For those of you who know me, I do not write well. After all I am a numbers guy. I do better with numbers than I do with words. This is why it has taken me so long to post about our trip to Wien Austria. Our close dear friends Brad and Stacey along with their three children are missionaries to a land that is full of beauty and brokenness. I have heard Brad describe a city of marvelous beauty and extreme brokenness before, and I got a first hand look at that recently.
After visiting Schonbrunn Palace on the first Saturday we were there, we took the
underground to Karlzplatz(the main underground station). It was there, just after witnessing marvelous beauty that we saw extreme brokenness in the blank stares of the drug addicts that were aimlessly walking the subway halls. The brokenness was there in the faces of the beggars who were holding out their cups for money outside St. Stephansdom Cathedral.
Our friends are planting a wonderful "Garden in the City" and we need to constantly remember them in our prayers as they build relationships with the neighbors in the apartment below, or the fellow students that Brad meets in the halls of the University. Pray that they will be able to reach a people who are hungering for something, what they don't know, they just know that something is missing.
My wife wrote a few blogposts ago that my favorite part of the trip for me was eating the horse liver sandwich (Brad, help with the German please). That would be a distant second to the night that Brad and I walked the entire 1st district praying for the people of Austria, searching hungering for something more. Then right after that walking into St Stephansdom at 9:00 P.M. and praying for the people again.
This trip has left me with the deeper realization that we too live in world of beauty and brokenness and that we too are called by our Father in Heaven to build gardens in our city. You don't need to go around the world to see that, but every once in a while it helps.
1 comment:
Thank you, Matthew, for this post. Pretty good writing for a bean counter. I'm so glad you, Kim, and the kids got to experience our "world", and that you go back to St. Andrews and South Florida as ambassadors for Vienna. We cherish your friendship. I, too, thoroughly enjoyed our prayer walk through the first district, as well as our good talks on the terrace. For at least one week, Stacey didn't have to bear the full weight of my verbosity. :)
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