One day we hiked through what is called a 'ghost town'. It had been a village of Greeks, peacefully living in Turkey for centuries. Then after the Turkish War of Independence (called the great catastrophe by the Greeks), all expatriates were forced to move back to their native country, so the Greeks left Turkey.
So now the hill is covered with ruins of homes that have been untended for 75 years. But what really saddened me was not just the homes, but the church. A Greek Orthodox church, showing faint traces of grandeur, mixed with devastation.
One of our group couldn't understand why a church would be allowed to fall into ruin, and kept asking why it wasn't fixed up and used. Finally the tour guide answered simply:
"There are no Christians here".
It was a devastating epitaph. It was said with no malice or agenda, merely as a statement of fact. It reminded me that Turkey, once a Christian nation, now has only 1/3 of one percent who are Christians. And if you look for evangelical Christians, the numbers are even worse. Out of a country of 65 million, the estimates are that there are between 2,500 and 5,000 born again believers.
Pray for Turkey. Pray that the revelation of Jesus would strike people's hearts.
Most of my friends in the nursing home like to pray for the world, but that's too big for me to visualize. But I can pray for Turkey. I can pray for Selcuk, our secular Muslim guide. And I can pray for the family who graciously welcomed us, and cooked us breakfast and dinner, and opened their home for us to stay overnight. And the woman who realized that we would be curious about her house carved out of rock, and simply invited us in. And Ahmet, our driver who carefully kept us safe on dangerous roads. And the sailor, who flirted with every woman on board, but immediately ran to help me clean and bandage my injured foot. And the captain, who tried to explain that a real worship song has to be in a minor key -- or at least that's what I think he was trying to communicate as he reverently hummed and warbled. Or the cook, who never said anything, but served us some excellent meals.
Or the boy who sold me a pashmina shawl, and explained in broken English that he knows about America because he watches TV [yikes, no wonder they think we're depraved]. Or the two little Syrian children who posed for me in front of the ruins of the oldest mosque in Turkey. Or the woman who scooted from gulet to gulet in a little motorboat, offering to make sweet or savory rolled 'pancakes' on the spot.
Or the doctor who rushed to the hotel when a member of our tour was ill. Or the musicians in the cacophonous military band. Or the little boy dressed up in embroidered satin because he was King for the day [don't even ASK what was in store for him, the poor thing]. Or even the would-be Romeo in the hotel who didn't quite understand "No" in either English or Turkish (but who did finally understand a closed door).
Or the clerk at the internet cafe, who thrilled me by understanding when I asked: "yerem saat kac lira, lutfen?" (or something like that!). Or the family that rose to a new height of togetherness, with 5 people riding on one motorcycle. Or the man who let me make 3 bathroom visits without paying [because he recognized an emergency when he saw it] . Or the merchant who gave us free samples of a Turkish dessert [too weird to describe - think rubbery walnuts with a sweet brown coating]. Or the caretaker at Zeugma who climbed down into the dig to remove the tarp so we could see a huge mosaic still in it's original site. Or the little boys who sell the postcards in front of the tourist sites.
Let's start by praying for them...
