Norine Brunson, the wife of an American pastor jailed on bogus terrorism charges in Turkey, had little hope of meeting with Sec. of State Rex Tillerson in Ankara this week.
But the North Carolina native flew to the Turkish capital city anyway because she already had a plane ticket, and Andrew, her husband, had told her that he felt that God had told him she would meet America’s top diplomat.
And it turned out that he was right.
“On Monday, Andrew told me he felt the Lord had said I would meet with Sec of State Tillerson. On Tuesday, I was told by the embassy and another senator that the meeting would NOT happen. I decided to come to Ankara anyway and arrived last night,” Norine Brunson wrote on Facebook Thursday, just after she met for 20 minutes with Tillerson.
Tillerson, a former CEO at ExxonMobil, had shown no indication that he would meet with Brunson. His only scheduled event was with Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
It is not clear what was said in the meeting or if Tillerson discussed Brunson’s case with Erdogan. Reports of the meeting focused on discussions about the civil war in Syria.
But Jordan Sekulow, the executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), says that Tillerson’s meeting with Norine Brunson is a positive development in the case to help free Andrew.
“This is a powerful sign that the Trump Administration is taking the plight of this wrongfully imprisoned U.S. citizen very seriously,” said Sekulow, who is working to help free the pastor.
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