Through a Different Lens
Oct 8th, 2007 by lorenozanne
You could go to Google or Alta Vista and get a gorgeous picture of wheat set against the gently-rolling foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, with the sunset casting radiant beams on the autumn wheat and brilliant fall colors of the leaves, but you would be missing the other side of the picture. That is, if you turned around 180 degrees, you would likely see a highway, or a subdivision, or a construction project. You couldn’t see what is behind this field of wheat. This picture is not just any one of millions of wheat fields in the midwest or the world. It is unique in all the world.
It is hard to put into words the significance of this field of wheat to me… It represents a God-sighting so huge that it changed the future course of my life. Nearly 8 years ago, Christina and I were invited by our church to go on a trip to Poland, to help lead an Outreach English Camp in central Poland. At the time Christina had already been teaching English for six years, and I had also taken some graduate courses in Teaching English as a Second Language. We thought this would just be a one-time trip. [When we first married, we were not both on the same page in terms of missions, or just what that might look like for us.]
The trip was very good, and we came back with a much larger world view, and as is always the case in the short term, it made only a ripple in a lake, in terms of impacting Poland or the people. Two years went by, and we were asked to go again. This time we began to wonder if God just might be up to something.
In preparation for this trip, I asked God to show me Poland, through a different lens - to let me see Poland with Kingdom eyes - the way He sees it. Later on Christina shared that on this second trip to Poland, as were flying into Warsaw, she had this sense in her spirit that we were coming home. [That in itself was another God-sighting, the start of a work in her heart, slowly over time.]
We connected with the same students that we had met previously, and made some new friends as well. The English camp was good, and we also had a chance to help some of the missionaries move and paint their house, and do some hands-on things, and then we had our debriefing time as a team in Krakow.
We toured Auschwitz and Birkinau, the largest death camps of the Holocaust, and where part of Schlindler’s List was filmed. It is out in the middle of the Polish country-side about an hour and a half from Warsaw. The spiritual heaviness and oppression is so heavy, you can still feel its ominous presence in the air as you enter Auschwitz and Birkinau. We saw the artifacts– mountains of shoes, and suitcases, and eyeglasses, and the hair which was then used to make mattresses and haircloth, and the gas chambers where the prisoners were executed.
About four to six miles from Auschwitz, is Birkinau, where most of the prisoners were first brought and separated upon arrival in the cattle cars. We came through the train house into the camp, and there before us was a massive forest of chimneys - remnants of the horse stables that were built to house the prisoners. Most of them were so infested with disease that they had to be burned after the camps were liberated. In The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, she said that the lice was so bad that the guards would not even come in the stables and it was because of the lice that she and other prisoners were able to pray and study the Bible.
As we walked out of the camp through the train house, our minds couldn’t even fully comprehend the heinous atrocities that were committed there. With the camps and barbed wire, and darkness behind us we walked out into light and there, not 60 yards from the fence and the train house was a massive, beautiful field of wheat. The heads were so ripe, they were bent over, as if waiting for the farmers to come harvest the grain. Along with the darkness and evil of the Holocaust and the death camps in the middle of the Polish country-side, etched forever in my mind and spirit, is this field of wheat because it was a God-sighting –one of many, by which God confirmed that this is where we belong. It is forever a reminder of God’s heart for Poland, and his Perspective of the world — Through a Different Lens.
Five more years went by, and two more trips to Poland, and the birth of our son, and even bigger confirmations and God-sightings to me, to Christina and to the elders of our church, and now we are just completing our first year of language training in Szczecin, Poland. I have started recording these Mile Markers of the journey, to recount God’s provision and faithfulness. We asked God to give us confirmations that we were on the right path, and he gave us billboards so big we couldn’t miss them.
We still have hard times and challenges with the language barrier, and times when we miss family, or worship in our heart language, but God has given us a wonderful church family here, and we have the deep assurance that we are where He wants us, at least for now.