"She'll be right..."

"Bir şey olmaz" - this is the equivalent of NZ's "She'll be right", only this wee phrase is used way more here than our own dismissive quip.  Often times the use of "Bir şey olmaz" is the basis of a wink and a chuckle at what you can get away with here in Turkey compared with what probably should or shouldn't happen.  However in some cases it reveals a more insidious tendency to care little about the wider picture, or of one's responsibility to act for the sake of the whole community - a reluctance to think beyond what seems the most expedient in the moment.  

Time and again I have felt dismay at what seems a prevailing readiness to accept the status quo, that and/or a sense of powerlessness to change things or make a real difference for the better.  Occasional attempts to challenge this approach are met with expressions that suggest I'm speaking Chinese!...the idea simply doesn't compute. (This is a generalisation of course and while I dare to say it is true in many/most cases, it is certainly not true of all).

At times I've become quite preoccupied with trying to solve the Turkish mindset, "Why are things the way they are here?", "Why do people seem to so readily accept what to me is unacceptable?"...  It's a risky business critiquing actions across a culture because no matter how well we think we've got things figured out, invariably there remains a great deal that we've not understood or even considered.  Nevertheless I can't help but contrast the drive within me, and generally speaking within my home culture, to always be looking for opportunities to make things better.  What is that about?  Why the difference?

I was reading something recently that said this sense of needing to contribute positively to our world and to make a change for good should characterise the Christian experience.  We have a God who has clearly communicated His dissatisfaction with much of what goes on in our fallen world and His work throughout history has been about redeeming it and us.  Jesus came because everything was all wrong, and His life, death and resurrection are integral to God's work of reclaiming and restoring...

Active and vigilant involvement in making our world better, safer and more just, are a normal and natural part of the call to align ourselves with a God, who said before any of us did, that "Everything is NOT okay."  Just as He is grieved by all that is broken in the world, so should we be, and our normal days should be about joining with Him in making things better.

It's a tension for the believer, called to see the worlds' brokenness - more than others might, and yet also called the love this world more than others do.  So as we love the world as it is, our love drives us to champion its change into something better.  Wow, that's gotta need a whole lot of the grace of God!

So, I haven't solved the questions I opened with, but in the meantime I know that there's a whole lot needs changing in me; but maybe while He's changing me, I might also get to partner with Him in being an agent of change for good in some small ways during our time here.  I pray that will be the case.

If it's worth doing...

Last Sunday I led the study during our fellowship time.  Now, while I don't believe I have a gift of teaching (that's my husband!), I do like to think I can communicate quite well.  Nevertheless, what I might do well in my mother tongue turns out to be quite another matter in a second language...

As it turns out the feedback I received suggested I did better than I felt I had - but that still didn't mean I felt terribly satisfied by my delivery.  Even acknowledging the heightened difficulty of negotiating spiritual truth - filled with nuance and deeper meaning - I still felt a bit disappointed and insecure about the whole thing.  In fact the importance of the content only serves to increase the pressure!

Anyone who knows me, even a little, will know I live my life very much according to the code of "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well."  Suffice to say, I don't like doing things that I can't do well...  But there's a very cool little twist on that saying which goes "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly!"  This idea has really helped me negotiate life in a second culture when I frequently feel I'm "performing" below par.

It turns out that there are some things that are so important...so worth doing...that doing them badly is better than not doing them at all; that is, communicating the message of the Gospel is such an important task that it's better that I do it a little badly than that I don't even try.  Certainly allowing my pride to be an obstacle to speaking out, no matter how haltingly is a mistake...maybe even sinful???

Additionally my own efforts are only a part of the equation to which God adds His blessing - the increase - so I simply need to offer my "bad" efforts in faith, then sit back and see what He does with them.  I really might be in trouble if it was all up to me, but thankfully it's not!

Some reflections on raising kids

I remember a co-worker observing the lavish lives of family back home and commenting on how hard it will be for those kids to ever serve God in a cross-cultural setting - assuming, as is often the case, that saying "yes" to God will involve a step (or several/many) down in the standard of living and experience of life that these kids were getting used to living now.

It got me thinking about the way we raise our kids and the values we bring to the role. Having spent many years raising my children overseas has given me an opportunity to reflect on some of our "Western" ways; I think it's enabled me to perceive things I would have missed if I'd always been immersed in my home culture.

Adding to my perspectives has been the observation that each subsequent generation of workers arriving in Turkey seems less equipped emotionally and practically to deal with the challenges of making a life cross-culturally.  By the grace of God somehow we get there, but I feel incredibly soft, and at times quite pathetic when I reflect on my own capacity(or lack of it) to cope with hardship compared with those who came before me.

It seems to me that in the West we've become so accustomed to the level of comfort we live with on a daily basis that our luxury has become normal.  And it's insidious in that the more we have, the more we seem to want - and it's not just a material thing, we've become emotionally very needy too.

As parents, wanting the best for our children generally looks like attempting to give them everything they need and doing our best to protect them from pain.  In and of themselves these are fine drivers.  The problem is that our perceptions of "need"  and "pain" are so skewed.

Our sense of need is largely shaped by our expectations and then we feel pain when those expectations are unmet.  In the Western world today our expectations are sooo high!  When as parents we 'succeed' in meeting all of our childrens' perceived "needs" we have often left them very weak and spineless.

As my kids wrestle with being removed from many of the comforts of home and engage each day with the challenges of life in a foreign country, my instinct as a mother is to want to fix everything to their liking and to try and meet all of their needs so that they are content and happy.  Of course this is well in excess of my capacity, as well as being misdirected.

I do have a responsibility to actively support my children, to listen to them and to care for their 'needs'.  However in all of that, a far more important element of my role is to teach them gratitude for the incredible blessings we enjoy everyday (without comparison with those who we perceive better off); to expose them to the realities of life for the majority of the world, to help put their sense of 'need' into perspective; to encourage them when they're struggling, but not to try and rescue them from that - instead, to teach them to trust God for His grace and to press into Him.

I'm confident that our time here is building emotional capacity and spiritual muscle in my kids that they would not have had in other circumstances.  That's not to say that it's impossible to raise strong children immersed in Western culture, but it does require great insight and intentionality - the support of like-minded folk would probably go a long way too.

Given the counter-cultural nature of the Christian faith I reckon we have a responsibility to keep standing  back and checking just what values are driving us; cultivating a healthy skeptism for what is normal and encouraged by prevailing culture can help keep us alert - even when assessing Christian ideas, which have all too often been as shaped by our culture as by anything from the Bible!

May God give us much grace as we endeavour to raise strong, resilient and Godly kids.

...oh, and don't forget to pray lots ;-)