Turkey follow up

A great follow up to last week's e-mail regarding Turkey.

Love,

Mom

Hi,
Follow-up to the last email about opening the work in Turkey. This is from my brother's perspective in Church yesterday.
Love,
Pres. Clark

Dear Family,

I was witness to an amazing display of the gifts of the spirit today at church. First a little background. As I wrote earlier, three weeks ago our little branch of 40 or so active members is now officially recognized by the Turkish government as an association – the first step toward being recognized as a church in this 85% Muslim country. As part of the official recognition, the Church has now assigned 4 young Elders to the branch - having transferred them down from the Romanian mission (3 Americans and 1 British). They have between 6 and 12 months field experience. Before I go on, I have to impress on you the difficulty faced by English speakers trying to learn Turkish – they tell me it is a little like learning Russian; not an easy language. I have been here cumulatively about 6 month and managed to learn a dozen odd words and to count to 10 – pitiful. I did much better in Mexico and China where I picked up quite a bit. Both the sound and the grammatical pronunciation of Turkish is not intuitive and most English speaking people I have talked to agree that it is very challenging and time consuming to master – requiring years to be conversant. As I said, the new missionaries got here 3 weeks ago with no previous Turkish language training – only Bulgarian which is worlds apart.

During testimony meeting, each of the Elders stood and bore their full testimonies in Turkish. Not with a few disjointed words but with flowing sentences. Each spoke for several minutes. The branch president translated and I was amazed at the depth and breadth of the topics each covered and details they shared. Without knowing you would have thought they had been in country 2 years and were getting ready to head home. Following the testimony of the last missionary, Elder Dennis Neuenschwander (1st Quorum of 70 emeritus) stood and spoke. He has a PhD in Russian and served as General Authority all over Eastern Europe and Russia and accompanied many of the 12 on their visits. He spoke of the many times that he had seen first-hand the gift of tongues in his travels with the 12. He concluded by bearing testimony that all present in the meeting today had witnessed the gift of tongues – referring to the young missionaries. The four young Elders then stood and sang a Quartet of “Now Let Us Rejoice” – all 3 verses in perfect unison – all in Turkish. I only recognized it from the music. Their faces shown brightly and radiated light. It was one of the most amazing and special things I have ever been party to. There were not many dry eyes in the room. I know for me I just sat there and tingled all over and felt a warmth and peace that is hard to describe but very wonderful. I spoke with Elder Neuenschwander, and several others after the meeting and each of us knew with saying it that this had been a truly special day and the we had seen a miracle and witnessed what Neal A. Maxwell referred to as a “divine signature” showing God’s love and attesting that he is pleased that His work has begun here in earnest. My only regret was that each of you were not here to partake of it.

Gordon