She Had an Iranian Passport
As I began writing this from the bedroom of my hotel in Istanbul, the Muslim prayers that piped through loudspeakers drowned the urban white noise of the massive city. The sound of honking car horns, revving motorcycle engines, and wailing police sirens all disappeared eerily.
We had traveled to visit Turkish missionaries that our church has supported for many years. And I hope we continue supporting them for many more years. Although their ministry harvest might seem relatively small to some, they have their hands to the plow and labor not in vain.
I’ll say a bit more about Christianity and the country of Turkey at the end of this post, but I’d like to start elsewhere. The first reflections I had in Turkey prove to be the ones that linger loudest: The people of the world simultaneously share so much and so little.
Our sameness and differences hit me while standing in the passport line when the woman directly in front of us took three passports out of her purse. She kept one and handed the others to her children, a small boy in a stroller and a young girl standing beside her. The little girl’s suitcase appeared kid-sized and made of bright pink rubber. The woman had a giant mom-bag, and out of the top of the bag poked a red tube of Pringles.
All three of their maroon passports had the word IRAN embossed in gold on the cover. And it hit me that just weeks ago my country dropped bunker buster bombs on her country, at least that’s what I remember them being called in the news. President Trump said in his press conference that no other nation could have done what we did so spectacularly. I believe that. Yet I stood there wondering what the leader of her country told her. The day after the bombing the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, actually flew to Istanbul to give a press conference, perhaps using one of the airport runways our plane used. I hadn’t listened to what he said and had to Google his name to write this paragraph. My passport is dark blue.
Standing in line, I realized the woman and I share so much of what it means to be human—both made in God’s image, both scarred by the fall, both well-acquainted with wrangling young children through an airport. We both need clothing and shelter. We need love and hope. We need Jesus. Our children like Pringles.
Yet she and I also share so little of our experience of the world, the same world but a very big and variegated world. Worlds within the world exist.
The temperature outside in Turkey rose above ninety degrees, and it felt at least eighty degrees in the airport. My wife wore a sleeveless shirt. The woman wore a full-length covering and a scarf over her head. Probably one-third of the women in the airport wore something similar.
How were this woman and I supposed to feel toward each other? We share human sensibilities, like the innate desire to seek transcendence in purposes larger than our own, for example. We both want to protect our loved ones. We both struggle to live moral lives.
Yet our religious sensibilities differ greatly—as did, I’m sure, our civic sensibilities about pride toward our respective nations. What place should healthy patriotism hold for each of us? More to the point, how should we respond when her impulses and mine, many of them subconscious, conflict? The Augustinian view of rightly ordered loves could help us if we could agree on the right order.
Standing there, I knew none of our likely differences could ever be discussed without an interpreter. Yet even with a shared understanding of words, how would one even begin to cross such a bridge? Or is it more like ten bridges? Maybe twenty? How does one ask another person whether it bothers them or blesses them to know that Isfahan no longer has weapons-grade uranium?
I tried to smile at her son. He didn’t smile back. They all looked super sleepy. So was I.
The time arrived for her to hand over her passport. Without any questions, the police officer flipped to the proper page, thudded the stamp, and let her and her children into Turkey. Next, he did the same for us. Never will I see her again in this life and likely in the next, though I pray otherwise.
Returning to where I began this post, juxtaposed with the beauty of a place like Istanbul, I struggle to comprehend the scale of spiritual lostness in Turkey. Maybe one Christian lives among every ten thousand people. The seven churches mentioned in the book of Revelation, for example, exist as ruins scattered across this country we call Turkey. However, today, several of those seven cities have no church preaching the gospel. Their lampstand is gone. A city like Sardis (now called Sart), has a handful of Christians, I’m told, but no church. Contrast this with my context. I live a long way from the Bible Belt, but from my house in Harrisburg, I can put on my running shoes and easily jog past six churches I would gladly send any believer to visit.
When we worshiped in Istanbul on the Lord’s Day with our missionary friends, nearly one hundred believers filled the room, a veritable mega church. I didn’t know most of the songs, but I did smile after the call to worship when we sang a Chris Tomlin classic translated into Turkish. We closed the service with “Shout to the Lord,” and the phrase “all the earth” took on more meaning in the lines, “all the earth let us sing, power and majesty, praise to the King.”
I’m finding myself praying like never before that all the people of the earth—in all our differences and in all our sameness—would know that God sent his only Son into the world so that whosoever believes in him might have eternal life. Or to say John 3:16 in Turkish, “Zira Allah dünyayı öyle sevdi ki, biricik Oğlunu verdi; ta ki, ona iman eden her adam helâk olmasın, ancak ebedî hayatı olsun.”
* Photo by Asal Mshk on Unsplash
