Epiphany

Few people can identify the moment they "grew up". The term is too broad, the event too weighty to contain a single moment.

We can, however, identify moments when our ideas changed. Sometimes they changed so drastically that our mind, heart, and soul were forever altered.

This post details one of those moments. It happened in the summer of 1987, when I traveled to Germany. My friend, who had been a foreign exchange student in my high school, lived in Hamburg. Her family escorted me to a carnival on the East German border.



A banquet of sights, scents, and colors danced around me. Balloons. Festive music. Children laughing. The waft of sizzling German food.

I smiled as we wandered the sidewalk festivities. Soon, something grabbed my attention. The music faded. The colors muted as I walked to the edge of the carnival.

And looked across the divide.

At a wall.

The grey wall captured my attention. It obliterated the music, scents, and scenes, seeming to suction them away. I stood, motionless, and watched. But I wasn't the only one watching. Across the way, a tall, stern man stood guard. He wore a huge gun strapped to his back, with rounds of ammunition traveling shoulder to hip. He, too, was colorless. When he marched back and forth, it was the rigid, purposeful movement of old age. And he was a young man, not much older than me at the time.



At the wall, all was silent. I watched the blatant, unabashed display of life to my right, and the utter absence of joy to my left. I watched.

And watched.

The contrast riveted me. This was not the life I knew in my quiet, unassuming Ohio hometown. This wasn't just across the world. It was a different world.

Had not my friend come to retrieve me, I might have watched all day.

That experience changed me. For years, it remained a neat story, one I could tell my friends two years later when the Berlin Wall fell. But as I grew and gained insight, I realized that the Berlin Wall marked the moment where the world opened up like a split watermelon, and I peeked at the gooey gunk inside.

Here and now, we know no walls of communism guarded by armed soldiers who never smile. We know only the carnival, many of us, and take for granted that carnival living is eternal.

How blessed we are, and how unusual in the course of history. Though these eyes have not seen, these ears have not heard, and these hands have not touched...should trial or catastrophe come, I'll know that we are simply taking our turn in human history--not as outliers, but as full participants.

The Berlin Wall gave me two prayers:

1. Lord, continue to protect us, if it be Your will.

2. Lord, if we suffer, let us remember You, first and foremost.

How about you, readers? Has a single experience changed your view of the world?