Reflections on the Trip of a Lifetime: Day 5 Athens – Istanbul – Cappadocia

January 14, 2014
/ Category 1 Peter 2, Revelation 1, Study Tour 2014
/ Posted By Kevin Bennett
/ No Comments.

Contents

Athens – Istanbul – Cappadocia

Just as we started to get used to Athens, we were off into the great unknown territory of Turkey. Unknown, that is, to me…

We all found Istanbul airport a slight shock. There were women in western clothes, women in burkas, and women in modest clothing with head scarves. It was fascinating for me, but reasonably scary and intimidating for many of the women in our group. The group was split up, and two of the girls were frisked by security which was, given the circumstances, slightly traumatic. The “pastoral care” dimension of the tour began…

Click on the map for an enlarged version.

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There was no way I was going to take photographs of any of the Turkish security personnel. Suffice to say that they gave me no particular reason to be nervous, but no particular reason to relax either.

I was excited to see Turkey up close for the first time. It was a landscape of dramatic contrasts: flat plains and sheer, snow-covered mountains, modern buildings and ancient cave systems, apartment blocks and piles of rubble.

Across Greece and Turkey I was never sure whether the piles of rubble were generally a sign of poor economic conditions, or poor planning controls. In Australia, people would go to jail for leaving building sites in those conditions, and if it’s a collapse, it gets cleaned up. Australia started to feel somewhat sanitised. Not that it’s a bad thing, but… different.

It was misty that day. Photographs were difficult, but peer through the mist and imagine how stunning this was..

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That evening the group really started visibly to bond. We had shared so many experiences, and we were certainly “not in Kansas any more”.

The Body of Christ, in which we all are intimately brothers and sisters, is not just “nice”. In a strange land, surrounded by foreign beliefs and values, it is sheer survival. It was no different for the early church communities, wherever they were.

Fond memories!

Engagement with the Text

The text for the day was Revelation 1. No part of the text is directly relevant to the places we had been that day. It was a kind of introduction to this stage of the journey – we were about to visit every single one of the “Seven Churches“!

Perhaps a more directly relevant text to my contemplations, since we were “sojourners and pilgrims” in the very places that Peter wrote to, might be:

Beloved, I implore you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul, having your conduct honorable among the foreigners, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by your good works which they observe, glorify God in the day of visitation.

– 1 Peter 2:11-12