I was shaving when all of this started. Just standing in front of the fogged-up bathroom mirror in our apartment, barely noticing the typical sounds of hustle and bustle and traffic that drifted up from the narrow streets below. The city and I were both getting ready for an ordinary day that lay ahead.
That’s when it hit me.
A thought, from out of the blue.
It’s time to come home.
It startled me, and I jerked to a stop. I warily hit rewind in my mind. What had I just heard? It made no sense. I’m an American, but the day I stood in front of that bathroom mirror I did not think of the US as my home. Turkey was home. When we had bought this condo two years earlier, we knew that our knees could handle climbing to the fourth floor with no elevator, but we wondered if we would still be able to do it twenty years later. We were here for life.
It’s time to come home.
My heart started to beat faster, because suddenly I feared that I knew what these words meant. I did not even want to think about the implications. I was home already. But my faith tells me that there is another home where I’m ultimately going. Could God be telling me it was time for me to die—time to come home to heaven?
It’s time to come home.
I rebuked the thought. This can’t be God. There are so many things left to do. No—it can’t be time for me to die . . .
FOR TWENTY-THREE YEARS Norine and I had been living and working in Turkey.
We had met in the library at Wheaton College. Norine was there to study, while I was there looking for girls who were studying! I was determined to marry only someone who was willing to be a missionary. From the time I was a child I had a strong sense of call to missions that went all the way back to Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to China. When he was an old man, a mother took her two young sons to him and asked that he pray and set them aside for missions. They did become missionaries, and when one of them, Stanley Soltau, was an old man, my mother took me and my sister to him. She asked that he do for us what Hudson Taylor had done for him, and so he did. Because I was acting up I got a spanking, which marked the day for me. I was three years old, and I never forgot. I’m sure God put something in me that day that eventually took me to Turkey with Norine.
We arrived to Istanbul in 1993 and eventually settled in Izmir. We had started churches, hosted national conferences, set up a house of prayer, and invited people from other countries to come and join us in spreading the gospel to cities where not a single person had ever met a Christian. We already had a good-sized international team and were excited about a group of new missionaries who had arrived a few months before to do a year-long training program with us.
In our hometown of Izmir—ancient Smyrna, set on the Aegean Sea—we had worked with hundreds of refugees from Syria and Iraq who had fled from Assad and ISIS. Some had just been passing through, hoping to make the dangerous journey by boat to Europe. Others had stayed. A few had even decided to return to their own homeland, and for all of them we did what we could to help by providing blankets, heaters, food, milk for babies, and other items as donations from churches came in.
We had given our lives to this country where so much of Bible history took place. Now there are only around six thousand Muslim-background Christians out of a total population of more than eighty million. How do you start a church when only one out of every sixteen thousand Turks becomes a Christian? Sometimes it is very discouraging. When we arrived in 1993, twenty of us started a language course together. Four years later only five of us were still in the country. Eventually Norine and I were the only ones left from that group.
Our years in Turkey hadn’t been easy. We knew of a few Christians who had been martyred for their work. We had received death threats. After the first ones, for a time I only wore tennis shoes and tied them tightly—something I rarely do because I like my shoes to fit loosely. Norine noticed and asked why I wasn’t wearing sandals in the hot weather. My answer was simple and pragmatic: “Because I may need to run away.”
That had been a scary time, especially for us as parents of young children, but it forced us to confront the issue of risk. Were we going to run at the first threat? How easy it then would be to get rid of us. We decided that we would stay until God showed us clearly to leave.
Recently we had spent time working among refugees on the Syrian border near a war zone, close enough for us to hear guns firing and bombs going off as the Kurds fought ISIS while we wondered if some fanatic would decide to kidnap us and hold us hostage. Norine was relieved every time she could return to Izmir after those trips. Overall, we had counted the cost. We knew the risks and we accepted them. Turkey was right where we needed to be. No, it couldn’t be time to “come home.”
I FINISHED SHAVING, got dressed, and took the short walk to our church. We had learned over the years that when people are seeking spiritually they often look for places where they know Christians will gather. That’s why we put up a sign with a cross outside Resurrection Church, making it hard to miss. We were breaking no laws and never attempted to hide what we were doing. In fact, we wanted to be as visible as possible.
We had hesitated to rent this small building when we started the church. It was about all we could afford in the city center, but it was in the transvestite red-light district—would anyone come? Soon, however, we discovered it was a great location, with thousands of people walking by every day on their way to the sea and to busy pedestrian streets packed with shops and restaurants.
At some point we started stocking the two windowsills with Christian books and left a sign telling people they could help themselves. And they did. Soon we were giving away over one thousand New Testaments each month.
We never had a dull day in Turkey. Anything could happen on a Sunday—good or bad. We could pray for a visitor and see them healed or we could have someone yelling threats disrupt our meeting. When our door was open, some would venture in just to see a church for the first time. Many came with questions and almost all would accept prayer. Those who became Christians would often drop off after a few weeks or months as the pressure of family and friends got to them.
Another challenge was that all kinds of people came—from sincere seekers to those looking for gain or wanting to cause trouble. Over time people’s motives would become clearer. We knew that secret police were in and out, and some people told us to be careful, but we had nothing to hide. With all this, it was amazing that the church grew at all.
As introverts, Norine and I were not a good fit for this very social culture, but God had tied our hearts to the people living in Turkey. And besides, we were convinced that God had given us and the church a very specific assignment—to prepare for a spiritual harvest.
I NEEDED TO FOCUS. There were classes to prepare. What I did not need was for that thought to come back. But it did. A soft whisper, but insistent.
It’s time to come home.
I had rejected the thought earlier, but I could not shake the sense that this was God telling me to prepare to meet him—to die.
It wasn’t the first time I’d stood in this church and thought that my life might be about to end.
Five and a half years earlier—on April Fool’s Day—I’d stepped outside the church during a prayer meeting. It was typically busy in the street, and I was talking with a member of the church. A few of the transvestites were leaning out of the windows above us, smiling and waving at passersby just like they always did.
Suddenly, a man in a camouflage jacket caught our attention. He stood out for one simple reason. He was pointing a pistol at me from about twelve feet away. He was quiet but looked utterly determined, and his eyes were bright with rage. I froze. All I could focus on was the pistol that was trembling in his grip.
Six shots rang out in quick succession. Then he dropped the gun, reached into a bag on the ground beside him and pulled out a shotgun. My brain finally started working. As he struggled to close the gun, I knew he could not miss with a shotgun. And if he went into the church after he got me . . . it could be a massacre. I rushed over to the gunman and wrapped my arms around him from behind in a bear hug. He was bigger than me, stronger too. I held on desperately. As we struggled, he pulled the trigger and the shotgun went off. The gunman started screaming, “You started a church and we will not permit this! We will bomb you. We will kill you. You will give an account.”
I felt nothing. I was numb. All I knew was that my life—and the lives of others—depended on not letting go.
Finally the police arrived and put the gunman down on the ground. Once they had taken him away, I walked back into the church. Adrenaline had helped me hang on to my would-be killer, but when I sat down the shock hit like a hurricane. My body started shaking and I could do nothing to stop it. As the tension bled off I was surprised that I was not afraid. God had spoken so many words about my future that I was confident that he still had plans for me in Turkey and would keep me alive until they were completed. So when the government assigned two police officers to me as bodyguards, I turned them down after a couple of weeks. I was sure I did not need them.
In the days and weeks that followed the attack, people asked us whether we would remain in Turkey. Norine and I knew the answer immediately. We had worked through this before: until God told us it was time to leave, we would stay.
As I stood alone in the church that October morning, I was no longer so confident that I could stay in Turkey. All those words about my future—was it possible that God was cutting short his plans for me?
It’s time to come home.
“God,” I prayed soberly. “There are so many things I have looked forward to. I don’t want to leave my family. I am not ready. But I belong to you. You can do as you want. If you want me to come home to you, then prepare my heart.”
THE NEXT DAY I went to meet Norine at a retreat center where she had spent the night to have some time alone in prayer. Together we drove out to the summer cottage that my parents had bought along the coast years ago. It had been a busy time for us, and though many of our friends had used the cottage, we hadn’t spent nearly as much time there as we would have liked to. So it was good to be alone together and to finally try my new wetsuit and swim in the cool, clear waters of the Aegean Sea. We were happy. We had a lot to look forward to. Life was good.
I did not bring up the whole It’s time to come home thought. It had flashed in my mind a couple more times that day, but I did not want to alarm Norine.
The following morning my phone rang, interrupting our lazy breakfast. It was a call from the church.
“Andrew? The police have just been here looking for you. They want to know when you’re going to be around.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be back in Izmir tomorrow.”
“That could be good news,” Norine said when I’d hung up. I agreed.
Months earlier we had applied for permanent resident status, which would allow us to live in Turkey until 2099—the rest of our lives. After hours of form filling, interviews at the local police station, and a lot of waiting, we were hopeful that the visas were ready. To both our minds, if the police wanted to see us it had to be about the residency application.
We had planned to spend a couple of days at the beach, but this was a good enough reason to cut it short. We busied ourselves cleaning the cottage and shutting it down for winter, loaded the van with food emptied from the cupboards along with our dripping wetsuits and towels, and made the drive back to Izmir.
It was dark by the time we pulled up in the street outside and made our way up the steps to our apartment.
“Look at this, my love,” said Norine as she reached the front door and pulled off a piece of paper that had been taped to it. It was from the police, informing us that we were required to report to the local station as soon as possible.
I smiled. Time to come home? No, surely not yet.