{Berlin} Freedom

“And so I was free, so spontaneously, I was suddenly free […] I still thought like a prisoner, though. It’s impossible to grasp that you are suddenly free. After six years a prisoner. You just don’t know what to do with your freedom.” 

       Zvi Steinitz, Israel 

On the last day that I was in Berlin, along with a group of people from my team, I visited the location of the former Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in the small town of Oranienburg just North of the city of Berlin. In college, I minored in history and the majority of the classes I took to complete that minor were on WWII and the Holocaust. However, none of my classes prepared me for physically entering into a place of such oppression and darkness. On the road leading into the former camp, the original wall displays facts and quotes from prisoners. The quote above comes from one such sign and demonstrates a reality that is both overwhelmingly impossible to understand and frustratingly true to my own life. Please don’t misunderstand. I want to be clear that I am not saying that I understand what it feels like to be freed from the type of captivity that these prisoners experienced. However, is this not the same reality that we, as believers, experience as we try to live “a good Christian a life”?

“It is impossible to grasp that you are suddenly free.”

The moment a believer chooses to surrender to the Lord and accept Christ as their Savior and Lord, they are free. Galatians 5:1 says, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Paul wouldn’t need to tell us not to submit to the yoke of slavery if freedom came naturally. The freedom these prisoners experienced was immediate and complete, however, they did not just walk back into normal life. They cowered. They feared.

Just like me. I submit myself to the yoke of slavery when I cower from the Lord in shame and guilt over my sin. When I convince myself that if I just tried harder, I could be someone worthy of the Lord’s favor. When I pridefully elevate myself to a place that is only designed for Christ. The Gospel is SO MUCH BETTER than that life. The Gospel tells me that my sin is repulsive and deserves death, but that is has been paid in full by Christ crucified. The Gospel tells me that I can’t try hard enough to make up for the depth of my sin–that trying to work harder only pridefully rejects the beauty of grace. The Gospel tells me that He must increase, and I must decrease (John 3:30).

I am praying earnestly that I would live like a free member of God’s family. That freedom would resonate deep within my identity. Lord, let me not go back to my captivity.

The full sign displaying the quote above.

A sign at the memorial for those murdered during the Holocaust

The ‘kill zone”. An area in front of the fence where prisoners were shot without thinking if they tried to enter.

{Berlin} Traveling Home

Note: I spent the last week in Berlin, Germany sharing the Gospel with college students and coming alongside the short and long term staff that live in Berlin. 

I have officially been home for a total of 20 hours. This morning I woke up at 6:30 thanks to jet lag and the weirdness that comes with traveling 6 hours back in time. I wanted to stay awake, so I went to Fusion Brew* and set out to process the last week of my life. This is what I processed:

 Maybe because it was so recent in my mind, maybe because of the jet lag, but all that I can think of is yesterday at the airport. Most of the conversations that happened amongst my teammates were somehow related to all the things we were looking forward to when we got home. It is true that I like ice in my drinks. I like free refills and I really like free water. However, as I think about all of the things that I like that are in America but not in Germany, it feels kind of ridiculous to be focusing on these things. To be sure, there is something beautiful about the anticipation of returning home. I can’t help but wonder, though–how long would I have had to stay in Berlin to become comfortable? How long would it take for me to forget that I was simply a stranger in a foreign land waiting with anticipation to return home to a place of true rest?

How often I forget that I am merely a traveler–disoriented, unfamiliar with the world in which I am living, seeking desperately to find some words in a language that makes sense- seeking  a temporary establishment that I know well enough for it to bring me some sense of comfort.

Jesus, make me aware of how foreign I am to this world. Make me desperate to turn to the only words that make sense–Yours, written in the Bible. Let me push through the exhaustion of not knowing where I belong and make it my expectation to serve you here and glorify you here in order to get a glimpse of my home with you, the place that I will find true rest.  

*P.S. Coffee is better in America. 

 

It would take more than two stadiums the size of this to fit all of the students living in Berlin. Each one is in need of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

 

This picture was taken at the East Side Gallery-a portion of the Berlin wall that has commissioned artwork that freely expresses various political and creative messages. What an example of redemption!

 

The Brandenburg Gate- Possibly the most iconic image of Berlin. It has been photographed through nearly every moment of Berlin’s history and stands now as an open pathway between East and West Berlin.

The End of a Season

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

The quote above is the final line written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in, arguably, the most compelling and celebrated American novel ever published. It is the wisdom that narrator Nick Carraway chooses to leave with the reader after a summer of indulgence, delusion, and despair. Now, I will admit that I am biased about this particular novel. Since I first read it in sophomore English (8 years ago?! Ew.), it has occupied a part of my heart that wishes for a life that is completely and utterly unlike my own. However, when I think of it now, it is with a  small amount of sadness. Nick Carraway’s final assessment of humanity is that we can’t stop trying to go back in time–to recreate the past. Although the beauty of the language still makes my heart flutter, (I am 100% proud of my literary nerdiness, btw.) I no longer want to live Gatsby’s life. I no longer want to experience the life of the tragically beautiful Daisy, a woman with the world at her fingertips.

Since graduation a few days ago, I have found myself feeling sad and thinking about how things might never be the same again. I’ve spent too much time this week thinking about how to keep my life from progressing. I’ve let myself become lazy. Why? I think that I have pinpointed the problem. I am scared terrified. As you may or may not know, I have committed the next year of my life to serving the Lord through a ministry that I am a part of on ISU’s campus called Cru. This requires me to do a pretty significant amount of work before I can “report” to campus. And I am, and always have been, terrified  of failure. The Lord has taught me this same lesson over and over again in the past few years, but He is teaching it to me again–that I must submit myself to Him. And I have been digging my heels in and fighting “against the current”, trying not to learn it–trying to continue to define myself by worldly success. But that can’t keep happening. I can’t go back and recreate the past any more than time can just stop and wait for me to be ready to move into the future. Scripture tells me that  The Lord will “establish my steps.” (Psalm 16:9). It does NOT say, “The Lord will make your steps for you–just sit back and wait.”  So, something needs to happen, and I am the one that needs to make it happen. I am so blessed to have a God that doesn’t give up on me. He has modeled for me what is good and what is right.

God does not look at my past. He has forgiven my past, and it has been wiped totally clean. Why then, should I look at my past and try to figure out how to fix the things that have gone wrong? From now on, I am not going to. I am going to take steps to move forward. No more thinking about what could-have-been. The Great Gatsby is still my favorite book. It probably always will be. However, I am not going to let the words that Fitzgerald so artfully crafted define the course of my life. Instead, I am going to trust in the Lord and let his words define my life.

Joseph Campbell, a well-known lecturer, once said, “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” While Mr. Campbell was probably not a Christian, he did study comparative religion in depth, and what he has to say here is incredibly applicable to our lives as followers of Christ.  The Lord has plans for us, for me, that are far greater than what we can even imagine for ourselves. So now, I am going to go let the Lord use me. What a blessing that he would choose to do so! He wants to use you too. Let him.

Take Two

So, I have a confession. I’ve tried this before–this whole blogging thing. I think it failed because I tried to be very specific with what I wanted to write–all the plans for my wedding. This time, I am not going to claim to know where this blog is going to go. I’m not going to make bold declarations of how I am going to blog every day or how the content of my blog will be exceptionally brilliant. I’m not planning anything. I’m just going to be honest and I’m going to be truthful. So, I’m going to start with one of the most truthful things I’ve ever written. It’s kind of long so try to bear with me. I promise every post won’t be this long!  This is what I turned in when I was asked to write a reflection at the end of my Senior Seminar (which was all about Ernest Hemingway) about what I have learned in college. 

It has taken me four and a half years, three colleges, two different declared majors, a minor, countless hours of reading, countless hours of writing, and a whole lot of tears, but here I am. This is it. Trying to synthesize the last four and a half years seems daunting. I am a completely different person. College has a way of doing that to you. Changing you. As we packed up the car to leave for my move-in day freshman year, I would never have thought that, today, my life would look the way that it does. I am going to student teach next semester and then graduate with a degree in English Education. What? If you had told 18-year-old Autumn that, in four years, she would not be studying her life away at a prestigious law school, she would have laughed at you. But that’s fitting because reality is funny, right? If nothing else, the last four years have taught me that change is good. It is necessary. That’s why, during my time of crisis, my time where I realized I-hate-politics-why-would-I-have-ever-chosen-political-science-as-my-major?, my natural instinct was to choose English as a major. My parents told me I would never get a job with this degree. I might not. My friends told me I was the last person they would ever expect to transfer out of Loyola University to go to a state school. I might have been. Nonetheless, English was the right choice. If I have learned nothing else about literature, it is that it is meant to change you. It stays with you—those few words that haunt you with their beauty or sting you with their reality. You cannot escape it. But you can harness it. Literature has taught me that you are supposed to do everything you can to experience life and that sometimes, the mundane can be beautiful. (I mean, Hemingway, Right?!) If this is not your experience, if literature has not changed you, then I am pretty sure you’re doing it wrong. I have grown as a person. My picture of who I am in relationship to others has changed.

My instinct now is to hesitate to include the next part of who I am. Why? Fear of judgment, I guess. Ultimately that doesn’t matter, because if I am going to be who I say I am, then this part is essential. A huge part of the change that I have experienced in college has come as a result of the Lord working in my life. It is my belief that, at one time, the world was perfect. That it was created by a loving and perfect God. Then, we messed up. Isn’t that what we do best? Isn’t that why Hemingway scribbled things out and started over again and again? But this mess up was different, we couldn’t just start over and fix it. It separated us from God. It put the entire world into turmoil. It caused all the hurt, pain, and bad that we see. It is still a part of who we are—it changed our entire nature to be now positioned against God. But God knew that this would happen and, in his divine knowledge, he planned a crazy, unbelievable, scandalous rescue mission—to bring us back to him. Even though we were the ones who messed up. He sacrificed his son-Jesus. Jesus had to live this sucky, messed up life we live, but he had to do it without one mess up. No scribbles. But he did it. And then he died. He was killed—sacrificed—for all the times that I have messed up, that you have messed up, that anyone has messed up. But he did not stay dead. He conquered death. And once he was done, he offered us himself. He told us that, if we want to, we can someday experience the perfection that was at the beginning of creation. We just have to accept that and give ourselves to him, our whole selves. Now, it would be hard in the mean time. It would be discouraging. It would feel hopeless. That is what I have experienced. Hard, discouraging moments that change me and hopeful beautiful moments that change me. But I know that someday I will experience perfection. I will get there.