Today I am thankful for good food. It’s Thanksgiving Day and people all around the country are sitting down with family and friends to eat turkey and ham and dressing and green bean casserole and cranberry sauce. Although I am not with my family today, I am with good friends who welcome me like family and we are eating very good food.
Short term missionary Bri McElroy learns about harvesting hazelnuts in Turkey.
Sunset over Istanbul and the Bosphorus
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Today’s brave story was written in San Antonio but it began in St. Louis and then traveled to Turkey. I am excited to see where it goes next! God called Bri to be brave for Him. I hope you are inspired by her story!
Stories from Turkey
My bravery story begins two years ago, in a center full of 17,000 excited young adults. I was at the Urbana missions conference in St. Louis, Missouri, and I was about to make one of the most important (and simultaneously terrifying) declarations of my entire life. Throughout the five days we attended the conference, I had been greatly impacted by the desperate need for the Gospel in every area of the world. Prior to the conference, I had had little to no desire to engage in international missions. In fact, I remember clearly praying as a young girl that God wouldn’t “make me be a missionary”. It was a concept that had always scared me, to be frank. But somehow, God radically changed my heart towards global missions in the weeks leading up to and during the short time I was in St. Louis.
So back to that important, terrifying declaration. It was one of the final nights of the conference, and the speakers were wrapping up and driving home their main points. One of the speakers had volunteers pass out cards to all the attendees. The card turned out to be a “commitment to missions” card. There were options to check off for short-term, mid-term, and long-term missions. Basically, the long-term mission commitment was an undefined amount of time to spend on the mission field. If you had asked me a few months before that moment, I would have said that I could only see myself committing to a short-term mission. But in that moment (and after a quick prayer), I very shakily checked off on long-term missions. We passed our cards back in, and then the speaker asked for each commitment to stand up, beginning with the short-term commitments and ending with the long-term. When we were called on, I stood with confidence and bravery that can only be accredited to the Lord.
My next uncertainty came in the form of direction. Where was God calling me to go? What organization should I go with? When should I go? I still had several years of college left, so I knew that I would have to begin with a short term trip. As we wrapped up the conference, I began praying for God to reveal to me where He wanted me to go to first. I honestly didn’t expect an answer so soon. But almost as soon as I said, “Amen”, I heard the word ‘Turkey’ loud and clear. I kept hearing Turkey over and over again, and seeing the country pop up on T-shirts. So I began to research the country for several months, and I started falling in love with the country and the people there.
Even though God had shown me where He wanted me to begin my mission work, the journey to Turkey certainly wasn’t easy. I wasn’t able to go that first summer, despite my eagerness. I realize in retrospect that the Lord needed to grow me some more beforehand. The following summer I was finally able to embark on a 3-week trip to Turkey, but even the path to that trip was lined with difficult circumstances in which I had to be brave and trust God completely. And it paid off, because sharing the truth and love of God in that beautiful, lost, hungry country is one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.
I’ll end with one quick story of bravery that happened while I was in Turkey. Travelling to another continent alone to meet up with a team that I had never met, and not knowing the home language of the country in question gave me a final dose of confidence and strength that I needed. On one of our final days in Turkey, we were walking through a closed-air bazaar that was filled with different booths. We came upon a religious bookstore and were looking at the different Islamic books. One of our team members dared any one of us to pull out one of our own books and somehow put it on the shelf without the boothkeeper noticing. A “reverse shoplifiting”, as we called it. Just then, another man walked up and began talking to the owner, staring us down the whole time. Our group began walking away, but I told them to stop and asked one of the other girls to cover me. I pulled out a Turkish translation of the New Testament and held it by my skirt. I picked up one of their books and did a quick Indiana Jones switch with our book, then put theirs back on top of the New Testament, hoping that someone would accidentally purchase the New Testament and be greatly impacted by it.
I share that story because it’s something I never imagined myself doing. It was risky because although Christianity isn’t illegal in Turkey, it is looked down upon. But I took that risk in the power of the Holy Spirit, in hopes that someone might hear and love the name of Jesus because of it. And now my next step of bravery is joining staff with a ministry that I’m passionate about, but it’s still an uncertain journey. But I know who has mapped out the journey for me, and He is more powerful and awesome than anyone or anything on Earth.
Mom's Going to Madagascar 