Article March 23, 1987 Issue

Foreign lands, safe hands

The Christian Science Monitor

The driver stopped the car under the pale yellow light of a streetlamp. "Here you are," she said. "Istanbul is that way. You can take a taxi." Unsaid but felt was the thought "You'd be safer in a taxi, if you can find one."

It was 3 a.m., and the deserted streets just outside Istanbul looked anything but safe at that moment. A friend and I had been traveling with someone for almost two days, leaving the friendly and known for the unknown and alien.

Instead of dread, though, I felt calm. Intuitively I trusted that God was there on that strangely unfamiliar street just as He had been present in the thoroughly familiar neighborhood I had left weeks ago when I began my trip. Having attended Sunday School in a Christian Science branch church, I had learned to trust God as the always present and all-powerful Parent that the Bible teaches Him to be. The book of Deuteronomy describes God as like an eagle that "fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings." This divine caring doesn't always take place in comfortable or familiar surroundings. Speaking of God's people in the verse immediately before the one just quoted, the Bible says, "He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness." Deut. 32:10, 11.

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