Incarnation

The alarm went off at 4 a.m. Up, shower, dress, packed, and then scoot to the airport, a hop from Raleigh to New York, then a trans-Atlantic flight to Frankfurt, Germany. Change planes, then on to Minsk, Belarus.

Landing in two feet of snow, walking across a Soviet-era airport, an architectural nightmare, I am charged nearly $300 for health insurance in case I get sick while in country for two weeks.

There is a sea of people about me, all dressed in black, unsmiling, their faces looking like they gave up hope several generations ago.

I ride in a taxi for 20 minutes into the city. Rows of 10-story “commie condos” line both sides of the highways. There are few cars, people cram buses or walk.

It is 10 degrees. The wind is howling. Snow drifts. We stop in front of a condo. It looks just like one hundred others we pass. A cranky elevator strains for the sixth floor and disgorges me at my host’s door. I am warmly greeted, shown my room. There is no furniture. I’m to sleep on a pallet on the bare floor.

Supper is fish, cooked head and all.

After a 21-hour trip I’m exhausted. So I pile under a blanket on the floor. I lie there listening to the wind moan, feeling winter’s icy fingers through the rude floorboards.

Dear God, I am here to teach how long? I miss hot water, my soft bed, my wife, the gentler weather of home.

This is a shock!

That is how I felt on a two-week teaching mission to Minsk. I left my world and visited another so alien, so hurting, so deprived. But how much more so Jesus Christ who left heaven with the Father to come to earth to minister to us, to proclaim the love of God.

Scripture says in Philippians 2 that Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant.” What I went through, He did more so. I left the USA for Belarus. He left heaven for earth. I left for two weeks. He left for 30 years.

Augustine of Hippo mediated on this long ago.  He wrote of Jesus, “Man’s maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother’s breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; that Truth might be accused of false witnesses, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might grow weak; that the Healer might be wounded; that Life might die.”

Yes, all this He did for me, for you. Jesus Christ entered our world that we might enter His.

The Reverend Stephen Crotts is the director of the Carolina Study Center, Inc., a campus ministry, located in Chapel Hill, NC. Pastor Crotts may be reached at carolinastudycenter@msn.com.