On the last night I was in Germany a newly met friend, Michael, one of Rev. Bernt-Ekkart’s closest friends took me out for dinner while Bernt had a church meeting to attend too, amazing how a pastor would have to work on a vacation day. Michael, who was not native to the area but had fallen in love with the city we were in and the surrounding communities decided to take me to a nearby village for dinner. He also wanted to work on his English skills and thought that the best way would be with a dinner conversation.
So we got into his car which had a convertible top, he cranked up his stereo using his iPod which he had filled with classic American rock music so that I would be at home, and we took off through the city to the edge of town where we boarded a car ferry and crossed over the Rhine river into the countryside on the far shore.
We headed through the fields and countryside for about five miles until we entered a small town with a village at the edge. We parked in a gravel lot and stopped by the outdoor beer tent where we each got a 2.0ml glass of the local beer. After quenching our thirst with locals who had recently gotten off work for the day we headed over to the walled village near by.
The village was called Zons, a medieval village built around 1372, think about this, Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492, over a hundred years after this village was built. You could see the age in stones that someone had carried and stack hundreds of years ago. You could also see that the mortar between the stones had been continually replaced as time wore it away. We walked up to the gatehouse, which still had wooded doors and metal hinges that looked to be original and hand made hundreds of years ago. The streets were cobblestones and looked as old as the walls. We walked into the village and it was immediately apparent that this was not a tourist destination. It was a real village inhabited by real people who had lived there forever. Many of the houses looked still had hand cut wood in their framing with updated brick, work and modern windows. You could tell where a house had been replaced even if it was built to fit in you could see that difference between the really old homes and the newer homes.
We spent about an hour walking the streets touching the outer fortress like walls, putting our hands on the walls of old homes throughout the village. We found the church at the center of the town and were in awe at the ornate metal work on the wooden doors. We wanted to go in but the church was locked. On an outside was we found gravestones displayed with dates going back to the late thirteen hundreds. How do you explain what it is like to touch a stone carved by someone seven hundred years ago? Does anyone know anything about the person the stone was for or who carved it?
After walking around the village we realized that we were tired and hungry so we headed to a restaurant near the village gate. It was a family owned restaurant and the chef was the grandmother. They had been running the place for over a hundred years. The main part of the restaurant was in the village with a patio that sat on and over hung the wall where one could sit in a beer garden.
So there I sat, at a table for two conversing with Michael in an outdoor café erected on the wall of Zons facing the bank of the Rhine River. I was drinking espresso, the real kind that wakes you up instantly, and eating Muscovy duck over lettuce greens while Michael drank beer and ate a flatbread pizza with a local ham and goat cheese. The garden was filled with people conversing in German and occasionally looking at us suspiciously as we spoke in English. My guess is that few of them knew enough English to know what we were talking about. As I watched the sun setting and felt the warm dry breezing all I could think about was that God is good. It was God who brought me here, God who connected me with all the wonderful people I had met, God who had me sitting in a conversation with Michael enjoying the abundance God has placed in my life. And I marveled at how God’s whisper is often the loudest in the simplest of places and during the simplest of times.
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