A right humbling perspective…my trip abroad.

‘Round me on the airplane, some passengers are reading, and many are sleeping, as we wing our way over Greenland, bound for home.   While my body is exhausted, my head and heart are full of the sights, sounds, and experiences of the last days.  Hmmm, how to make sense of a holiday of short duration but of huge personal proportions…  Eight days ago, I flew with my family from Southern California to spend a few days each in London, England, and Paris, France—my first trip abroad.  My primary expectation was fulfilled; indeed, the thing that I expected to be most ‘taken by,’ I was — the history represented by the land and her people.

As I walked on cobbled streets hundreds of years old, passed the regal gates of Buckingham Palace, and underneath old craggy trees in Hyde Park, (where Spring blossoms were just beginning to pop), I once again thought, ‘Oh, if only these trees could talk—what tales they could tell--so much history they would reveal!’ 

Several thousand worshippers filed into Westminster Abbey on a misty, gray Easter morning, with many left standing all around the back.  Now just imagine how many people have streamed in and out of the thick, tall doors of the Abbey, Notre Dame and London’s oldest church, All Hallows Church, over the centuries!  Think of how the styles of dress, manners of speech, and transportation, have changed over those centuries.  In the train stations and on the streets, people of every description, tongue, and dress met the eye . . . a bit staggering, really.  

Besides the grandeur of the architecture of the Natural History Museum and the aforementioned churches, the sheer enormity of a number of things I saw shrunk me down to size immediately.  Take London’s Houses of Parliament, the beautiful Tower Bridge, the Grand Palais of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, etc.  And in both of these grand cities, there are not just a few exquisite buildings, there are many; as all seem to say, ‘I have been a fixture of money and power and influence for hundreds upon hundreds of years…’

And then speaking of grandeur, London’s Harrod’s department store is surely  in a class of its own—stately, beautiful, opulent, and flourishing.  Between the two cities, I saw every designer I have ever seen advertised, and many more as well—clothing, shoes, and jewelry, too.

And now, I am going home, aware that I am a very small, very unimportant person in the scope of history.  Unlike Charles Darwin or poet Ben Johnson, I am not going to have my name on a large marble floor tile at Westminster Abbey, and I will certainly not be entombed or memorialized in a beautiful historic cathedral either.  I think of a little wooden plaque my mother had on the wall in our home—“This life will soon be over and pass’d; only what’s done for Christ will last.”   Right perspective—to think and to act as to honor God, my purpose always should be to bring glory to him.

Randomly, in charming, eclectic Nottinghill, I took a picture of a home where George Orwell once lived; I passed by Paul McArtney’s apartment, where he penned several well-known Beatles hits, and then saw up close the scratchings of 17^th century prisoners on columns in the Tower of London.  Oh, my goodness … so much history has come before – as yes, to make me feel sufficiently small, sufficiently aware that as Paul said, I should ‘not think of myself more highly that I ought, but with sober judgment,’ Romans 12.3.   

And yet . . . we must see ourselves rightly too!  Because though you and I are but a speck in the continuum of space and time, or as James puts it ‘a vapor that is here for a little while and then vanishes,’ James 4.14, God cares individually and intimately about each one of us.  What a delicious irony!  I close with thoughts of the Psalmist, ‘When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?  O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!’  from Psalm 8.

la grace de vous,

Christine