My first trip by plane was to go from home in California to my grandparent’s farm in Missouri when I was four weeks old. From the Mayflower to homesteading to modern day travel, there is a long history of pioneering and travel in my genes.
In 2006 the opportunity arose to go to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with some family members and some of their friends, and a deeply rooted travel instinct made it easy to join them. We landed in Munich with a spring rain falling and went directly to Dachau. It was a sobering beginning to walk through the same gates so many people entered and never departed, and continue through a museum experience created to remember the people who lived the concentration camp horrors.
Mountains surrounded every destination while many valleys held brilliant, clear, blue-green glacial water. While in Switzerland, we took a short bus trip out of Lucerne through a long valley surrounded by cliffs and waterfalls. We boarded four cable cars to climb almost 10,000 feet to the top of the Schilthorn, one of many peaks in the heart of the Alps. At the top, we found sunshine, snow, and a 360-degree view of endless rugged peaks. After two cable car stops down the mountain we arrived at a village called Murren for lunch. It sat below the snow and was filled with neatly kept homes accented with flowers.
We circled back into Germany to Neuschwanstein, a well-known Bavarian castle with only 14 rooms of the fairytale completed before King Ludwig’s mysterious death. The castle sits on a hill with breathtaking views into the valley. To those who like to climb as I do, ascending the hill beyond the castle a grander view from a bridge is vast and spectacular with castle, lake, and valley below. Wagner’s operas were the romantic inspiration for the rooms that were completed.
In Salzburg, we visited a church with five organs. How do organists coordinate together when their backs are to each other? Churches held a new fascination after a lifetime of protestant drywalled sanctuaries. The Wieskirche, or “Church in the Meadow” in Bavaria rested in open country space. Its rococo style was bright and ornate with many windows welcoming bright sunshine. If the interior did not lift your heart, stepping out the door into the surrounding green meadows with expansive views of mountains and pastures would bring fresh air to your soul.
The world opens up when you go to a new land or try a new experience. The ground opens up when you sit on a slide in a salt mine and pick your feet up to slide down the polished wood into the depths of the earth below. And your heart opens with a crack when you look up outside the mine to a mountain known as Eagle’s Eye that housed the tyrant who brought horrors on the innocent victims remembered just a few days before at Dachau.
Only after I had been home for a time did I realize that my view of the world had enlarged, and I had changed. I was awakening to the reality that my twenty-something peers in Europe were secular because they knew church to be a cold and mostly empty building complete with meaningless rituals and burdens.
My church has a presence in these countries, but at this time no one was talking about the mission fields in the first world. Over the next few years, I began to see how our country is gradually following Europe into the same secularism, although maybe 15-20 years behind. Through this process, it has become a practice to observe and ask what can be learned for Kingdom work from my travel experiences.
After reading through 1 Corinthians, and then the following from Acts of the Apostles, I found a wonderful account of how Paul adapted ministry to the people in Greece,
“In preaching the gospel in Corinth, the apostle followed a course different from that which had marked his labors at Athens. While in the latter place, he had sought to adapt his style to the character of his audience; he had met logic with logic, science with science, philosophy with philosophy. As he thought of the time thus spent, and realized that his teaching in Athens had been productive of but little fruit, he decided to follow another plan of labor in Corinth in his efforts to arrest the attention of the careless and the indifferent. He determined to avoid elaborate arguments and discussions, and ‘not to know anything’ among the Corinthians ‘save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.’ He would preach to them ‘not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power’” (1 Corinthians 2:2, 4 KJV).1
Call to Action
Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
These few words through the power of the Holy Spirit will save a soul, a city, a country, and the whole world. They only need to be spoken by all of us.
- Ellen G. White, The Acts of the Apostles (Mountain View, California: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1911), 244
