The Lord’s Day

Today we start our second week in Turkey. Had a lovely breakfast on the patio, in the warmth of the new day sun. In a few minutes we’ll be loading up the van and heading to Ankara. The internets are really slow at this hotel in Pamakkule so I’ll try to get this out, though it won’t have any pictures and just a little text. I will try to journal a bit of my thoughts while riding on the van.

I’m  looking across the valley as we drive out of Pamukkele and  imagining where Laodicea might have been – according to the book I was perusing last night, you were supposed to be able to see it from Hierapolis. I also read that there was a 60th canon aded to one of the Councils (can’t remember which it was and my book is on the roof) that listed the canon of the Bible, listing all the books we have in the modern canon- EXCEPT Revelation. That makes me wonder if they excluded it because of their prominent place in the begining of John’s apocalypse?

    
This is supposed to be a 6-8 hour drive so there should be plenty of time to collect some thoughts. As I wrote earlier, the geography and flora of Turkey have totally surprised me. The valley between Hierapolis and Laodicea is fairly green. They’re growing lots of crops, mostly corn and fruit and nuts. It reminds me of the Italian countryside between Venice and Rome. Just passed some grapes and wheat…oh, and…there’s a mosque over there! 

The friendliness of the people we’ve encountered (albeit most of them are in service-oriented positions) continues to impress me as well. When I told people I was going to Turkey (wait, there’s a mosque over on the right!) they often expressed concern for my safety. I haven’t run across any fanatics waiving AK-47s or planting IEDs or sporting the latest designer explosive vests. People often look at us, sometimes in seeming bewilderment, when we pull in town and then start unloading our luggage from the roof of the van (there’s a mosque!). But when they do it’s out of sheer curiosity – we are quite the sight to behold.

BUMMER! I had several paragraphs here that disappeared while I was uploading the photos. The only part I can remember this morning is how grateful I am for being a part of this study tour. I miss Cathy and wish she were here with me. It’s really cool to have one of my sons here and to experience this together with him. We may have to do a family vacation here one day…Lucy wouldn’t t like it though as there are too many (tame though) stray animals for her comfort level.

We pulled in to Filipus in Ankara at at 6pm and checked into our rooms. Five members of our team are staying at the Filipus building itself. Three girls are staying in a home about 3 blocks away and 3 guys (myself included) are staying in a home of a young British family about 2 blocks away. We made french fries (using potatoes we bought about an hour outside of Ankara) and a salad. The SMU team, who flew here back on the day the PoT class drove out of Istanbul, got back from their day of work in the city as we were getting dinner ready. They went out to get us some drinks and we ordered some Pollo Loco. We ate together, along with 3-4 of the Filipus staff, in one of the Filipus classrooms.

After cleaning up from dinner, the Peoples of Turkey class met to share three of our stories and go over the plans for Monday, the first day of July.

Gonna wrap this up and try to go back to fill in any blanks on my prior day blog entries…