“You Have Jesus, and I Have Alibaba!”

“You have Jesus, and I have Alibaba!” Arda told Jacob.

Jacob stood in the schoolyard, heart racing under the scrutinizing stare of a police officer who was now moving in his direction. What could he want? Why was a police officer even there on the first day of school?

Always on Alert

It had been more than a year since we moved into the village. Our children had made friends at school last year and had grown by leaps and bounds in learning the local language. As covert church planters in a Middle Eastern city with no established Adventist presence, we were always on alert. We did not even use the “M” word in our vocabulary. In the local understanding, being a missionary was indistinguishable from being a government operative seeking to undermine the fiercely protected collective order. While proselytizing was not illegal, it was considered a threat, and open outreach could result in loss of the residency permits we had worked so hard to obtain.

The policeman, dressed in a black-and-white uniform with a bright-yellow vest, approached my husband, Jacob, and took off his hat.

“Don’t you recognize me?” he asked.

Then Jacob realized who he was.

During our first summer in the country, before we moved to the village, Jacob had worked in an English school for a few months. We had assumed that teaching English would provide legitimacy for our residence in the country. Since purchasing the village home, however, Jacob had stopped teaching, and it had become increasingly difficult to explain to people why we were there.

While he was still teaching at the English school, Jacob had been contacted by a man asking if he would tutor his 7-year-old daughter. Little Shani had blond hair and light-gray eyes and already had an astonishing grasp of the English language.

“She’s an only child,” her father explained in the local language. “Her mother and I both work, and she has grown up spending much of her time watching YouTube videos in English.”

While neither parent spoke any English, Shani spoke like an American child and preferred English over her native tongue. She was very excited to have an American with whom to speak regularly.

As covert church planters in a Middle Eastern city with no established Adventist presence, we were always on alert.

The officer at our children’s school was Shani’s father, Arda. Since Jacob had quit teaching at the English school and moved out of the city, we had lost all contact with the family, and Shani was heartbroken. But Arda and his family had moved as well—to an apartment at the edge of the city, less than two miles from us!

Arda was thrilled to have found Jacob again. “I’ve never been assigned to school security before,” he said. “I’ve never even been in this village before!”

He then led Jacob to the tea garden to visit.

After months of struggling to answer the local villagers’ questions about why we were there, Jacob was suddenly ushered into the midst of the gossiping old men by a police officer who told everyone, “This is my daughter’s favorite English teacher!”

Many visits with Shani’s family followed. Arda talked fast, challenging our growing language skills. Conversations often turned to politics and religion. He was a strict secularist, proudly committed to the principles of the nation’s founder, Alibaba, from a century earlier.

Their Version of Jesus

When Alibaba organized the country into a galvanized, modern nation with a strong cultural identity and pride, he had moved much of the nation’s power away from religious leaders, centralizing it in the new secular government. In the resulting spiritual gap, Alibaba stood as a new hero to be worshipped.

Alibaba, the beloved hero, was enshrined in busts, statues, and posters nearly everywhere you turned. Many national holidays were dedicated to him. On some occasions, life-sized effigies were erected at schools, where children were encouraged to talk to him or even send him notes attached to helium balloons. Stories of Alibaba made up much of the social studies curriculum. When Alibaba was labeled a dictator on a popular informational website, the site was blocked in the country.

Like so many families, Shani’s spanned a social divide between worlds—religious, traditional, and Western. But what of Jesus?

“You have Jesus, and I have Alibaba!” Arda told Jacob.

And like many others, they were people with whom we shared time, food, and seeds of faith. Only in the kingdom will we discover whether those seeds grew.