Mark's Blog

I have been waiting to get to a computer in the business center of our Budapest hotel for 20-30 minutes now because they all were being used by gray-haired women–every single one of them.  You expect teenagers to be doing games, but maybe that has all gone to their mobile phones now. Two of these women were checking their email and the other was downloading a recipe for one of the women on her tour.  It just struck me as a mark of a changing world.

Today we had no travel and no appointments–the first day like that since we left home.  We slept a little later although it is so unseasonably warm in Europe that the rooms are all too hot for us. The hotels have switched to winter climate control, however, and there is no turning back for them.

We did a little sightseeing at the Buda castle. No, the castle has nothing to do with Buddha. It is the west side of the Danube with Pest on the east side.  The river is so large that two very distinct groups settled both sides of the river. Until the 15th century, they really only co-existed, sometimes peacefully and sometimes belligerently.  We know the city as Budapest–and it is a lovely city.  It reminded both of us of Vienna–many beautiful buildings, clean, history everywhere you turn.  I wish we had more time here.

We did a turn of shopping too–which I still will never believe is recreational unless they make it an Olympic sport, but I have not convinced Sherry of that yet–near the castle, but also in a beautiful pedestrian zone just off of the Danube on the Pest side.  I tend to stand outside the stores and people watch while Sherry looks through the shops.  Tonight I thought to myself, what a wonderful time we live in. Listen to all the languages. I heard Dutch, French, German, Russian, English, Japanese, Korean, and several Arabic languages that I couldn’t distinguish.

But even as I thought that, I thought, the Day of Pentecost in Jerusalem was just like this–maybe even more so.  During St. Paul’s times, people are traveling from Greece to Italy to Egypt to Israel and to all of the countries in between.  We do live in a wonderful time, but people are having the same experiences that we are having, just not quite as plugged in perhaps.

At the National History Museum we saw beautiful glass drinking cups and pitchers  from the 5th century, beautiful leather  belts and beaded necklaces–one that looked just like some of these silver studded fashion belts being worn today–and we saw gold and silver coins from the first century.  I wonder if any of the women on Paul’s missionary journeys had to have a day for shopping every now and then–it wouldnt’ surprise me.

A dose of walking through museums and shopping in foreign malls is good to correct our perspective sometimes.  When we think the world is as bad as it could be, that the politicians have ruined everything, that the economy is everyone’s motivation for good and evil, that families are falling apart, that children are . . . . . and so forth, we probably ought to just take a look at the skulls in the museums or the simple leather shoes of children found in the cesspools of old houses, or the mosaics of families eating together in pre-Christian Roman houses and just be reminded that people are pretty much the same as they have always been.  Different toys, different haircuts, but pretty much the same.

That is really good news. That means that the ancient Word of God is also the modern Word–and likely is still the post-modern Word. In fact, I believe that the Word is the same yesterday, today, and forever, don’t you?