I am Nelle Temple Brown. I work for the World Health Organization as the liaison officer for Washington DC, and I live in Falls Church Virginia. It has been a great joy and a delight in both in the lightness of the life and good humor that we had in our group. It has been enjoyable to be part of the group from the first time in the morning until at night when we were all falling asleep in our seats in the bus. We had such a good spirit among us; you know, it has been a wonderful to travel with this group of people, especially with Ali and Sumeyra.
I guess I have had many profound experiences on several different levels: I have had several very profound experiences of prayer during the time that we spent visiting mosques on our trip. I am a person of prayer and I take the time to pray whenever I can. I am very moved to find that praying in a mosque is a very fruitful experience for me. Especially this time that we have been on the trip, there has been a major war going on. So for prayers for the peace, I felt like very blessed, and my prayers go for peace at this place, because I feel that this movement is moving in that direction for our world, and we need that so desperately. I feel the creativity of the work that you have done as in your movement in societal innovation at the cutting edge of discerning the signs of the times in your own culture and for that matter in the world as well, and then finding key points of intervention that can overtime transform society and with a strong, umm, I think this is God's work in the world! I think it happens in different religious traditions, and I think we are all, all people of faith are about that, some way or the other, trying to be surrendered to their own understanding of what they need to be about and work in the world. I think God would not create a world in which those works end up creating wars and conflicts and killing among us. So I think it is a question of becoming a more obedient to our traditions and understandings and being in dialog with others so we find that what's to become work now we have together as we move in that direction. I could say a lot more of the, at the lighter end of what we have done and seen. For me the letter to the Effessians has always been one of the most powerful scriptures in our Bible for me. So to have a chance to go to Effessus was a very very moving thing. I think actually the letter to the Effessians, and some of the other letters to the churches in this part of the world, have had the core vision of the Christian scriptures of what that, what should I say, the coming together of things in faithfulness. In the future that is the core vision, sometimes called 'the vision of the cosmic Christ' or the, you know, and so it is kind of a foreshadowing of that. We may not individually live in the times in which we see a combination of things, and most certainly we won't, but we can see things moving in that direction, and that is a very heartening thing. I could speak more about of all our dear friends here, but I must say, I am also, I am loosing track… I am someone who has been in my entire career working on the problems of development in developing countries. I expected, I realized that, we have been in some of the more developed parts of Turkey, but I expected to see a developing country with pockets of development, and instead I feel like I have seen in a developed country with pockets, which we did not even see many of, of underdevelopment. I wish for the trip because of my own interest we might have seen more of the face of poverty, and the face of what is not yet been accomplished in the society here, because those are many social challenges as well, ones I have been working on in my career on a global scale. Turkey surely in my mind will no longer be at that category of a developing country. It is going to be in another country in my mind. I think it really portends well for the whole movement of development. To find countries such as Turkey which not only developed for only themselves, but as your inviting on this trip has shown, are taking a leadership role to figure out how that transition can be done in most effectively with gifts to give world from that process. So that has also been a great encouragement for me to see. So thank you!
