Mecklenburg

There are four hours left of our 9 hour drive from North-eastern Germany down to the Bodensee; home. I have been gone with our school principal, the childrens’ ministry leader and 6 other Bible school students on an outreach to a very different part of Germany. On the eastern side of Germany, an hour away from the Baltic sea, Mecklenburg has a distinctively different feel than the western side of the Iron Curtain of Germany. Many of the buildings are older and more simple than the quaint and cutesie ones in the West. Grocery stores contain products from the GDR era; products that, not 30 years ago, would have been the only ones to fill the shelves. We drove nearly 1,000 km up there to spend 6 days with a small village community. Our ‘home base’ was an old mansion sort of building turned into a transitional home for drug addicts, run by a small number of Christians. It was a huge old mansion in the middle of an expanse of wheat fields, and upon entering you were faced with an old, wide windy staircase leading upstairs, a large brick fireplace in the main room, with high backed armchairs clustered around. It felt like a fairy tale mansion.

Our group was dispersed among several host houses where we were to stay. One of my old roommates and I were placed with a family with two kids near our age, and we were delighted to find that we had our own apartment. The family had a small house next to their home, and we had the whole place to ourselves. It was such a blessing to be able to come back from the busy programs throughout the day and to be able to retreat into our little home for some rest. We spent the time on Thursday and Friday visiting local schools and sharing about our home countries; Canada, Pakistan and the US, and performing music for them. I joined Daniela, the kids’ ministry leader on Friday in an elementary school where we ran a longer program, with games, drama, a Bible story and songs. I developed a new appreciation and sympathy for teachers during the school visits. I found that the younger kids were more attentive and interested while I spoke about Pakistan, but the older they got, the more bored their expressions became. The final class I did on Thursday consisted of 12^th graders, and they appeared so uninterested, into the first couple minutes of my presentation, I was unnerved and discouraged. Apparently it’s not cool to show interest. Whatever. Cheers to the teachers that persevere with apathetic zoned out students. In the evening we ran a program for a large group of rehabilitation people from the area. I had a conversation with a man afterwards that was mostly over my head, as he was old and talked so slurred that I could barely make out his words. Mostly I smiled and made small affirming comments. This method is highly effective for such conversations.

Saturday we ran a program all morning for a group of kids in the process of making their confirmation to the church and we ate breakfast with them. We had a small break in the afternoon before having a coffee time and program at the transition home with their residents. I watched the men (they were all men, apart from one woman) as our group played music for them, and their eyes seemed to drift to a different world. Some stared out the window. Music is so powerful, I sometimes wonder if it doesn’t bring agonising pain from memories for some people.

That evening we had a program for the youth in the area, and Sunday morning we led the local church service and I took the kids for Sunday school with one of the Bodenseehof staff members. We had a lunch of hot Goulash and I talked with one of the men from the rehab house who had put his faith in Christ. He was born in Bolivia but spent much of his life in Germany, so we were talking about the shared confliction of multi-cultural-ness and confusion of identity that comes with it. He said something very valuable to me. He went out for a smoke, and when he came back he said, “I’ve thought of a picture that I’d like to give you and I hope you can take with you. You are like a tree, and you are growing and becoming stronger, as you learn more about Jesus and as His fruit becomes more abundant in your life. You’re discouraged sometimes because you want to have these roots sticking into a ‘home’ and there is no single home. Your roots are always coming up, and you’re unsettled. But you don’t have to compromise the growth and strength of the tree for the position of the roots. If you have roots deeply planted in Jesus, it won’t matter when your tree gets moved. It can be moved wherever and whenever, and the roots will stay deep, and the tree will stay strong, because Jesus will not change.” I know this is a simple image, but it is exactly what I needed to hear at the time. This big burly Bolivian/German man in his 40’s with a love for Jesus shared a piece of truth that deeply touched me and encouraged me.

We said sad goodbyes and then travelled about an hour to Guestrow. Guestrow and its area is apparently the most atheistic in the world. 79% of the state of Mecklenburg is not affiliated with a religion. This city had a weird feel. Being one of the most unemployed cities in Germany, it has a depressed, hopeless feel and is reflected in the faces of its citizens. We met a small team of people who have begun a ministry with the kids of a massive apartment complex. They run tutoring sessions all year for kids who want help with homework, activities on certain days of the week, and Bible studies. Many of the children come from broken homes or with unemployed parents. It is normal for girls to be pregnant and begin raising their own families as early as 13. One of the ministry workers told us that it is likely the young men and women start families so early in hopes of redeeming the hopeless and depressing lives they live with their own families. It was very encouraging to see what the small community of believers was doing in Guestrow. When we went to the service that evening, all 30 or so of the members were hospitable and open, very excited to have us visiting them. The way they treated one another and us, and spoke of the family of Christ, I felt like I had a taste of what the early church was like. They shared greetings from other churches and individuals and shared prayer requests, just the way I imagine the community of Christians would have been back in Paul’s day. It was simple, open and beautiful. We ate dinner together and I talked with several women. One elderly lady in particular stands out in my mind. Her name was Heidi, and I asked her if she would tell me a bit about the old eastern side, before the reunification. She became very animated and said that it was like a big family. “We were so close and open with one another, and looked after each other like a family. Everything was shared and fair. It was so different. Not like now, with people selfishly doing things for themselves. Now everyone is so independent and self-serving, they speak sh** about one another behind each others’ backs. It wasn’t like that then…”

I suppose I was a little surprised to hear how much she missed the days of the division, seeing as so much of the world (at least the Western world) portrays it as an unjust, awful situation for the east. But sometimes I wonder if they really were (and are) happier than we are with all our Western ‘freedoms’. I don’t believe the situation was as ideal as Heidi describes it, and I am sure she appreciates more of the freedoms that she has now than she will admit to, but she still has a point. We are selfish. Capitalism is selfish! If communism or socialism worked the way they were envisioned initially, and if resources really were shared among the population, and if we as humans just loved one another enough to work together towards an equal society, it would be beautiful. But it’s not. Because we are humans; because we can’t stop thinking about ourselves.

As I was about to go to bed that night, some of the young people from church invited us out to go explore the city’s 800 year old church. Sleep could wait. We received a behind-the-scenes tour of the church by a young woman who has a job there as a tour guide. She showed us a secret painting behind the altar, and a monument from the First World War, and took us up to the top of the bell tower, normally blocked off to normal visitors. We walked around on the inside of the ceiling of the church, on planks spanning over the bee-hive like bulges of the domed roof. We kept going up about 5 levels until we reached a somewhat dodgy-looking structure of a platform, with an equally dodgy-looking ladder leading up to the final level. We climbed up and on the last level were able to walk out on to the small balcony previously used by trumpet blowers. Daddy, I thought of you a lot through the church tour—you would have been in heaven! And that was the last day of our outreach. Now we’re home. Outreach didn’t feel much like we ‘reached out’. It was more the world reaching in to me. The people I thought I would be encouraging and helping ended up doing just that for me and teaching me precious lessons. I think God takes our expectations and inverts the reality sometimes so that we don’t get too puffed up with pride. It’s effective.