Reflection

It's been a month now since I left for my most recent trip to Eastern Europe, and though I hadn't intended to take this long, it's a good time to reflect on the trip. It's always helpful for me to reflect by comparison. This time round, an easy comparison was made via our return trip to the States. We left Romania early Monday morning, July 31, and flew to Frankfurt, Germany, for our onward connections to home. Arriving at 7:30am, though, we had almost six hours until our flight to New York, so our team stowed our bags for a while and hopped the train to Mainz, a nearby suburb. Mainz was a great little diversion. It was the birthplace of Gutenberg and still has a fair amount of medieval charm to it. Of course, it's a little touristy, but not too much, and we really enjoyed spending a few hours poking around the cathedral, the Gutenberg memorial, and just walking around western Europe for a while as somewhat of a reintroduction to "the West." It was this time in Germany, however, that provides my basis for comparison and really got me to thinking about the trip that we just completed.

When I've traveled in Eastern Europe, I often find myself thinking that these trips are somewhat "exotic," because everything could use a good scrubbing, some new bricks, and a good coat of paint. It's no knock against the people, because they're wonderful. Eastern Europe simply is run down and crumbling in a lot of ways. It's a testament to the effects of decades of non-Biblical thinking and that way of running a society. Western Europe on the other hand is much like the States, only with smaller cars and funny electrical outlets. When we stepped onto the streets of Germany, things were shiny, clean, new, and familiar. And that is a testament to the economic and cultural might of a historically Christian nation and portion of the Continent. Germany is sad, though, because it is at the forefront of the secular humanist debacle that has become Western Europe. As I walked the streets of Mainz, I thought of that. The churches are simply museums now and the praise that Gutenberg gets in town is not because he brought the Bible to the masses but because he was a technological innovator for his time.

I am in the middle of a great book by George Weigel called "The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics without God." The book chronicles the last couple centuries of intellectual history in Europe and America and the devastating consequences that have been wrought by removing God and Christianity from society. Western Europe is literally dying demographically and killing itself spiritually in an effort to "free itself" from the constraints of Christianity. Rather than finding their freedom within and because of Christianity, Europeans have become rabid secularists. America is only but so far behind, too. But Eastern Europe still clings to the hope found in Christianity in many ways. Sure their mindset (collective) was molded by the Communists for seventy years, but there are definite roots of a previous era still firmly planted, and that's the contrast I see. There is some hope left there for solid change and revival.

I'm excited but trepidacious at the same time. Whenever I travel to Eastern Europe, I see God doing wonderful things. However, my human weakness always questions whether we're too late to make a large-scale difference. As poor, desperate, and hungry as the believers in the countries I've visited are, I wonder if the influence of western investments, globalization communication and entertainment, and ascendancy to EU membership has already pushed them over a precipice from which recovery is all but impossible. But with God all things are possible, right? I know they are, and I must continue to pray that way and pray for Him to change my unbelief. Pray with me, won't you?

More to come...