I spent many evenings sitting at our white IKEA dining table in our small flat in Istanbul completing my homework from that morning ready for my Turkish class the next day. I spent a lot of time listening to the audiobook of the Turkish translation of 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' on half speed while following along with a physical copy, trying to get my brain accustomed to hearing and understanding Turkish and pausing to look up words I didn't understand. I did my Turkish vocabulary flashcards on my phone and sometimes I even did them in the middle of the night while feeding the baby (although other times I scrolled through social media).
As we invested hundreds and hundreds of hours in learning Turkish, we didn't know which city we'd move to. We knew that we wanted to be working alongside a local church but we didn't know what exactly that would look like. But we knew we needed to speak decent Turkish. I imagined sitting on a sofa with a Turkish friend, sipping sweet, black tea and eating cookies, talking about the Gospel while our children played together. Or being able to understand a Bible study and contribute meaningfully without having to mentally rehearse exactly what I'd say. Maybe, if my Turkish got good enough, I'd be able to share at a ladies' meeting or do baptism lessons with a new believer.
Sometimes God moves in straightforward ways. I got to do those things in the city we lived in. Thanks to God, my Turkish was good enough, although it never felt good enough. And many, many times the ladies were gracious enough to overlook my grammatical errors, foreign accent and sudden realisation that I couldn't remember the vocabulary for a critical word.
In that city I met someone who would become a good friend. We met up regularly in parks for our children to play together and so we could chat. While I lived there, she was the non-Christian that I had the most Gospel opportunities with. One time our conversation turned to salvation and how we earn the right to enter heaven. I explained that the Bible teaches that we cannot earn our ticket to heaven through good works but salvation is only through trusting Jesus and his death on the cross. That both a murderer and the 'average' person who tries to do good things deserve God's punishment. That the worst sinner who puts their faith in Jesus on their last day on earth will go to heaven. And I knew she grasped it because her response spilled out immediately: "but that's not fair!"
That friend and I spoke English together. She was from another Central Asian country and her English was better than her Turkish. Hours upon hours of Turkish study and while I lived in Turkey, I got my clearest Gospel opportunities in English. That wasn't the type of opportunity I imagined when I was learning grammar and memorising vocabulary. Sometimes God moves in mysterious ways.
Earlier this week I sat with eight other people around a couple of tables pushed together in our church hall for our church's monthly prayer meeting. Two of those there were Iranian, still in the early-ish stages of learning English. The person who usually acts as the church's Farsi-English translator was not there but I was there and the Iranians who were there understand Turkish better than they do English. So in line with our church's general language and translation philosophy of 'do the best you can with who is there', as the prayer points were shared, I translated them into Turkish, so that everyone in the meeting could join together in praying in as informed a way as possible. There were plenty of grammatical errors, vocabulary that disappeared out of my head as I reached for it and at least a couple of words and concepts I had no idea how to translate (though in my defence, we didn't exactly need to know how to pray about the distribution of church leaflets and for the church to have greater presence in the community in the conservative Turkish city that we lived in).
In all the hours I spent learning Turkish, I never once imagined that I'd find myself using it in the UK with Iranians. I never imagined we'd be back in the UK after only spending five years in Turkey either. God moves in mysterious ways.
It's easy to praise God when he works in the straightforward ways, when I can draw a straight line between effort and results, when I can see God's fingerprints over an outcome so obviously. But when the Lord takes my efforts, often feeble as they are and entirely enabled by him, and turns my plans, those plans I carefully constructed with good intentions and a true desire to see God glorified, upside down and inside out, will I still praise him? Will I give in to the temptation to believe the lie that my plans would have been better? Or will I humbly acknowledge that I am only human and that the plans of the eternal, all-knowing God, who loved me when I didn't deserve it, are infinitely better than anything I could dream up? Will I marvel at how God takes my ideas and experiences and investments of time and energy and hopes and dreams and does something so unexpected with them that my right and only response is to worship him?
Praise God that he moves in straightforward and mysterious ways.
