A young Turkish couple, Mustafa and Uman, providentially found our Adventist team here in Turkey. Last Sabbath, Uman told me the remarkable story of her conversion. Here it is in her words.

Being a zealous Muslim girl, I was shocked one day to find my older brother and his friend watching the Jesus movie in our living room. I was filled with indignation. I wanted to stop my brother from this dangerous path. The Christian film surely was a blasphemy against Allah, I thought. I felt such an obligation to stop this blasphemy from happening in our house that I grabbed the vacuum cleaner and began vacuuming the living room. That took care of the sound, but my brother and his friend were still glued to the images on the TV screen. So I started vacuuming in front of TV. Finally, the boys got upset at me and turned off the TV and left. I was happy I had succeeded.

In my vigorous vacuuming, I had moved the TV stand, so I began to push it back into place. Our video player was old, and you had to push the buttons very hard to get it to turn on, so the next thing that happened caught me completely off guard. As I was pushing the TV stand, the TV suddenly turned on, and so did the video. The face of Jesus filled the screen, and he was looking right at me. The subtitle read, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.”

I was shocked, scared and angry. But, for some reason, I sat down in front of the TV and decided to watch the movie to better oppose my brother in his interest. I ended up watching the whole movie. By the time it was over, I was crying. Then and there, I decided to follow Jesus.
At the time, I still felt I was a good Muslim. I didn’t understand the implications of my decision to follow Jesus. The subsequent year was the hardest of my life. I struggled to know what was right. Sometimes satanic forces would harass me and shake my bed. Most of all, I felt betrayed. If Jesus is as powerful as the Bible says, why hadn’t my parents or any of my Islamic teachers told me? Why didn’t the Quran teach this? One night, I couldn’t take it anymore. Out on my balcony under a dark, cloudy sky, I cried out to God, “Allah, if you want me to follow Jesus and Christianity, then You must show me clearly. I can’t go on like this. With all my heart, I will be either a Muslim or a Christian. Show me.”
All at once, the dark clouds parted, and high in the sky I saw a bright cross. I stared at the incredible manifestation, and I knew without a doubt it was God’s message to me. Even to this day, I begin to cry when I remember that amazing miracle.

I was baptized in 1999. At that time, my brother, who had already become a Christian, told me, “Uman, there are a lot of Christian groups. Each has its own extremes and doctrines it teaches to the exclusion of others.” Then, holding up a Bible, he said, “Sister, remember: this is your only true guide.” Over the years as I entered different Protestant churches and interacted with the people, the pastors and the teachings, I always remembered those words.

As my Mustafa and I studied the Bible together, we found numerous points of conflict with our church’s teachings. Then we met a Christian man from Norway who was doing business in Turkey. We were very impressed with his life. We noticed that he never worked on Saturday. Later, he told us about the 10 Commandments in Exodus. Oddly, no other Christian church had pointed these out to us. Mustafa began reading the Bible for two or three hours a day. Jesus was teaching us so much, and we shared what we learned with many people.
About four years ago, we became convicted that the Protestant churches we had been affiliated with were in error, and we decided to separate altogether from them. Then, a year ago, we started to keep the Sabbath in our home. About that time, we met some Pentecostal ladies from Finland who lived in our town. We asked them if they knew any Christians who keep Saturday as the Sabbath. “Yes,” they said. “In our country they are called Seventh-day Adventists.” Excitedly, my husband and I began to search for these fellow believers.

That’s Uman’s side of the story. Now I’ll continue the story from my perspective. All my life, I have read stories like this in Sabbath School mission reports, so to experience one myself has been supercharging!

About three months ago, one of our believers, the author of an outreach website, received an email requesting information about our church. With another Turkish Adventist friend, I drove about three hours one day to meet with this interest. My friend and I were excited and nervous. Excited because the inquiry seemed so earnest, but nervous because there is always the chance that an anti-Christian group could be leading us into a trap.

We met Mustafa in front of a bank. From there, he led us to their tiny, old stone house. Immediately our suspicions were relieved. We could see the light of Christ in these people’s faces. They were overjoyed to see us. Later, Uman said, “We have been in a desert for four years. We have been searching for a people who follow the Bible. Now God has started the Spirit river running again.”

For the first hour, they told us how they had come to Christ and their journey through the Bible and different churches. They said they had carefully read through our website before writing us, making sure that everything was according to scripture.

It was an unforgettable day, like when Paul met Aquila and Priscilla. I had brought only a Bible and no prepared lesson. But something Mustafa said led me to turn to Revelation 12:17: “And the dragon was angry with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.” I had intended to use the text to talk about the commandments. But Mustafa jumped on it and focused on its reference to the remnant. For the rest of the afternoon, he focused our conversation on the remnant. In a dozen different ways, he kept saying, “There must be a group of people who believe the Bible, who believe the Sabbath. There must be a smaller group within Christianity who hold to truth. The Bible teaches this throughout the old and new testaments.”

With great joy, I looked at Mustafa, Bible in hand. “Yes, you are right there is a remnant, Mustafa,” I told him. “Yes, there is!”

While doing Bible work in the States, I met self-taught Christians who had studied deeply and come to conviction about the Sabbath. But there was always a degree of arrogance about their discovery and usually some fringe pet ideas they clung to, viewing themselves as authorities. That spirit was totally absent in Mustafa and Uman. They had come into great truth by dint of their own study, but were still eager to be taught and hungry for the embrace of a church body.
Mustafa was convinced that this remnant was not a closed group, but a visible body of believers he and Uman could join. He turned to a text in Philippians 2 that talked about shining like stars in the universe in a crooked and perverse generation. “Obviously,” he said, “there are some people who are standing for holiness in the last days. And without holiness, no one will see God.” He talked a lot about the need for growth after accepting Christ.

Seeing Mustafa’s great interest in the remnant, I sent up a silent prayer for guidance. God directed me to start in Revelation 12:1 and read forward. For the next five hours, we studied the Bible with uninterrupted focus and passion.
God gave me a very powerful and rewarding Bible study that traveled through Revelation 12 to Daniel 7 and Daniel 2 and ended up again in Revelation 12 and 13. After we read in Daniel 7 about the beast who thought to change times and laws, I said, “And this is where you come in. In finding that the Sunday Sabbath is a lie, you and Uman found a secret that Daniel prophesied would happen.”

It was a eureka moment. Mustafa clapped his hands. “I knew it!” He and Uman had been unraveling a mystery, and the whole Bible study confirmed what they had sensed in their private study.

To be Christians in a country of 70 million Muslims is counter-cultural, but to branch out and become Sabbath keepers based solely on Bible reading is amazing conviction. Sometimes during the five-hour study, Mustafa and Uman would hold their faces in their hands and breathe deeply. Sometimes they would cry and look at each other in elation. “We knew it!” they would say. “It’s true. Now it all makes sense.”

It was an amazing study. It was as if my Turkish Adventist friend and I had brought the last handful of pieces to the puzzle Mustafa and Uman had been working on for years. Without confirmation from another living soul, this fine couple had gambled their eternal destiny that they were rightly listening to the Holy Spirit. It was a daring gamble, based solely on scripture, and the Spirit had sent me to confirm, “Well done good and faithful servants. You chose rightly.”

The following week, we met with Uman and Mustafa again. Uman said with a beaming smile, “Now I know joy again. Since we became Seventh-day Adventists, the Spirit has been working on our hearts. A dam has broken.” My Turkish friend and I chuckled. They had consciously been Adventists only a week!

Obviously, Mustafa and Uman have a lot yet to study. But, from their perspective, they are in the movement of truth and in to stay. After our third visit, Uman said, “Now that we have become Seventh-day Adventists, I must learn how to teach others. I have two young women and another family who want to learn the Bible. You must teach me how to teach the Bible.” I nearly fell over. “Teach me how to teach.” That was the second time I had heard those words within two months (see my article in the November 2008 AF). Since then, I have given Mustafa and Uman two concise seminars on witnessing. To our great delight, on our fourth visit, Uman had invited a guest—a bright young woman she had been working with for nearly six months who had recently accepted Jesus into her heart. In a gesture of trust, she asked that we pray over this new baby in Christ.

Mustafa has said again and again, “Before we met you, our lives were like tumbling stones. Now we understand what the Spirit was teaching us.” We praise God for using our humble family to answer their prayers and allowing us to be instruments in their spiritual journey. Uman said that, in 13 years of involvement with other Christian churches, “I was never shown that one scripture should be compared with another—that the Bible interprets itself.” Suddenly, from what seemed a thousand scattered promises, she now sees one perfect mosaic; a picture that she and her family are part of.

You can imagine what our new relationship with Mustafa and Uman has done for our team here. It felt amazing to know that God trusted us to guide such precious children of His! We are delighted to be heirs to the Holy Spirit’s work. It has also been an affirmation that our media and publishing strategy is the right one. Why? Consider how media played a part in this whole miracle. First, Uman’s initial conversion was the result of a media production. Second, a website guided Uman and Mustafa to our group. Third, we were glad to be able to give them a History of the Adventist Pioneers DVD in Turkish (our team’s first multimedia production) to tell them more about the church body they are joining. Just like the path of Uman’s testimony, our aims are to create a media presence in Turkey that will act as a great net to spark the interest of honest, searching souls and bring them to us for more education, training and encouragement. Uman and Mustafa are the first fruits. May God prosper our road ahead. Please pray for us in Turkey.

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