This time last year I was trying to fit more socks into an already over-crowded suitcase as I prepared to fly to Turkey for a semester abroad. Little did I know that I was about to embark not only on a physical journey but such a deeply spiritual, emotional, and intellectual one as well. I can’t think of a better way of putting it other than that I have donned entirely new lenses through which to see the world.
I also wouldn’t have guessed, that first week of January 2012, that exactly a year later I would be sitting in an apartment in Skopje, Macedonia, writing this.
Part of me feels like I still haven’t even processed everything that we observed, every lecture we heard, every conversation we participated in, every detail we soaked up with our senses. I hope I carried some of the richness of all these experiences back with me in my suitcase, that most of this information is stashed somewhere carefully in my mind. I am so thankful for every mistake, every tearful night, every fervent journal entry, every adventure, every relationship, every way God has showered me with undeserved love, that has brought me to where I am now -- a very imperfect but blessed twenty year-old, a human being pulsating with the delight of being alive.
Last night my sister watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I wasn’t paying much attention until one of Paul Varjak’s lines snagged on my thoughts: “...no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”
I don’t like running into myself. Most of us probably don’t, if we’re really honest with ourselves. You’d think that when you travel you can hide behind all the activity and newness...but the truth is, sometimes when you decontextualize yourself (when you have little control over your surroundings or cannot avoid certain kinds of interactions) and are unable to insulate yourself with the usual busyness that keeps you from searching your soul, you actually discover how lonely and cold you are when you refuse to let Christ transform you. You might see the world, learn everything there is to know, experience a host of ‘good’ new things... and meanwhile let your integrity atrophy.
But thankfully strength of character can be exercised like a muscle. If you’ve built it up and worked it daily, its resilience can hold up anywhere and everywhere -- even under strain and weariness.
You might be in really good shape already, but if not maybe you can think if this as a new kind of New Year’s personal fitness resolution.
Yesterday, a very delightful Macedonian Orthodox woman showed us the Holy Mother of God Perivleptos Church (which dates back to the 10th century!) in Ohrid, enthusiastically narrating the explanations behind each exquisite and ancient fresco. We came upon a mural of winged creatures depicted in ascending movement on a ladder stretching to the heavens. It was Jacob’s ladder. Painted beneath it were Jacob and an angel, locked in silent conflict. “Some angels are going up the ladder,” we were told. According to Orthodox theology, we all climb up the ladder towards God. We can get very far, clambering up the rungs and doing good things and forgiving each other. But we hold bitterness against each other, we sin, and we have to go back down the ladder again. “See how some of the angels are going the other direction, away from God?” I hadn’t noticed this before in the dimly-lit church, but it was true. “When the apocalypse comes, we want to be found going upward -- even if we are at the bottom of the ladder -- keeping God always before us in the struggle and process of doing good. It is never too late to begin, never too late to start again.”
I don’t necessarily agree with Orthodox theology, but I found her statement to be very profound.
When I found the relevant passage in Genesis later I stared and stared at it.
God says to Jacob: “...Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you.” Then Jacob wakes up, and says, “Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it.”
God is everyplace. He is beside us in every new year inevitably marked sooner or later with our fumbling mistakes and failed resolutions and, yes, glorious achievements. He is there when you wrestle with Him. He is there wherever you run, and whenever you run into yourself. And I can tell you from experience, you can run into yourself even in someplace like Istanbul, or Amman, or Jerusalem, or Stuttgart, or Skopje.
C.S. Lewis says it a lot better than I ever could: “If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into...a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.”
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