Monday, February 22, 2010

Upcoming Trip to Turkey

A week from today I leave for Turkey.

A year ago I would have told you I was heading to Brazil. I've been wanting for a while to have a chance to put my vocation to use in a ministry context to get a taste for what that would be like, and an opportunity came up while I was in California to potentially take a trip to Brazil for a few weeks to help out with a project there. Things were in flux for me at the time, however, so I put that idea on hold.

I have since moved back home to Indiana and have settled into an apartment in Indianapolis and have rejoined the church community I had been a part of before moving to California over three years ago. The Brazil idea never left my mind, but when I finally got around to pursuing it this past summer/fall, things had changed and that opportunity had passed. In the meantime, another opportunity presented itself.

Through a connection my parents had, I made contact with a group of folks working in Turkey on a website meant to help people understand the Bible and the message of Christ. The organization behind it provides resources for helping those interested to grow in faith and knowledge of God in the hope that they can discover the reality of God's love for them.

After a few conversations and a pilot project it became clear that this could be a good fit. My experience lined up with what they needed. Before I knew it I was seeking approval to take a leave of absence from my job (something I asked to be able to do when I interviewed a year ago) and a little over a month ago I bought my plane ticket to Istanbul.

I'm really excited about how this has worked out. God seems to just drop things in my lap sometimes, and His provision for me has always astounded me. I did not plan on heading to Turkey, nor did I seek it out, but it came together in the timeframe necessary to work with my job. I have some specific technical skills that are needed for the project, so God is providing for this project as well. And I fully expect to see other ways in which He has orchestrated the details of this trip--like the graphic design help I am already receiving from a friend!

My first week in Turkey I will be joining a group of technology-oriented folks for a conference on using the Internet in ministry and getting up to speed on the website and the technologies they use. The next couple weeks I will be helping implement a new design for the website and adding new functionality to tie the website in to social networking sites such as Facebook. (Turkey is the third-largest user of Facebook in the world! See this link for more details.)

During my last week in Turkey I will have some time to travel. I feel very blessed to have a chance to visit some of the places where I grew up. My family moved to Ankara, Turkey when I was nine years old, and I spent the next seven to eight years there before leaving for high school in Germany. I plan on visiting old friends who are still there and also hope to visit some parts of the country that will be new to me (including Trabzon and the Sümela Monastery).

I'm looking forward to hearing and speaking Turkish again and seeing many of the familiar sights of Turkey, from the towering minarets of the mosques in Istanbul to the street vendors balancing stacks of baked goods on their heads to the mountainous landscape and the Black Sea coast as I travel beyond the city. And the food! I can't wait for a good kebab.

As I leave on this trip next week, I would really appreciate your prayers! Please pray for smooth and safe travel, but mostly please pray that God will have his hand on every step of this trip. I am going to serve... I want to have a servant's heart. I am also going to learn... there is much I do not understand about the ministry work to which I will be contributing. And I am going with my eyes open, looking for ways that God might be leading me or speaking to me as I think about how to invest the gifts He's given me in the future. So please pray that He would direct my steps and give me divine appointments... meetings and conversations from Him.

Beyond my involvement in ministry, I would also appreciate your prayers that I would just be able to grow in closeness with God during this trip. Please pray that He would reveal himself in new ways and that I would revel in His delight in me. That's part of where the title of this blog comes from... two symbols that God has given me over the years of my identity and His love. I'll try and write more about that later. Please pray for God's protection and provision as I'm on my own for a few weeks without my normal community of friends and family in Indy.

That said, please keep in touch with me while I'm in Turkey! I will update this blog as much as I can and try and take some good photos to share with you. I'm looking forward to writing about my experiences and putting my otherwise dust-gathering camera to use. Thank you so much for reading this and for your encouragement and support! I am so thankful for the friends and family God has given me.

More to come,
Dan