I have always been vague about where we lived overseas and what our family did. I still don’t want to put too much online, but I do want to share what’s going on with my family right now as things are kind of topsy-turvy for us.
Until this summer my family had been living in southeast Turkey near the Syrian border. I’ve actually seen ISIS members. They recruited in our neighborhood. Our city faced the brunt of the influx of refugees from Syria to the point where now a quarter of the city is refugees. We ended up being support to a school for Syrian refugees and my husband discipled Syrian, Afghan, and Iranian pastors leading fellowships in the city.
This spring we found out that our residence permits were not going to be renewed to continue living anywhere in that region of Turkey. As we had felt called specifically to that city and not to Turkey in general, we didn’t feel right just choosing another city in Turkey to live in. We sought the Lord as a family and two weeks later found ourselves moving to eastern Germany, really east, like a stone’s throw from Poland, or as they say here, a cat’s leap.
We moved in with a family who had been strangers before we arrived. We were at their home for six weeks until we moved into our apartment just this August. Yes, we just moved in. When we went to apply for our residence permit in Germany, we were met with a letter saying our application would be denied unless we enrolled our children in school. They had been told by a German friend of ours that we would be homeschooling. (He had been trying to be helpful.) The Lord has not changed our minds on homeschooling, and so we began speaking with this official and that official and sending letters, etc. In the end we were not given permission to homeschool, and we have to leave. We’ve only been in our apartment for less than a month. This weekend my husband will leave with my two oldest to find our next home, and I will be traveling by plane a week later with the youngest four children.
Where are we going? We are headed to Macedonia. It’s the first foreign country the Lord brought us to years ago. We were there for 6 years, living and working among the Roma, better known as Gypsies. I love Macedonia, and I have not been for a visit since 2008. We are allowed to stay three months there without a visa before we either need to get permission to live there or get out.
We do plan on coming back to Germany in three months (we can re-enter after being out 90 days) and will keep doing the work we’ve begun here and we’ll see what comes of it. We have friends here who will continue to seek an exemption for us to homeschool. We don’t know what God’s plan is for all of this.
Please be praying for me and my family through all the transition. I love being home, so it’s hard for me to not have a place to settle into.