[Editor’s note: The purpose of this issue is to let TCKs share their stories. Elif ’s belief system does not align with MF’s understanding of God, humanity, and sexuality; but we love Elif, and are thankful we get to share real stories like this one that represent a journey some TCKs have taken.]

When I was six months old, my born-and-raised American parents moved themselves and their young kids to Turkey, settling into a neighborhood where most had never met a foreigner, much less spoke English.

My parents learned Turkish and settled into the local culture over the years, while I grew into a child expressed through both the English language native to my parents, and the Turkish language native to my community. I loved Turkey, saw it as home, and considered my American-ness as sort of an inherited and fun fact more than anything else. I didn’t like being identified as the foreign kid—I didn’t feel foreign! Turkey made sense to me because it was home. When we visited family in America once every two or three years, that was when I felt foreign and lost.

As I got older, I learned how to balance and embrace my TCK-ness. Most people thought it was cool that I was bilingual and had travelled to many different countries. Being of blended cultures was fun, but the more stressful question was: If your family is American, why are you here?

This was a tough question—I actually didn’t know the full answer for most of my life. Until I was about 13 or 14, I truly believed we lived in Turkey because my parents liked it there. That’s it. They also owned and ran a business, but I really believed we were in Turkey mainly because they wanted to be. They were fine with letting me believe this, so I would not carry around the weight of a different, more sacred motive: They were missionaries hoping to spread the Christian gospel.

My overall understanding of my upbringing, even after I realized our life was funded by evangelical Americans, was that we loved Jesus, we loved Turkey, and Jesus told us to love everyone, so we did. Over my entire life, I can recall only one conversation with a friend where I attempted to convince her Jesus was better than their prophet. I shudder at the memory of that conversation—it felt so unnatural to me to draw this strange space between myself and a dear friend.

Throughout my life, I saw myself firmly as a cultural ambassador rather than a religious one. My gospel growing up was this: America is not as great as everyone says it is, and Turkey is way more awesome than anyone realizes. From childhood to young adulthood, I proclaimed this to anyone who would listen.

I was privileged to be raised in a wide world and believed each person and each place was the owner of a story that I could learn something from. By contrast, I experienced many Christian Westerners, particularly Americans, as being quite prideful of their culture of origin. The brand of “patriotism” coming from some Americans was, to me, at best abrasive and at worst oppressively imperial. I often felt that many of my American friends and their families were in Turkey because they believed Turks needed their American answers and civilized solutions to their societal and spiritual struggles. Meanwhile, I was fiercely loyal to the Turkish culture that had lovingly raised me and birthed my values and was firmly defensive against all who wished to change their cultural expressions.

In the spiritual language of my upbringing, I would’ve said that God left fingerprints of divinity across all peoples and cultures he created, and we should embrace their unique expressions rather than attempt to change them:

Then Peter began to speak: “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right.” (Acts 10:34–35).

From birth to 18, I witnessed adults who took the love of Jesus really seriously. So seriously they were willing to set their own self-interest aside in the name of embodying a higher love, even for just a single person. I learned from their lived example that the essential value of our faith was that humans deserved love and care simply because God created them. No person was beyond the love of Jesus, so why should we treat anyone as anything less than beloved? If we are all children of God, then aren’t we all beloved family to each other too?

My faith upbringing taught me that God is love.1 This made sense to me. If the spirit of God lived in me, then I had the capacity and even duty to channel that love to the world around me. In my quest to effectively love all people, my life became an exercise in cultural interpretation and code-switching. If I wanted to express love to all people, then I would need to learn all the ways that love is expressed by people.

For example, loving my American friends meant saying nice things about their character and buying them gifts, while loving my Turkish friends meant spending time doing homework and chores together and ordering identical lunches. I learned that loving my American friends looked like making them feel unique and special, whereas loving my Turkish friends looked like sharing in community and collective comfort.

A firm sense of global citizenry, combined with the ideals of unconditional love for all, laid the groundwork for my values system. I adored finding Easter eggs of my faith values in every unique culture; it built my belief in the universal embrace of Jesus’ love. As a TCK with a family who took a position of humility and learning from new cultures, I gained an understanding of how the same core faith values of love and community can be exhibited differently based on cultural contexts.

I moved away from home at age 18, when I headed to university in America. I had never even lived in a different city in Turkey, much less in a completely different country. Seeking a community where I could anchor my core values, I started attending a church about a 15-minutes walk from my campus. While it was an energized and fun church to be a part of, I also found it to be hollow in its community promises. I thought Christian community was about learning from and leaning on each other, but I saw little of that in this young Christian church. I remained hopeful though, as their core espoused values were “worship,” “family,” and “justice,” which aligned pretty closely with my expression of Christian faith. I figured I must just be missing how it is expressed in this culture; I just needed time to understand this context.

However, I grew increasingly confused as I discovered that the community I had been lacking and desperately hungry for since leaving my TCK world was most thoroughly expressed among my queer friends. The queer folks I met exemplified community care, compassion, and relentless collective love in a force comparable to the most dedicated Christians I had ever met (and boy have I met some dedicated Christians). They not only spoke about justice, family, love over hate, and community care but lived these things out in an easily identifiable way.

The final tear in the veil of my naivete arrived in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Still in my teens and learning about the real world, I was faced with a blatant and painful reality: My evangelical Christian communities across the spectrum were disappointingly silent in the face of the pleas of my Black brothers and sisters, and worse, some were even actively oppressive towards these cries. I witnessed the exposure of a harmful and racist side of American ideals, and instead of marching toward justice, as I expected based on my own understanding of Christian faith, most Christians in my world went silent.

Added to this silence was the deep quiet of the pandemic. The nagging cognitive dissonance in my mind was slowly starved of the noise it had hidden under. Once my external world got quiet, my unacknowledged inner thoughts got loud. Over months of often painful reflection, several personal revelations emerged. I love Jesus. Like Jesus’s teachings, I believe all humans deserve love and care simply because they exist. I know very little to be certain. Seeking certainty in theology will not bring me peace. I’m not sure I can follow “Christianity” if I really believe in the teachings of Jesus. And perhaps most earth-shatteringly, I’m definitely not just an ally but rather an undeniable member of the queer community.

I feared what my coming out as gay meant for my faith. Mostly because I had always been taught that the two were incompatible. But the older I became, the more life I witnessed, the more people I met, the more I was sure that God and my faith were much bigger and broader than I had ever dared to believe. I felt the divine presence within me grow even deeper as I accepted the truest expression of my created self.

My mind and heart began to expand, discovering new heights and depths of divine love that I had never previously allowed myself to explore. The only commonality I can confidently identify across all bonded communities is love. Its expressions differ; its existence doesn’t. I won’t attempt to comprehensively define love here, but I will present a simple teaching from my faith: God is love. If God is love, then love is divine. In my experience thus far, expressing this divine love to each other is the closest we can possibly get to embodying God.

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. (1 John 4:16)

Radically loving community is world altering. That is the gospel of my life. My radically loving Christian and Turkish communities built my worldview. When I found the disappointing limits in the love of my Western evangelical Christian community, my radically loving queer community changed my life with their relentless acceptance of my hurt, confused, imperfect, evolving self. I uncovered within the queer community a shared love so powerful that nothing could shut it down, neither disagreement, nor misunderstanding, nor oppression. In that space, with those radically loving folks, I felt myself step into the next layer of who I was created to be.

I both receive and express love to the world around me freely and joyfully. I love the teachings of Jesus, his unprecedented calls to leave judgment behind and focus on compassionate care. I love the lessons I learn from every person I’ve dated, every friend I’ve had a deep conversation with, every stranger I bonded with over a drink at a bar, every acquaintance I connected with despite language barriers, and every future human I’ll share a smile with. I grew up trying to find the bridge between people of different cultures so they could learn from each other. The best bridges I’ve ever built were made from love. And not the red-and-pink-Valentine’s type of romantic love. I’m still referring to divine love here, the kind of deep human love borne from simply caring about another human’s experience and existence.

I often joke with my parents that you can’t raise a child in a theology that teaches you to “love everyone” and “seek the spirit of God everywhere” and not expect that child to then grow into a bisexual who freely loves many and seeks spirituality through many cultural avenues. Some may say I took the lessons a little too much to heart, but I really do believe in their core value.

Being raised in a multicultural environment and holding many cultural expressions of love to be simultaneously true expanded my ideas of what a loving God looks like. It allowed me to observe and learn from the existence of divine love in every community, beyond just Western Christian expression. It allowed me to love deeper, wider, and freer, expanding into the radical community lover I was created to be. As an adult TCK, my expressions of love are just as diverse and unique as my cultural upbringing.