Istanbul, not Constantinople

Hey everybody,

Just wanted to let you know, I'm doing well and happily in Istanbul this morning. We took a bus from Skopje, Macedonia yesterday afternoon (left Kosovo in the early afternoon), I'll be here for a week or two roughly. I had a really great, though unfortunately short, time in Prishtina, meeting together with the church there and meeting up with my friends from Boulder (Georges, Jason, Hoyt, Mary, Ashley, Heather, and Corinne). We're now here together with a few of the believers from Kosova, I expect it shall be a really good time. They all speak English very well, and I've picked up a few words of Albanian too (as well as Bulgarian, Macedonian, and now some Turkish). =) Slava na boga! (That means "Praise the Lord!" in Macedonian--in Albanian, it's "Lavdi Zoti!")

I had a good time visiting with my brother Joel in Germany, even though our time was pretty short. May the Lord bless him there in his last few months.

Here goes the call to prayer in Istanbul--most people don't seem to care much. It's definitely a more secular country even than Lebanon. Or rather, both the Muslims and the Christians in Lebanon take their religion relatively seriously (for better and for worse, usually the latter in Lebanon's case), but in Turkey which is almost completely Muslim, most people don't seem to hold onto a Muslim identity very strongly, if at all. Of course that's a generalization. It's even more that way in Kosovo, which was Communist for a long time--it was weird for me to drive through little towns and see all the women unveiled, wearing tight jeans and Italian fashion.

I'll write more hopefully from Istanbul, once we've spent a little more time here. May God bless you all--pray that our time here might be fruitful and meaningful. Soon I want to write more about Kosovo and the Balkans--I've really seen some things I want to be praying for there that I wasn't as keenly aware of before I came here.

Love,

Seth