Are you still praying for Afghanistan?

It was easy to remember to pray for Afghanistan when it was on every news headline. When there were pictures of cargo planes crammed full of refugees, stories of those desperately trying to flee the country and a looming deadline, we prayed.

Afghanistan doesn't make the headlines every day now. The Taliban takeover is not breaking news. 

The situation in Afghanistan is still heartbreaking though. Maybe even more so now, with news reports of families selling their children to buy food.

Are we still praying?

Wonder, not boredom

In our house, Wednesday is nature group day. At the start of September, I launched a nature group for home educated children, in conjunction with our church. Every week a group of us meet in a large park (large by British standards of maintained parks, at least) for a nature walk, story time and activities linked to a weekly theme. When the weather is particularly bad, we hurry down the road to the church hall into the dry. The vast majority of those who come would not describe themselves as having a personal faith in Jesus or regularly attend church so I hope it will be a low-pressure way to just get people comfortable stepping into the church.

We've wandered around the park eight times now. Occasionally we'll venture into some open access public land at the bottom of the park but our routes are familiar enough that the children who come regularly can usually predict where we'll go next. I try to mix it up some weeks and start off in a different direction but there are only so many paths in the park so sooner or later we end up on one of our usual paths. 

After the first few weeks, I was worried that the children coming would get bored. Familiarity would breed contempt and they would just want to go somewhere new. But just a couple of months in and I see that the opposite is true. We might be treading the same paths in the same park but every week there's something new to see as we watch the seasons change in the park, from summer through autumn and now entering winter.

I'm more enthusiastic than knowledgeable about nature so every week sees me researching and learning about that week's subject. I hadn't really been particularly looking forward to last week's fungi topic and this week's mosses and lichen. But I read a bit about fungi and last week we peered into undergrowth and poked around decomposing logs and I was amazed at just how many varieties and the sheer quantity of fungi that we found. I'd just never really been looking for them before.

This week we didn't need to hunt down at the ground because the moss and lichen was right in front of us on the trees - and even lichen growing on metal. We meandered through the park and I marvelled at all the moss and lichen that I'd never really noticed before. In fact, I had wondered beforehand if we'd even find a particular type of lichen, convinced that I hadn't seen it before in the park. There were so many trees covered with this type of lichen I couldn't help but laugh at myself. I'd just not been looking closely enough before.

As we walk many of the same paths each week, I'm starting to build up a mental map of the park. I know where we can find a whole collection of ferns and where the horse chestnut trees are and the pine trees. I checked today the small patch of ground where I was astonished to find the famous red-with-white-spots fly agaric fungi last week, to see if they were still there (they were). I know that if I'm lucky, I'll find frogs in the fountain at the right time of year and that the wildflowers bloom longer than I expected and the leaves change colour later. And it's only November. I wondered if the children (and adults) would get bored in the park and now I'm starting to see that there's so much to explore, so much that I don't even know that I don't know. I'm not asking if there's enough to keep a group of children interested now, I'm wondering how we'll ever fit in everything I want to cover. There's so much to wonder at.

I hope my knowledge and experience of, and relationship with, God is like that park. After being a Christian for a number of years, it's easy to think that maybe the familiarity of the Christian life is just a bit boring. I've trodden the paths of listening to a sermon at church each week, reading the Bible, praying and taking communion for a while (although nowhere near as many years as others) and there's a risk that I might think that I've been here many times before and there's nothing new to see. 

But I want to watch in awe as the passing seasons and years reveal the never-changing God from slightly different angles. I want to learn more about God by digging around in the undergrowth of the doctrines that I hold firmly to in order to find the things I'd never paid much attention to before. I want to learn more about God by lifting up my eyes and realising that there's so much in plain sight that I'd never thought to look for before. I want to see that same landscape in all the different weathers, to see that the core truths of the faith are just as solid and real in the foggy weather of doubt as they are in the blazing sunshine of God's clear and unmistakeable answers to prayer. I want to walk those means of grace again and again knowing that the paths may be the same but there is always more to understand, more to see, more to experience. More to wonder at, more to thank God for, more to turn into praise.

God moves in straightforward and mysterious ways

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.