In my earlier life, when I worked for a university, one of my side jobs was as a freelance academic editor. I specialized in working with non-native English speakers, helping them translate their very technical language into something that made sense to an English speaking audience. It was fascinating work. Not only did I learn a lot about some very obscure topics (forestry management in Malaysia, the challenges of emergency transport through the streets of Mumbai, architecture and gender roles in the Middle East, etc.), but I formed friendships with people from around the world. One of those friends was Dr. Özlem Erdogdu Erkarslan. Özlem was a professor in Izmir, Turkey, who had contacted me through a friend. She needed help with the trickier parts of our language and I needed help paying my bills. It was a good fit.
Most of our work was done online. She would send me articles and I would send her back edits. She would send questions, I would send answers. After a few months of back and forth, our emails drifted into personal topics. She had twins who were born the same year as my oldest daughter. We talked about motherhood, cooking, and the perpetual pile of laundry that plagued us both. She talked about her parents and her husband, and she asked me about my family. She wrote of her fears about the future her children faced and her conflicts about being a working mother, both of which I shared. Özlem made me realize how even the most personal experiences are still universal. At one level, her life couldn’t be more different and yet it was almost as if we were the same woman.
When I first learned of the earthquake in Turkey (and Syria) my mind went immediately to Özlem. She has become the face of Turkey for me. When I see a picture of a woman wailing in distress in front of a collapsed mound of concrete, I feel like I know her because I know Özlem. I know how she struggled with her daily stresses, what she worried about at the end of the day, and how much she adored her beautiful children. This familiarity brings the images into closer view. I see in sharper detail how tragedy has landed like an explosive, destroying the very ground her life was built upon.
It is tempting in a tragedy of this magnitude to distance ourselves from the reality of the lives lost. It is a normal response to the overwhelming numbers, almost impossible to comprehend. But, I believe that when God calls us to see Christ in everyone, we are forced to recognize that we are one and the same. Their pain is our pain. Their loss is our loss. This makes the news of such events much, much more painful. Out of this deep pain, we not only pray for the people of Syria and Turkey, we grieve with them. It is an overwhelming grief indeed.