We walk along the beautiful coast of Kusadasi. Everything breathes vacation and peace, but we are here for a different reason. Together with a group of young people from Sydvestjyllands Efterskole's Reach-out line, we have traveled to Turkey to listen to Christians whose journey with Jesus has looked different than most of ours.
A fifteen-minute walk from the coast we meet Zeynep and her husband. They welcome us into their church and give us a peek into their lives.
Zeynep grew up on the Black Sea coast of Turkey, a conservative area where her mother raised her as a Muslim. As a child, Zeynep loved talking to God, but when she turned five, she had to go to the mosque to learn the Quran. Zeynep, who didn't understand Arabic, thought: “How can I communicate with God when he speaks a language I don't know?” When she experienced a devastating earthquake in her city as a teenager, she began to doubt God's goodness. “But in our culture, you can't really ask questions, so I kept it to myself,” Zeynep says.
“If you are a loving God, show yourself to me.” - Zeynep
Nature became the place where Zeynep later realized the goodness of God. “God must be a good God and he must love people because everything he has created is perfect,” she thought and started praying: “If you are a loving God, show yourself to me.”
She prayed the same prayer every day for two years until a Christian man, Musa, came to the school where Zeynep taught. She said: “You are Musa and you are a Christian? I didn't think it was possible for a Turk to be a Christian.” Musa told her that God is a loving God who loves people. She grabbed his arm and said: “Is that in your book?”
This led to five hours in a café reading the Bible together. “We were exhausted afterwards - but I felt so thirsty and that someone had just given me a big bottle of water. I was so excited and thought, ‘This is what I've been looking for,’” Zeynep says, looking around at the students curiously following her testimony.
“But then the fear came. ‘I can't make this decision to follow Jesus,’ I thought. I felt like the enemy was trying to steal the seeds that had just been planted,” Zeynep says.
“It's an alternative form of mission, called dating mission. We wouldn't recommend it to anyone - we are an exception.” - Zeynep
At the same time, some thoughts started to come back to her: “I didn't want to live. I thought it would be easier to end it all.”
One day, while sitting on the couch eating sunflower seeds with her mother, she decided to do it. Zeynep wanted to take a lot of strong medicine, but suddenly a kernel got stuck in her throat. “At that moment, I started thinking about who was waiting for me on the other side,” Zeynep says and continues: “So I asked: ‘Who are you? I'm coming, but who are you?’ I heard an audible voice from God saying, ‘I want you to live because I have great plans for your life.’ At that moment, the sunflower seed flew out of her mouth.
“It was a miracle and I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit so strongly that I couldn't get up from the floor. While lying there, I made the decision to follow Jesus,” Zeynep says. The following year she married Musa and together they now lead a church on the west coast of Turkey.
Zeynep looks at Musa with a smile and says: “It's an alternative kind of mission, called a dating mission. We wouldn't recommend it to anyone - we are an exception.” The students laugh and we thank them for sharing their lives openly.
