Lymph Journa # 52 - Sretan Uskrs!

4/9/2012

This was to be posted on Easter but I’ve waited a day in light of an unfolded event that will be obvious as you read.

A few mornings ago I woke thinking of exploration.

I love to explore. 

I love not fully knowing where I am, recognizing that the answers may appear as I proceed through the peculiar challenges of being slightly lost.

I enjoy teaching units on the Age of Exploration (in the fashion of the day I should call it the Age of Exploitation – often with good, if culturally anachronistic, reasons). 

Have you ever been in one of those getting to know you sessions with a new group and were asked,  “When would you most liked to live in the past?”  I don’t answer with the spiritual answer of “I’d like to have walked with Jesus” or some such.  I always answer – “I’d go with Lewis and Clarke and the Corps of Discovery”.  Imagine being the first of your cultural experience and heritage to see the wonders of the Rockies, meet a grizzly bear and canoe to the Pacific.

When I take a walk I don’t like to return the same way I went.  When I’m in a new place I’m tempted to get up early and wander and discover.  This stuff feeds some yearning in my being. 

Following God certainly offers opportunities to feel a bit lost and to explore strange regions both literal and metaphoric.  We’d all like to know just where God is taking us but when we get there it’s often a relief that we were kept in the dark along the way.

M-trips are a concrete example of watching this work.  One of my happiest memory snippets in life happened on an M-trip to Croatia.  The group had traveled to Croatia on Good Friday of Spring break to provide lots of manual labor for a camp that would open in the summer.   

The student portion of the team.

The camp cabins newly stained by our labors

Our first nights were to be spent in an apartment in Zadar, an old coastal city.  We had been left with instructions to call our host (whose house across town we’d already visited) in the morning when we were ready to start the day’s activities.  Simple right?  Here’s my card, call me in the morning.

Simple.  The apartment’s phone was not connected.  OK, must find a pay phone. In a residential zone there were none to be found.  This meant getting in the van and negotiating the ridiculously narrow roads of an old Croatian city – off I set on my own – I am not complaining about this – my joy level is rising with each new impediment because it’s an adventure that requires exploration into the unfamiliar.  I find a pay phone.  That was easy.  But, the pay phone requires a special sort of card.  The card is not available at the small “convenience” market next to the phone.  I must find another type of store, on Easter weekend, early in the morning, in a language I do not begin to get.  (Well, I knew what “Happy Easter” was “Sretan Uskrs” – it was plastered all over the Zagreb airport when we arrived.)

Sretan Uskrs!  Happy Easter! @ Zagreb Airport

Off I set on the road again.  I’m following the coastal road and can feel my smile growing with the challenge.  Two or three stops later I find an outlet for these cards and now head back to the pay phone (there’s not one by the place that sells the cards.)  I scrape off the security cover to reveal the magic code and begin the process of making the call.  Many incomprehensible sounds from the earpiece later I figure out that the phone number on our host’s card was in error – just plain wrong or out of date.  I can’t make the call.  It turns out we’ll have to set out as a group and drive across a city we whisked through under jet lag to find a home we’d visited the night before – no problem and we did.  It was in those moments not knowing where I was going or how it would turn out but confident that it would turn out that I experienced great joy. 

This trip had a few more moments like this including solving our “last night in Zagreb/no place to stay problem” at the hands of an opera singer.  That’s another entry.

In thinking about this on Easter morning (and reminded through the Easter sermon) I realized that we have an advantage over the followers of Jesus so shattered, bereaved and disappointed the way things had worked out on Good Friday.  We know how the story turned out.  We know that God had the perfect plan in what had happened – perfect for His glory, perfect for our peace.  His followers didn’t know on Friday or Saturday but how a resurrection changes things.  And that is the greatest reversal and hope for our lostness and grief we can ever count on.  I knew God had a plan in my not “solving” the phone quandary – real small beans in comparison to the followers of Christ on Easter weekend but we, on this side of Easter, can be confident in confusion.

This particular Easter Day in 2012 the resurrection’s vitality was driven home real hard.  A friend and fellow worker in the Kandern community, Mari Ellen Reeser, passed away following unexpected complications related to a hip replacement surgery.  Diane was visiting with her when Mari Ellen suffered whatever it was that brought on her death.  It was tough for Diane please pray for her.  Pray for this community as Mari Ellen has faithfully poured her heart and soul into the ministry of counseling here.  She is and will continue to be deeply missed.  But Diane was able to tell the docs that Mari Ellen was with the Lord.  Others later affirmed that sure hope to hospital personnel. The power and the promise of the resurrection are just about everything at this time we’ll all face.

Anyway, as I began, I woke up thinking about exploring.  I was born out of time to experience the great moments (for the explorers at least) of discovery and I’ve had to be content with the little moments.  Maybe it’s a good thing to have missed he unfortunate episodes where exploration went too far and turned into ugliness.  But I realized that the story really isn’t over yet.  I live in a community of missionaries and work with the children of missionaries.  I get to hear a great deal about how frontier, exploratory missions gets done creatively and respectfully.  For here and now there are new areas to explore and a great reason to do so.

But what I really started thinking about was someday.  There are delightful biblical indications that when all is said and done the people of God will be established on a New Earth joined by the presence of God in the New Heaven.  Will these people God has redeemed for forever then have the privilege and joy of exploring this new earth?  If so, won’t it be without the mistakes and mixed motives of the past – won’t it just be good?  Won’t it just be an absolute pleasure offered to us by the Giver of all good things?  To wander, to discover, to delight. Sign me up for those expeditions.

Mark Buchanan, in his book, Things Unseen accurately describes the basic human longing to seek and find what is refreshingly new.  He also speaks of our longing for the familiar, for the sense of wholeness that comes with being “at home”.  Both are deep desires of the heart.  My students who are kids raised apart from their passport countries in all kinds of unique situations generally like exploration and are generally confused about “home” but both are valued and important.

But someday both longings will be totally fulfilled. 

When we first came to Germany our family lived across a narrow bend in a side street of downtown Kandern from Mari Ellen and her apartment mate. Sound traveled well in that narrow canyon way of a street.  Mari Ellen had a particularly distinctive laugh – come to think of it so did her apartment mate.  We always knew when they were entertaining and I dare say they must have known much about our then six people in a small apartment.  Mari Ellen loved the hills nearby and the mountains not too much farther from here but degeneration in her hips had come to greatly inhibit her ability to walk those hills and mountains.  There will be that day when those children of God who have embraced and trusted in Christ’s death and resurrection celebrated over this past weekend will have their heads turned at the sound of Mari Ellen’s signature laugh as she delights in painlessly walking the hills of the New Earth.  Yup, the resurrection means everything.

Sretan Uskrs!