Hope

It's funny how sometimes God will use a really small thing to give you a little glimpse into His heart. At the edge of Baja, on the banks of the Danube, there is a small stone tower. There is a steep set of steps along the outside of the tower which climb to a small, circular platform at the top, around which runs an iron railing. There is a circular bench in the center of the platform where one can sit and gaze out over the river and the forests which line the far bank. It's a wonderful place to sit and rest in quiet.

What is worthy of note though is the railing which runs along the steps and around the platform. There is a tradition, started in Hungary and now spreading to many other cities, that a couple will take a lock and engrave their names on it. According to the tradition, if they attach the lock to the railing and then throw the keys into the river, then their love will endure forever!

A few of us from the OM Arts team wanted to go out to see the locks. I ended up being a little behind the others, so I spent the half hour walk along the edge of the canal approaching the park by myself. As I was walking, I couldn't help but notice the rolling black clouds of a thunderstorm fast approaching from the other side of the river.

The storm held off long enough for me to get to the park, even though I could see the lightning flickering in the distance. To one side of me there was bright blue sky, full of sun and hope. To the other, ominous black clouds approaching fast.

I sat for a little while on the bench, looking at the locks, and it suddenly hit me that I was seeing a picture of life. Every one of those locks represented a couple, a story, a dream, a hope for the future. Like the bright sunshine, they had seen a time of joy and expectation. Some of those dreams were only born yesterday. Some had been there for many years. Yet, in the background, the storms were approaching. I wondered how many of those dreams had been broken or crushed over the years. How many dreams had turned into nightmares? How many have lived on, struggling against the storm? How many were still flourishing, bringing life and light to others around them?

What I saw was more than a silly tradition and a bunch of old locks on an iron railing. I saw lives of real people. These are the same people Jesus sees. These are the people Jesus has sent us to, to enter into their stories and reflect His love to them, and tell them there is a Savior who is stronger than tradition, a Savior who commands the winds and the waves. I felt a sense of the urgency of that call.

So, I guess God can even talk through a bunch of rusty old locks...

Marsha, painting along the Danube

Hungary Update

Hungary:

As you may remember from previous updates, I spent most of the month of July traveling with an OM Arts team in Hungary. Every time I go out on one of these trips, I learn to appreciate more and more the value of getting out of the office and seeing what exactly all of my IT work at OM USA is actually supporting.

You may also remember that, as we were planning the trip, there were a lot of questions about what exactly we would be doing. I'm learning that this is pretty common – you set your goals and make your plans and collect your materials, and then you hit the ground on the first day and discover what God is really planning for this trip! Goals and plans and preparations are necessary, but you learn to hold on to them with an open hand!

One quick story:

Our OM Arts team was made up of six visual artists working along side the music and dance teams. I will never cease to be amazed at the caliber of people God brought on that team, and how He molded us together in the couple of weeks we spent together! We had a couple of main objectives as we were in the city of Baja (pronounced: Boy-ah). The first one was teaching art classes in the small English school there, and developing friendships with the students. Another main objective though was to create a large scale piece of art which would be a part of the final concert in the main town square of Baja on Friday evening... and be able to do it in five minutes on stage! The concert would bring together music, testimonies, dance and art as a complete presentation of the message of the Gospel. To that end, we spent a lot of time at the start of the week praying for the specific message that the Lord wanted us to communicate with the people of Baja.

The sense that we got was a message of how God takes our brokenness – through sin in and around us and all the wear and tear of this life – and somehow transforms that into beauty. He doesn't always "fix" things in our lives, but He takes those things and transforms them into something that makes us whole, strong and even beautiful. The word we found in Hungarian which best communicated this transformation was, "Csodálatos", which means full of wonder and beauty and awe. It even has the sense of birth and new life. We decided to do the piece as a "graffiti wall", a canvas around 5 feet by 12 feet, which we could do with spray paint and multiple layers of stencils and free hand painting. On Friday (after a LOT of scrambling to pull together all the details), we were able to actually get the "wall" up on stage at the end of the concert, and do the entire piece while Bill Drake and his band played behind us. When we were done, Bill explained the message behind the piece, and then invited people to come up and put their hand prints in paint on the wall as a visible statement of their commitment to be a follower of Jesus.

There were a lot of the students from the school who came up to add their hand prints to the wall, as well as some others from the audience. I was busy behind the stage taking care of some of the stencils and materials we had used to make the piece, but when I came back around the corner to the front of the stage and saw the wall and all the hand prints there, I was struck by the thought that each one of those prints represented a person, a life, a story of someone who was making a step forward. Each of those steps were different – some were probably more serious or thought out than others – but each was still a step. It was more than just a pretty piece of art up there on stage. It was God using art to communicate the deeper message of His Love to the people of Baja.