Storms, Prayers and Musical Feasts - Turkey, Day 4

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

At about 4:00 on Tuesday morning, I woke up to a huge thunderstorm. Big lightning, thunder and rain. My first thought was "I need to shut that open window or we're going to get drenched." Upon further inspection, I realized that there was a roof over the garden that kept rain from coming into our window. Sweet. So I plopped back down into bed to sleep.... wide awake... can't sleep. I tossed and turned for about 30 minutes trying to go back to sleep. This never happens to me - I LOVE SLEEP. Now, it may have been the time change (it was 8:00 p.m. back home), but for some reason this thought didn't occur to me. At 4:30 a.m., the first call to prayer rang out from the minaret of the nearest mosque. There was something really eerie about the call to prayer mixed with the thunder and lightning. I was reminded of Ephesians 6:12, "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood...but against the spiritual forces of evin in the heavenly places." I was reminded that there was a battle going on in this place - not just a battle over ideas and religious dogma - a spiritual battle. It was at that moment that I realized that God was keeping me awake so that I would pray. Imagine that... I was reminded to pray by the Imam at the local mosque! Now, maybe I wasn't praying the same prayer or to the same god, but God did remind me to pray through that arabic chant. So, I proceeded to pray. I even took out my palm pilot and journaled some prayers in the dark. Finally, around 6:30, I drifted off to sleep.

I re-awoke at about 7:30 and took a shower. After reading my Bible for a bit, I went downstairs to breakfast. We ate inside the lobby today because of all of the water out in the garden from the storm. The breakfast spread was the same - just as tasty as the day before. After breakfast, James and I got together for a bit to choose some songs for the "Musical Feast" (aka - concert where we really play mostly worship songs in English). At 10:00, we had our first "team time" in James' and Jay's room. James led us in a sweet time of worship and then we shared for a bit - how we'd seen God at work, how we were adapting to the culture, etc. We prayed for each other to close. As we were talking, we realized that 6 of us had trouble sleeping early that morning and had felt the call to pray for this place. God was certainly going to teach us something about prayer in our time there.

Then we walked to the church and met with P, T, I and L for some more worship time. It was nice for me to not lead the songs for a change. It allowed me the space to really think about the words we were singing. In fact, I really enjoyed having the freedom to thumb through my Bible to find verses that related to what we were singing. After a couple of songs, I felt compelled to read a Psalm out loud. I don't even remember which one it was, but I do remember God really speaking to me through His word. Then we sang another song and someone else read a passage of scripture. This continued for quite a while. We finally closed in prayer. T commented that it was really nice to worship in English again after singing in Turkish for the past 9 months.

We then split up into groups and went to Akdeniz Üniversitesi. Akdeniz means "light sea" in Turkish and is what they call the Mediterranean. Light Sea University. Each group traveled to the campus in a bit of a different fashion. The theory here was that we didn't all want to arrive on campus in one big horde so we wouldn't draw too much attention to ourselves. P, me and Jennifer walked to a bus stop and rode the Dolmuş (pronounced "dole-myoosh"), which is basically a short, cramped bus. We rode to the stop by the University, then walked across this long, blue bridge over a busy street. Then we were on campus.



I'm not sure about other University campuses in Turkey, but Akdeniz doesn't really look anything like most University campuses here in the U.S. First of all, it is VERY spread out. The buildings aren't close to one another at all. Maybe they are preparing for future growth or something. There were palm trees and scrubby bushes all around. And rocks. These really gnarly looking rocks everywhere. We concentrated our time in the area where the University hospital and medical school were. We walked for quite a while just praying for God to move on the campus. As we were making our way to lunch, we stumbled upon a man laying in the road rolling around and mumbling. At first glance, it looked like he was high on something and was experiencing some kind of overdose or something. We quickly realized that he was having a seizure. Thankfully a couple of doctors from the medical school noticed him right away and came to his aid.

We walked to a food court kind of thing for lunch. Basically, it was a bunch of restaurants arranged in a circle. The entrance to each restaurant opened up to this large courtyard that had lots of tables and chairs. Above the sidewalk that went around the circle, there was a trellace that was covered in flowers and vines. Very Mediterranean and cool.



We stopped at a place called Han Pizza. We each got our own Turkish personal pizza. This was fairly close to pizza here in the U.S. The sauce was less spicy and they put different vegetables on it like corn and artichokes. I had the Pollo Pizza which was pizza with tavuk (chicken) and mantar (mushrooms). And a cola. Now when they serve cola (coke) in Turkey, it almost always comes in a can with a straw. Now that makes for some fizzy coke, let me tell you. Also, did I mention that practically all Turks smoke? Smoking is their national habit. Everywhere you go, there is a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. I got sort of used to it after a while.

After lunch, we headed back to the old city. James and I went to the garden at the Pansion and practiced some songs for the concert... oops, I meant musical feast. Salim, one of the workers at the Pansion came out and listened to us sing and play. I think he really enjoyed it. Of course I don't think he realized that most of the songs were worship songs (and he is an Alevi Muslim).

For dinner, we met everyone back at Zeynep's kitchen. We had the exact same meal, except this time, instead of chicken, we had Köfte. That's basically a flat meatball with oregano in it. Well, well... I still like the food. Then back to the church.

We were going to have the concert in the garden at the church, but because of the impending rain, we decided to have it inside at the coffeehouse, Paul's Place. This actually was a much better atmosphere, in my opinion. We set up the sound system and prayed that some Turks would show up. And slowly they did. About 12 in all. James started the night by playing some of his original tunes.



Then I joined him - he sang and played rhythm while I played lead. Since there was only 1 microphone, we couldn't both sing at the same time. All the while our team was hanging out and getting to know the Turks that showed up. The idea was to build some relationships with people and then invite them to join us later in the week when we did fun stuff. After James' set, I played some worship songs and James played lead guitar with me. We played for a total of about 2 hours. At one point, we sang Happy Birthday to a Turkish girl. Then she stood up and sang a traditional Turkish song for the crowd. I think everybody really enjoyed the music. Afterwards, we learned that Jay had the opportunity to share the gospel with one of the guys there. Dick was able to share quite a bit with another guy as well. It was a good night all around.



We headed back to our pansion and I went on the roof of the building to take a couple of pictures. After a bit of quiet reflection, I went back downstairs and went to bed.