My first real encounter with a person from the Middle East was when we lived in Hannover, West Germany, in the 70s. His name was Mustafa. I don’t remember what country he was from. We were a little afraid of him—I’m ashamed to say.
I had gone to the big Holiday Inn Airport hotel in Hannover and registered with them as “clergy” because I had read an article about how people traveling sometimes sought help at hotels. One night the hotel called because they had an employee that was distraught, and they were afraid he might be suicidal. I drove to the hotel and met Mustafa. We talked. He wasn’t really suicidal, but he was distraught and pretty isolated in Germany. We met several times. He came once to our apartment for dinner and even brought Sherrylee a red silk robe from his country—a very nice gift! But I have to admit that we were only cautiously friends.
The 70s were scary times—maybe more so than today. We had only lived a few miles from the Olympic Village in Munich when the Israeli athletes were kidnapped and murdered. Airplane hijackings occurred frequently, some ending in grenades being rolled down the aisles of the planes. The Red Army Faction, known to us in Germany more as the Baader-Meinhof Group, were kidnapping people, bombing establishment sites, and assassinating well-known figures. Wanted posters were everywhere. I even had the German Bundespolizei call me for an interview once because after driving back from a youth rally, one of the young Germans with us had seen a VW van with lots of anti-government slogans painted all over it, and so he reported it to the police.
Those were scary days in some ways, but our fears of swarthy people were mostly from movies, and only somewhat from reality. When I think about it, it reminds me of the first time I ever flew into Germany in 1968. At the airport in Munich, German soldiers with rifles stood at the entry to the airport as we deboarded, and my heart leaped into my throat because they appeared to me to look like all the enemy German soldiers I had seen in the WWII films that I had grown up on in the 50s. It was a silly, but visceral response—and I think that’s where our apprehension about Mustafa came from as well.
Wednesday was our last day to teach English to refugees at the Omonia church in Athens, Greece. The farewell was similar to many we have experienced—a few tears, lots of hugs, and group pictures. Selfies with our students were new– and exchanging IM addresses.
And new was that virtually all of those that we were leaving were Middle Easterners! Most were Muslims from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. Some were Christian background, Persians or Kurds. All were refugees. Some needed clothes or medicine or diapers for their babies; others needed papers—they had no official nationality because their papers and/or passports were lost, stolen, or destroyed.
I hesitate to tell you what some of them had seen. One young man said that he had been in a store in his city when a man in a truck drove up and started warning people about planes coming to bomb their homes. While the man was warning the people, a rocket hit his truck and totally disintegrated it and the man. “Poof” was the word the sixteen-year-old Syrian boy used to describe what he had witnessed. What would that do to you?
Then there was the family of five from Iraq who came to Sherrylee’s class every day. Even though he was horrified at the destruction of their country by the military actions of the West, and even though he had worked with American forces during our occupation—or maybe because of his cooperation—he and his wife and children had had to flee.
How can people who have seen and experienced such horrible things be saved?
Two are being baptized in the name of Jesus today—it is eight hours later in Athens, so maybe they are already celebrating. Sherrylee and I are home—glad to be here, but now our Facebook pages have Arabic writing in many of the posts which we have to use Google Translate to read.
John 3:16 may be the most publicized Bible verse in history and the first one that we and many of our children memorized. I sometimes have the feeling that we are just beginning to learn what it means.
God so loved the world—not just the USA, not the West, but the world. And that’s why He sent us to every nation.
I’m just figuring out that Jesus was a swarthy, Middle Easterner too.
The young man had come home. Here he was in his own synagogue, surrounded by the people who had seen him grow up. Of course he was asked to do the Scripture reading from the Torah and to make brief comments afterwards. After all, he was one of them.
Let me tell you a true story about refugees. There were over 100 who had already fled their home country together because of severe and dangerous persecution. They had sought refuge in one country, but now needed to move on. They paid a lot of money to arrange two small boats to carry them across precarious waters to a country where they thought they could be free and safe. One of the boats was so leaky that after just a short ways, both of the boats turned around and went back to where they started. Those refugees in the leaky boat decided either not to risk it again or to overload the boat that had a chance of making it. The bravest or the most afraid launched out again on their dangerous journey.
It was raining hard this morning when we woke up in Athens. Our apartment for this LST project is near the center of the city, so we are surrounded by tall buildings which block the sun a bit. All this to say, that it was really a dark, rainy morning.
I visited with a Christian man from Albania today who moved to Greece seven years ago because he felt called to plant a church among the million Albanians who had fled to Greece in the 80s and 90s. The Soviet Union was quite successful in purging all of its satellites—but especially Albania–of Christianity, so the million Albanians then in Greece seemed like a ripe mission field. He and his family moved to Greece and began a church which then multiplied into other Albanian churches throughout Greece.
One week ago we were worshipping with a little Christian church in Glasco, Kansas, of which in 1870, my great-great grandfather Mahlon Woodward and his wife Mary Ann were founding members. After lunch at church with people who knew my grandparents and my dad, we accidentally went to a poetry reading that had been advertised as a Smithsonian program on Kansas waterways! I suppose towns of 500 can’t be picky!
Our international flight was via Munich, a new airport, but the same city where in 1971 two pretty clueless young newly-weds landed and began their mission journey together. We are slower than we were then, but wiser, I hope—certainly more experienced. While we have definitely changed, the world has changed also. When we left for Munich in 1971, Christians faced Iron Curtains and Cold Wars and Walls. We could just barely drive to Berlin back then, much less the Arab world. Now Christians can go to a small church building in Athens and work in the Middle East. Look around your neighborhood and tell me the world has not changed and that the nations are not coming!
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