“If you are not prepared to remain in Turkey for the foreseeable future, we urge you to book commercial travel now.”
This sentence from a U.S. Embassy email arrived in my inbox after I had spent six weeks social distancing in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. It suddenly put my family and me on high alert.
I did what my family, staff, and I thought was safest. I packed my things and left my apartment, where I had lived for seven months, in less than 24 hours. Then I flew across the world and within 48 hours, found myself in my parents’ house in New Jersey, social distancing at home.
Ordinarily, returning home from overseas missions requires lots of intentional planning. There’s a go-to book for missionaries who return to their home countries: Re-Entry: Making the Transition from Missions to Life at Home by Peter Jordan. Throughout the book, Jordan compares a missionary returning to their home country to an astronaut coming back from space.
“[Thorough] planning,” he writes, “is necessary for your return from the mission field. Too many returning missionaries have crashed upon landing because they mistakenly thought they could glide right back to a smooth touchdown in the culture they left behind.”
Quarantined in my childhood bedroom, I read these words and wrote in the side margins, “But what if I was forced into a crash landing?”
I arrived in Ankara on September 4, 2019, a year after I said yes to God’s calling to be a missionary there. I had begun studying the language during my senior year of college, and my months of preparation culminated when I arrived in the country.
I quickly realized that I was the ideal foreign friend for many Turks. Students wanted to befriend someone they could share their culture with, as well as someone they could practice their English with. So I spent my time learning more Turkish, befriending students, having conversations with them about the Bible, and leading music ministries.
Strangers turned into dear friends, and after a few months, I found myself involved in a truly fruitful ministry filled with personal growth, eye-opening conversations about the Gospel, and experiences that made this foreign country feel like home to me. During this time, I even decided to extend my time in Turkey by one more year. It wasn’t because I grew to love this country so much, but because this country helped me love God more, and I wanted to continue to obey him.
I was enjoying dinner at a Turkish friend’s house on a Thursday night when we got news that the stay-at-home order due to COVID-19 would begin the following week. What began as a celebratory dinner for finishing midterms turned into an emotionally distressed last supper. Our goodbyes that night were filled with extra hugs because we didn’t know when we’d be able to see each other again.
I was prepared to stay in Turkey for the long run, but the emails from the U.S. Embassy became more and more ominous. American missionaries from other cities and countries went back to the States and my chances of sticking around grew slimmer each day. The choice to go or not go back to the States was ultimately mine, and I prayed about it every day.
After reading the final warning from the Embassy, I knew that God was sending me home. I can’t explain how I knew that, but my mind changed in a matter of seconds. As I packed my life up, I wondered what God had in store for me back home.
I had just told my family that I was reading Peter Jordan’s book because I was feeling depressed and suffocated being back in New Jersey.
My dad laughed at me. “You need help? Adjusting back to here?”
He pointed at the floor of my mom’s room, a room that I’d spent hours in, a room that our family has had nightly services in ever since I was a kid. Hearing my dad’s levity, I felt my face get red with frustration, and I yelled at him with tears streaming down my face. The room fell quiet. No one had expected this eruption of emotion from me; they all thought I was happy to be home.
My family wasn’t wrong in thinking that way. After all, that’s how I had been presenting myself ever since I got back. I ate my mom’s home-cooked meals with a voracious appetite and spent long conversations laughing with my dad and older brother.
But this, I felt, was who they wanted to see. This was the same daughter, the same sister, that they said goodbye to at the airport when I left for Turkey. The same person who called every Sunday night from 5,000 miles away saying she missed home. Now, things were different, and I didn’t return to America under the expected circumstances. What my family had assumed would be a return to my personal refuge and paradise felt more like a deportation.
Even the homecoming at the airport wasn’t what I had imagined. Because of the pandemic, I couldn’t hug my mom and brother, who greeted me at the airport, and I couldn’t fully understand the facial expressions under their masks.
The six-foot distance that I had to keep from my family felt much longer than the 5,000-mile distance we had between us only two days prior. Physically, I was closer to my everyone than I’d been since I left for Turkey, but I couldn’t help but feel more separated than ever. All of these experiences and feelings compounded, and I felt isolated.
No one’s gone through what I am right now, I thought to myself. I’m alone because no one’s lost what I lost. No one had to spend a year alone serving in a foreign ministry only to be pulled out just as things were looking up. No one had to pack their life up in less than a day. No one had to rush through international airports by herself for 30 hours. No one can understand how I feel.
Satan made me feel so alone, and I fell for it hard.
A few days after I started reading Peter Jordan’s book, I came across this line: “It is imperative before you leave the mission field to take time to properly assess how much you have changed, and how much things have changed back home.”
If only I read that before I got here. But just because I crash-landed back home didn’t mean that it was too late to think about these changes. After all, Jordan also wrote, “People often are not prepared for these changes. As a result, misunderstandings and hurts can occur… It may take some time… so be patient.” The misunderstandings were already happening in my life, so here was my call to be patient, be
still, and think.
I’m not sure if Peter Jordan could’ve predicted or imagined the “changes” that COVID-19 brought to the world, but I had so many — maybe too many — changes to consider.
I thought about what I had lost in light of the pandemic: the semester that I was looking forward to, the short-term teams that I was going to host and introduce to God’s kingdom in Turkey, even greeting friends in the traditional Turkish manner of a tight hug and a kiss on each cheek. These things didn’t just feel lost, but stolen from me. As the list got bigger, I couldn’t help but feel more and more bitter.
Why did God send me overseas this year? Was this year a waste? There were so many things promised to me — how could God just take them all away?
In this moment of honest heartbreak and bitterness, I needed to remind myself what I was doing: I was making a list of changes — not losses, not things stolen from me, but things that had changed. And when I asked myself “What hasn’t changed?” finally all the other voices in my life quieted, and I heard God speak.
God hasn’t changed.
His faithfulness, sovereignty, goodness, perfection, and majesty haven’t changed. The God who stirred my heart in 2018 to go to Turkey as a missionary is the same God who sent me home early because of a pandemic. He knew the whole time, and he still did it. I re-surrendered my life to God at that moment because I realized that my circumstances will never change who he is, how much he loves me, and how eagerly he wants to use me.
In Matthew 7:17, Jesus tells the people “a good tree produces good fruit.” The last time I checked, there isn’t anyone better than God. God is good, so his plans must be good too.
I’m still planning on returning to Turkey in the fall for the second year that I promised to the Lord. Coronavirus will most likely still greatly affect our ministry, but I approach my second year as an overseas missionary with a new heart. I no longer see change as loss but as an opportunity to behold and worship the unchanging God that I serve.
Anonymous is a missionary who worked in Turkey.