supposed to bring my posse?

I showed up alone. He did not.

His wife’s brother grew up in the UK and spoke with a heavy Yorkshire accent. When the nerdy cousin arrived, he plopped his laptop (still rare in Iraq) on the table and proceeded to line up digital “proof” of my crime.

Ali’s allegations against me were ridiculous. He believed I had taken illicit photos of his wife and sold them for an enormous sum of money to the American media. That someone could have such an overblown appraisal of both themselves and the American system perfectly highlights the vulnerability many of our Iraqi friends live with, constantly afraid of being victimized by outside forces.

Ali knew me. He knew my wife, Jessica, and our kids, Emma and Micah, since they were toddlers. He knew I had cared for his wife as if she were my sister when we took her and their son outside Iraq for a lifesaving heart surgery so many years before. He knew I was with him and for him. But he was vulnerable when it came to his family’s honor. So when my best-friend-turned-enemy, Kochar, wanted to use Ali to hurt me and told him I had posted photos of his wife online, Ali saw red. Then green.

I set a single sheet of paper down on the table between us as the café workers behind the counter cut thin slices of chicken from a massive spindle of shawarma.

“So, Jeremy. What are you going to do?” Ali had barely said anything else up to this point, by phone or in person. He’d said only that I’d dishonored his wife by taking and selling these photos for ridiculous sums. The photos Kochar had sent him from our website were a tasteful, honoring documentary of a mother and her son walking the journey toward a life-or-death heart surgery together. She’d ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note
• 1. Your Presence Is Requested on the Other Side of The Way Things Are
• 2. What Have You Done, Jeremy?
• 3. We Kill People for Stuff Like This
• 4. Are You Gonna Go My Way?
• 5. In the Spring, at the Time When Kings Go Off to War
• 6. Believe Me, I’m Lying
• 7. Sparks Fly
• 8. That’s Me in the Corner, Losing My Religion
• 9. No One Left to Conquer
• 10. The Great White Throne Judgment
• 11. There’s No Way We’re Moving to Iraq!
• 12. What Kind of Father Are You?
• 13. You Didn’t Move Here to Say No!
• 14. Shoot First, Ask Questions Later
• 15. The Birth of Preemptive Love
• 16. Explosive Expectations
• 17. More Cruel than Anything We Have Ever Seen
• 18. Time to Go
• 19. No Apologies
• 20. It Matters What We Call People
• 21. The Rains Came Down and the Floods Came Up
• 22. Spies Like Us
• 23. Love First, Ask Questions Later
• 24. Bang Bang Club
• 25. No One Ever Comes Home from War
• 26. Ideas Worth Dying For
• 27. The Great Deluge
• 28. The Raven and the Dove
• 29. The Place of Descent
• 30. Love Anyway
• 31. A Sisterhood Is Born
• 32. A Grim Reminder
• 33. The Love That Leads to Death That Leads to Life
• 34. Micah Faces ISIS
• 35. They’re Right on Top of Us!
• 36. They’re Bombing Us, Jeremy!
• 37. Go Where No One Else Will Go, to Love the People No One Else Will Love
• 38. You Call This Peace?
• 39. There’s a Reason No One’s Doing It
• 40. They Are Your Sons
• 41. A Birthright
• 42. The One Who Cries
• 43. They Would Have Shot Her Anyway
• 44. The Body of Christ, Given for You
• 45. Ex Cathedra
• 46. No One Left to Blame
• 47. Virtual Reality
• 48. The Unmaking
• 49. The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
• 50. There Are No Victims on the Other Side of Preemptive Love