Walls

Friends wrote today to remind us that the Berlin Wall was built on this day over 50 years ago in an attempt to keep countless East Berliners from escaping their Communist-held homeland.  The article also said "the Wall" was the most protested barrier in the world.

Tim and I were able to see some of those protests first-hand when we visited East Berlin and its infamous stronghold in 1985.  The Wall was actually two walls:  an inner wall around the city itself and an outer wall that was across a "no-man's" expanse and faced West Berlin.  It was the outer wall that West Berliners covered completely with protest graffiti and that East Berlin officials periodically whitewashed during the night as they tried to mask the West's dissatisfaction with their stranglehold on countless lives.

Yes, a visit to The Wall was, indeed, an unsettling experience made even more so by having a rifle pointed at us from across that "no-man's" expanse.  We had climbed a West German built tower with a handful of teens from our church and were looking at the barren land where Hitler supposedly committed suicide in an underground bunker when we noticed a guard in a tower on the East Berlin side with his rifle pointed at us. We believe it was nothing more than an attempt to intimidate but nonetheless we got the young people back on the ground in a hurry.

If that had been the extent of our visit we might have gone away with a sense of "those poor people having to live under such oppression" but that was not the end of the story.  We had the opportunity to pass through the Wall's borders and to meet several residents of East Berlin by sharing ice cream cones of all things.  You see, we had to exchange a number of West German Deutchmarks (about US $5.00 worth) into East German currency and were not allowed to bring any of their money back with us to the West.  Once inside East Berlin we could not find anything to buy as store shelves were nearly empty but we did find ice cream vendors on the streets.  

Soon we were asking people if we could treat them to the frozen cream's delight and nearly all responded with a resounding, "Yes!"  The conversations were simple with explanations about some of the city's architecture and questions about where we were from but it was still a time of warm sharing and learning. NOTE:  One fun architectural story we learned later from our guide was about a tall, Seattle Needle-like structure with a dome at its top that reflected all over the city the cross from a nearby cathedral. East German leaders had tried numerous ways to stop the reflection (such as sanding the dome's sides) but to no avail.

Walls.  We've learned there are countless numbers of such barriers in this world and that not all are physical ones.  For that reason we have prayed and searched for ways to surmount these obstacles in an effort to bring about communication, understanding and reconciliation and in doing so we have realized some of God's truest riches.