Playing in the Mosque
I’ve lived in multiple different countries in my life and consider myself to be pretty cross-culturally experienced, so it’s not often that I’m genuinely caught off guard by a cultural difference. But this one I did not see coming.
We had spent the day in a Muslim city touring many sites, including a historic building that has functioned as a church, a mosque, and a museum over the centuries—sometimes all three in the same generation. By the time our group of 17 made it to a beautiful mosque picture above, including my family, the kids had run out of patience.
We entered with head coverings for the girls and a reminder to everyone that we were guests here. The mosque was divided into sections: a space in the back for women, an area for tourists in the middle, and a designated section in the front for men at prayer. Our guide had been clear: stay in the tourist zone.
I was standing near the divider keeping an eye on things when a security guard noticed my kids. He looked at them, then at me, and gestured toward the prayer space. “Do you want them to come across?”
I hesitated. I looked around at other children who were already goofing off, but I didn’t want our group to be the ones causing a scene. I asked him to clarify, “You mean all the kids can come and play?” He nodded.
Within seconds, our kids were running around playing tag in a 400-year-old mosque. Note the photo below of one of them wiping out on the carpet, proof that I’m not making this up! In the background, local men continued praying, graciously ignoring the whole thing.
If you had asked me beforehand what proper etiquette for children inside a mosque looked like, I never would have guessed it looked like that.
Learning on Their Turf
That moment became a metaphor in my mind for the rest of the trip. I co-led this two-week Balkans vision trip to four countries alongside David Drury and Trent Nettleton. We went hoping to learn. What I didn’t expect was how much I needed to unlearn.
Most of us carry subconscious assumptions about Muslim communities, assumptions that come more from movies and news cycles than from actual relationships. But as we traveled, something shifted. We stopped being observers and started being guests.
There’s something that changes in you when you’re on someone else’s turf. You can’t control the environment. You have to rely on your host’s hospitality, and sometimes that hospitality looks completely different from what you expected. Receiving that kind of welcome, especially when we felt like outsiders, broke down walls in me that I didn’t even know were there.
Knowing the Neighbor
When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves, the natural follow-up question is: how do we do that?
The answer is simple, even if it’s not always easy. We have to get to know them. There’s a big difference between studying a people group from a distance and sitting in a two-hour conversation with an imam like we got to do on this trip.
Once you move from thinking about “that people group” to thinking about “my neighbor,” everything shifts. It becomes much easier to pray for them, to care about them, to see them as individuals made in the image of God.
A Journey of Support
We’re still processing everything we saw and heard on this epic trip through so many different cultures, religions, and histories. We’re genuinely grateful for the prayers and support that made the trip possible. Raising support was a new experience for us, and it was humbling to watch God move in other people’s hearts to provide exactly what was needed.
If there’s one thing I’d want to pass along from our time in the Balkans, it’s this: mission isn’t usually about bringing your agenda to a new place. It’s about showing up, taking off your shoes, and being willing to play in the space your neighbor opens for you.
Sometimes that’s exactly where God is waiting to help us learn, or unlearn, what he has planned for us.
______________
Read more from Wes Dean about this family’s adventures at Global Marketplace Multipliers here and here.
Contact GMM@gponline.org to start a conversation about how you or those you know might become an international tentmaker with Global Marketplace Multipliers.