By Faith Wilson I stared up the towering wall of limestone before me. The thought of scaling it was daunting. I watched in awe as person after person in front of me carefully clung to seemingly invisible nooks and crannies that allowed them to slowly and steadily ascend the vertical mass. It was …
IN THE SUMMER of my 21st birthday, I adventured to the damp outpost of Koropun, in the magnificent highlands of Irian Jaya. Those were the most significant two months of my entire life. Each morning, my friends and I rose up out of bed at 5 am, ate a quick breakfast and went outside to gawk at the towering, breath taking, rugged mountains and breathe in the crisp air. Our primary task was to complete the construction of a church. We had to work fast, knowing that at about noon, dark storm clouds would come rolling up the valley and bombard our village with intense rain, sending every one of us running indoors. The afternoon rain would often continue through the cold nights.
IN JUNE 1944, WHILE WAITING TO BE EXECUTED in a Nazi prison cell, Dietrich Bonheoffer wrote some of the most soul searching poetry I’ve encountered. The marching boots of certain death approached with each tick of the clock. In this condition of unimaginable anxiety, his words plunged with unmasked veracity into the freedom of truth. In one poem called Who Am I? he wrote the following lines: