Turkey Recall

 It’s true that the older you get, the less knowledgeable you become. A younger version of me arrogantly thought I could change the world. You can imagine my surprise when my world ended up changing me!

A couple of years back, I travelled to Turkey for six months on an English-2^nd Language teaching secondment with the school I had been working for in London. The idea was to serve the people I met, get to know them and share my spirituality with them. I guess it was also an experiment. I wanted to see how my faith would stand up in a completely new culture, one where even the calendar didn’t remember my Christian heritage! When I got there was that I felt completely overwhelmed and alienated. I remember being initially quite freaked out by the Islamic call to worship every morning. The evening classes started and I made friends with the business English students. I didn’t expect to feel as lonely as I did. Then each student, one by one, invited me to their house, took me on visits to the sites of Istanbul and took me out for meals. I was readily included in every social activity and warmly received into the community. They showed me a tangible kind of love, a love that doesn’t just talk but actually is shown in action.  

I know that my culture does not place such a high value on welcoming foreigners. I know my faith does but bizarrely the Turks showed me what the story of the Good Samaritan is all about. I was humbled by their love. I found God there. On the day I left the school I was laden with gifts. Not just feeble, last minute gifts but beautiful ones: a little Turkish carpet and bag, a beautiful delicate Turkish plate and a fantastic coffee book on the sites of Turkey. I was flabbergasted. My perspective on my earth-shaking abilities changed. If I did change their lives in any small measure, I think the favour was reciprocated in triplicate.  I guess I have issues with the whole evangelism thing. But I’m not exactly sure what my method is, if there is one. It doesn’t rest easy with me to impose faith on others, unless they are genuinely interested and ask. I don’t know how the rest of you feel about this…  

But I totally identify with this discovery:“Instead of bringing God to unreached places and unreached peoples, I find countless missionaries who say that, while this was how they once thought, time and again they find that these unreached places are the very sites they must go to find God and to be reached. How many of us have learnt too late that that our initial idea, that by serving the world we will bring God to others, has eclipsed the wisdom that in serving the world we find God there.”  Peter Rollins  “How(not) to speak of God”