following the Way

We went to a silk bazar where one of the retailers had actual silk worms in his shop! It was kind of neat to see. And if you touch them, they do feel incredibly soft, like silk. Eeew!

This is from last year’s collection and is where silk actually comes from!

One night we had entertainment provided by “Nasrettin Hoca,” a legendary teacher from the Middle Ages, who often taught through humor and jokes.

We also traveled to Konya – though Scott had been there before, it was my first time to visit this significant city for many people here. 3/4′s of the city is surrounded by hills and mountains like these.

This is a Selcuk mosque in Konya. Normally the mosques here are lavishly decorated, coming from the wealthier Ottoman period. It was really different to walk into a building centuries old whose simplicity reminded me much more of a church than a mosque.

There was even a bookshelf and a grandfather clock against one of the walls!

Our time in Konya finished up by going to a showing of the Whirling Dervishes.

We went on our first real picnic of the season Saturday. This has been a surprisingly cold spring, so people are just now getting outside more. Just this past week we began swapping out winter clothes for summer clothes.

I love picnics and love that this part of the world sees them as the default activity once the weather is nice, so I was excited about heading out to a nearby park with a family we recently met.

When we first arrived we were each told how the sister and brother-in-law coming later had recently lost their seven month old baby. And that’s why we were having the picnic, to try and take their minds off of it and cheer them up a bit. She had only died one week beforehand, and the parents would be coming with the grandmother to join us just after putting the headstone on the grave. She died from a kind of heart defect that couldn’t be treated by surgery.

Definitely not the picnic we were expecting. My heart broke for this family. I wanted to tell them how babies with heart defects have a very special place in our lives, and that we would have done anything to try to help them. Instead, knowing there was no way to now help this baby, we sat with them, listened, and ate picnic food. It wasn’t a very happy picnic, but we couldn’t have been more grateful to be there with them.

May God continue to bring comfort to this family in the midst of such great pain and loss.

My first Bosphorus boat tour! Not a bad way to do sightseeing. Pictured is one of the palaces remaining from the Ottoman period.

Getting to tour the city on a BEAUTIFUL, sunny day! Something we have not seen often this spring!

This is the Hagia Sophia. It was first a church building, later turned into a mosque, and is now a museum displaying signs of both of these functions. It has been under restoration for years making this the first trip for us to walk in and see it without any scaffolding. Definitely worth seeing again!

We not only got to see significant historical and religious sites in Istanbul, but took day trips to other nearby cities. Here we are during a day of touring in a nearby city.

We had wonderful families host us for meals – more than one breakfast, a dinner, and even one overnight stay. Pictured here is a local breakfast. It was quite the feast!

We truly enjoyed the time we had with our local friends, our new foreign friends, and the many people we met along the way. Because our trip was 10 days, and we basically did everything together – shared all of our meals, traveled in the same van, and slept at lodge almost like a dormitory, it was a lot like camp – we really bonded with each other! We saw lots of neat sites along the way, but also learned more about Islam and had many opportunities to dialogue about our different faiths, marriage, dating (Scott was sorely outnumbered on this trip, much like our Turkish classes!), politics, and many other topics. So grateful for this opportunity!

More photos to come!

As Abby mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we recently had the sixth anniversary of when I proposed to Abby. So I surprised her by taking her to a movie in the middle of the day, which is one of Abby’s favorite things.

(If you must know, we went to see the fourth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean. Abby doesn’t really care about what the movie is as long as she gets popcorn and I’m a sucker for swashbuckling. That and there wasn’t anything else remotely interesting showing this week.)

When I picked out our seats from the ticket kiosk (movie seats are assigned here), I noticed that three full rows of the theater had been blocked out. Initially, I just thought that it could be a system glitch, but I thought that was weird. So I decided that maybe a group had bought tickets in a block. Then, as we were eating lunch before the movie (KFC, for those scoring at home), I started to notice an unusually large number of youths prowling the mall for the middle of a school day.

So after buying our popcorn and settling in for the movie, we were greeted by three rows of ninth graders who apparently had a geography (biology? orienteering? PE?) field trip to explore the Caribbean in 3D with Johnny Depp and us.

And we had thought those third grade engagement interlopers from six years ago had forgotten all about us! They were just waiting to surprise us at our anniversary celebration, too.

It was one year ago today that we landed in Turkey! Some of you may recall at that time between British Air strikes and volcanic ash we had a rather difficult time actually leaving to come here! It’s hard to believe now that a whole year has passed. At the same time, walking the streets of Istanbul in the hot summer sun, scouting out different areas, and spending much time seeking the Lord about where He would have us to live in many ways seems like a distant memory.

This familiar place last May that wasn’t quite home has become home now. It is where we live, work, study, and have relationships. It is the language and culture we are growing in and adapting to. Of course it could never take the place of a state we love and friends and family that we miss dearly, but it is nice to be feeling more and more settled into life and culture here.

Thanks to the many of you that have journeyed with us through this last year.  We certainly would not be where we are now without your support and encouragement and look forward to what’s ahead!

One of the special things about getting to recently go back to the city where we previously lived, is that 6 years ago this month Scott asked to marry him in that very place.

On that day 6 years ago, we took one last photo with great friends and co-workers as we were preparing to move and go in different directions. The photo was actually taken from Scott and John’s balcony.

Scott then took me to a hill in one of the nearby forests that had an amazing view overlooking the water. He read to me a seven page letter he had written that ended with him telling me that he loved me for the first time and asking me to marry him. He had brought everything needed to then wash my feet and for us to share communion together. It’s possible that a bus full of 3rd graders on a field trip to the park might have shown up to share in this special day with us! Even with their surprise visit it couldn’t have been more perfect.

We called our families, stopped off to share our news with dear friends living nearby, and then went into town to buy our local engagement rings and start planning a Turkish engagement party (which really is a ceremony).

Abby and Scott: Together Forever

Invitations, dress buying, suit shopping, cake ordering – it was good practice for wedding planning! We learned a lot from our friends in the process about engagements, and loved to getting to share this special time in our lives with them!

I could not be more grateful for a husband who has faithfully walked with me through all of the ups and downs of life’s journey the last 5 1/2 years while continually leading us into knowing our Lord and each other more deeply. We definitely could not have imagined the journey we’d embark on as we prepared to move from Turkey at that time. It has been good to know God’s faithfulness together and was good to go back and remember where it all began!

This past weekend we were able to visit the area where we previously lived, and while we were there we went to Troy with our friends.

I think this was at least my 3rd or 4th time to go to Troy, and we’re planning to go again when my sister comes this summer. The amount of civilizations that continually rebuilt the city of Troy is rather impressive. And the horse isn’t bad either! And in case you’re wondering…no it’s not the “real” horse!

After leaving Troy we stopped at “Scenic Kebab” for an early dinner. Not a bad view…

It was a great end to a nice weekend with our friends in a place that we love!

Oh, and I may have gotten my hair cut a couple of times in the past two weeks. Once to get it cut…and once to fix it after getting it cut!

We spent a lot of time with these classmates, 20 hours per week and some days a meal or trip out somewhere after class. You really get to know one another when you spend that much time together! It’s a strange thing after several months to suddenly go separate ways. Though I imagine we’ll keep in touch with some of them. This picture was taken at our final lunch taken after our exam. You may have noticed that there are no guys. There was only one present, the one taking the picture, Scott! We only had two months where another guy was present in our class, one month a student, and one month a teacher. I’m sure Scott will enjoy a bit of a change in this regard. The more established branch that is farther from us has more male and female students preparing to study at universities here. The classes at our newly opened branch were typically made up of foreign women who had recently married a Turkish man.

We finished our Turkish course on Friday! There are other courses we can add in later if we decide that’s the best route for our continued language learning, but for now it is nice to move into a different pace of life!

For our last presentation I chose to do my topic on some of the silly differences between our two countries. :) I’ll try to share a few of the slides every now and then. They are probably more entertaining for us, but hopefully it’ll give some of you a glimpse of the very small differences in life here!

One of the trickiest things about visiting someone here is knowing which button to press to get buzzed into their apartment. And often enough, the bell sounds like a bird chirping! When we first moved here, I was often amazed by how many birds were around. I slowly learned to answer the door at the sound of birds!

I have to admit, though maybe not in the color above, I now prefer the Turkish style of light switches. While it doesn’t seem like a big difference, our classmates and teacher were very surprised to see an American light switch – it definitely seemed different to them!

These two aren’t all that different, but it’s definitely an important difference!

I don’t know if this is normally the case, but at least this year we are celebrating Easter at the same time as our Orthodox friends, which includes one of our neighbors. We’ve really enjoyed getting to know their family, and when we saw the wife recently she let us know that this weekend they would bring us Easter Chorek:

It was my first time to have Chorek. This is the bread eaten by Armenians (like our neighbors), Greeks, and a few others to break Lent. It is definitely special to get celebrate this holiday with others around us.

She also brought us some:

Easter eggs! Until we moved overseas I didn’t realize that other cultures also used colored eggs to celebrate Easter.  In this case it is particularly important to include a red egg with the Chorek, sometimes tucked inside a hollowed braid of the bread, representing the blood Christ shed for us.

We are excited to gather today with some friends we don’t normally get to see for worship, food, and fellowship.

May you know the joy today of celebrating our Risen Lord! He is risen indeed!