As I sit down to write my 104th Adventist Frontiers article, I remember as a college student the great pleasure of playing trombone in the concert band. I loved the thrill of sitting in the midst of that whooping, bleating, pounding, tinkling cluster of trained humanity. Behind me were the rolling timpani and cascading xylophone; sitting to my right were the blasting trumpets, and on my left the tubas blatting like walruses. The saxophones, flutes and all other sort of hooting things were in front of me. I sat with my sliding cohorts, and we played our unique part in the midst of this grand musical machine.
I never got to play in a marching band, but I can only imagine the magnified wonder of being in motion in the midst of audible coordinated chaos, to make something beautiful and harmonious.
I especially enjoyed the pieces with a showy fanfare and a wild, dramatic finale, whose last 10 measures exploded with crashing cymbal, base drum, and the sense of a forest fire being brought under control.
Being part of a grand finale came to my mind in June as we were wrapping up our work in Turkey. Somehow I felt like I was in the middle of God’s great orchestra. It was spectacular how God coordinated our departure as we worked hard at doing our part.
God’s grand finale over the last three months clearly showed me that He is not only interested in my outreach, but also my sanity. Our material exit from 10 years in Turkey was nothing short of miraculous, and I am praising the Lord for all the divine help to sell off our possessions, liquidate, and reduce to zero. Condensing 10 years of life down into a little over a dozen suitcases seemed like an impossibility, but God coordinated everything to His blazing glory.
It all began with an e-mail I posted to a Protestant believers’ forum near the end of March. Rather than struggle over the liquidation of every item, our hope was to sell our whole house as a unit: desks, beds, fridge, sofas, garden tools and kitchen items. In the e-mail I listed all of our household contents for sale, praying that perhaps someone would want a whole lot of very used things and in the process take about 10,000 lbs. off my shoulders. One man responded and said he was interested, but he wouldn’t need them until the third week of June. Perfect! That was also our schedule precisely. After coming and seeing our belongings, he and his wife made the decision to buy. Here was a big sign of God’s love. He gave us three months of peace of mind allowing us to use all of our things for the full duration of our mission. We got to sleep on our own bed and eat at our own table until a week before we left. This allowed homeschooling, ministry, visitation and everything else to continue without added stress.
That buyer also put us into contact with two people who wanted cars. In our huge city, selling a used car can take months and lots of phone time, as well as time showing the car. However, to God’s credit and glory, buyers bought both our cars sight unseen and without trying to negotiate the price! The first buyers were a young German couple who told us,” We don’t need to see the car or even know its make and model. We just want your car.”
My wife and I began to feel awkward and asked them, “Wouldn’t you like to know something about the car?”
“No,” they said. “We just want the car,” as they gave us two envelopes of cash.
The sale of the second larger car was also a gift from God in that we really needed to use it until the very end for hauling stuff. The people who bought it were from England. They gave us a deposit in April and said, “You can use the car until the middle of June because we will not be arriving until then.” I couldn’t imagine a more merciful gift. God arranged things so that we could use our car up until two days before our departure! Yes, He had perfectly calibrated every detail of our last months to insure our sanity. Between receiving the buyer’s deposit and the actual sale, I put 2,500 miles on the car!
I do not have time or space here to tell all the God-orchestrated details of our last two weeks in Turkey. I can only say that it was both exhausting and breathtaking. We worked like crazy, and all that kept us from going crazy was keeping our eyes on the clear movements of God’s baton conducting our days. Closing telephone accounts, bank accounts, electricity and water accounts. Passing out remaining Bibles and witnessing materials. Meeting the landlord and saying farewells, all the while trying to get every last item of our life accounted for and into suitcases less than 50 lbs. each. My wife sorted our 10-year accumulation with detail to insure that every book, every piece of clothing, all toys, and other household stuff would end up in the hands of someone who would be happy to receive it. It was a huge undertaking, and she delighted people from one end of our city to the other with the thoughtful gift boxes she prepared. Thank you God.
Another thing God did was to provide us housing. Our teammates, the Masseys, were away on furlough, and they let us use their home the last week after our furniture was gone. Thank you God for that convenient transition. A tour group happened to pass through and took three of our suitcases back to America with them. Thank you God for the help. My sister came from America and took our boys back with her two weeks early, freeing us to focus on the move. Thank you God. Oh, and my mother-in-law’s short visit was a blessing too.
I wish I could tell you about all the good people we said goodbye to, the kind farewell of our church members and teammates, the Iranians who took our cat, how God rescued me when I lost the keys on the main moving day, how I carried a piece of furniture two hours away by mistake and it turned out to be just what a poor Adventist family needed, and, and, and. Had you been there, I think you could have heard the rolling of the timpani, and the crashing cymbals, and oh, the trombones! Every wild detail came to a coordinated, harmonious close. Yes, God is good, and He is deeply interested in our sanity. Praise His name.

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