Turning Left: Clearly The Right Decision

This reflection follows on the heels of a prior reflection on God's rather pointed insistence that Paul "Turn Left." I ended the prior reflection with my shoulders shrugged and my hands in the air. Like this: \_(ツ)_/ And for several days, that's where I thought the matter ended. But as I continued to read, I discovered today a twist I had not considered before. Let's return to that map I shared on the last pass...

As the map shows quite clearly, this "Turn Left" decision took Paul on to Troas instead of Asia. Guess who was waiting there in Troas? Nobody important. Just Luke, the man who authored the book of Acts that I'm now reading.

Yes, I'd known that there was a turning point in the book of Acts, where Luke suddenly starts pointedly using the phrase "we". The first time he does so?

Acts 16:6-10
Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

It feels quite strange to find myself using the exact same map and exact same passage from scripture, just a few days later, and this time seeing a connection there that I never noticed before. I find myself imagining Luke's growing awareness of the significance of the events surrounding Paul's first pass through Troas.

I myself have a special friend that God brought into my life by a set of bizarre circumstances. It was immediately clear that God's action had brought us together, but only as the friendship continued to grow did I more fully appreciate how very much came from a very small beginning. (Irony of ironies... this dear friend I speak of hails from Istanbul, Turkey. I met *my* friend by turning right where Paul turned left.)

Returning to Luke, I have to imagine that a few years passed before he began to begin to understand how very much had blossomed out of a seemingly small decision. If Paul had turned right, their lives would not have intertwined as they did. Or perhaps at all. I used the word began for a reason, and it's too generous by half. Luke could not possibly have begun to understand how his writings would impact the world after they took their rightful places in the new Testament.

If. Mystery.

But to reduce the answer to our question down to one variable is surely too simplistic. I don't think God was thinking only of Luke in the midst of all this. My 2 cents say that God was also focusing Paul in on a particular piece of geography, the purpose being to strengthen and build the base of God's church in Macedonia. Asia would have to wait. That is wild speculation, to be sure, however I do note the confluence of these two threads (Luke and the strengthening of the Macedonian church) in the passages that follow.

(What a debt of gratitude I owe to the countless Bible scholars who have sifted all this stuff before! My Bible commentaries have been a great help to me, today.)

So why do I see these two thoughts coming together seamlessly? Well, note first that Paul met Luke at Troas, but left him in Philippi. I won't get into the passages that make this conclusion clear, but this is the general consensus view, and it leads us to to the $64,000 question: When does Paul meet Luke again? Most pointedly (to me, anyway), he does so on a return journey described repeatedly as one motivated by Paul's desire to strengthen the churches he had planted on the prior pass.

Acts 18:23
After spending some time in Antioch, Paul set out from there and traveled from place to place throughout the region of Galatia and Phrygia, strengthening all the disciples.

As if to complicate the time/space continuum even further, Paul's decision to return to Jerusalem (Acts 19:21) is delayed by a riot in Ephesus (Acts 19:23-41) which leads him to instead go where?

Acts 20:1
When the uproar had ended, Paul sent for the disciples and, after encouraging them, said goodbye and set out for Macedonia.

Macedonia. Isn't that where the man in the vision asked Paul to come in the first place? Am I reading too much into this? Let's keep reading.

Acts 20:2-6
He traveled through that area [Macedonia], speaking many words of encouragement to the people, and finally arrived in Greece, where he stayed three months. Because some Jews had plotted against him just as he was about to sail for Syria, he decided to go back through Macedonia. He was accompanied by Sopater son of Pyrrhus from Berea, Aristarchus and Secundus from Thessalonica, Gaius from Derbe, Timothy also, and Tychicus and Trophimus from the province of Asia. These men went on ahead and waited for us at Troas. But we sailed from Philippi after the Festival of Unleavened Bread, and five days later joined the others at Troas, where we stayed seven days.

Wow, I've never felt such a need to bold different sections in a tight passage of scripture, all to track the interactions of four distinct entities: Paul, The Church, Macedonia, and Luke. Let's unpack again, taking it from the top.

A riot in Ephesus seemingly changes Paul's plans. He decides to encourage the churches he has planted where? Macedonia.

After three months in Greece, Paul prepares to return to Syria by sea, but upon discovering a plot he instead heads where? Macedonia.

And, having abandoned his original plans to return by sea, who does Paul meet up with (yet again) in Troas? Luke.

The outrageously bizarre circumstances that bring Paul and Luke together in two different cities on two separate occasions bring to mind two quotes from slightly more contemporary sources. For fans of the play Hamilton we have this: "We keep meeting!" Follow that up with this observation from the James Bond movie Goldfinger. After meeting James Bond for the third time, the evil mastermind Auric Goldfinger comments, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."

Paul has certainly been facing enemy action, too, but the highly ironic twist in this story is that the enemy is not itself Macedonia, nor is the enemy even from Macedonia. But enemy action keeps driving Paul to Macedonia. And when he gets there, he keeps meeting Luke. As can be seen in the below image, Paul ends up passing through Macedonia twice on this journey, the second pass being the one in which Luke joins Paul in a partnership that continues through to the very end of the book of Acts. Spare a thought for Paul's enemies who unwittingly help him to not merely strengthen the nascent Macedonian Church but also to reconnect with Luke.

If one thing is clear from all that we are reading, it's that God has none-too-subtly pinned Paul to a prescribed route, accomplishing the task by means of both angels and devils alike along the way.

A parting thought. I entertained a number of conjectures in this reflection, but there are also enough facts to, I hope, leave us encouraged. In particular, having recently myself suffered a setback at the hands of an evildoer, I find it mightily encouraging to see how events that were setbacks for Paul were not setbacks for God. In Paul's life God used evil people with evil intentions to accomplish good for Paul, for the Church, and for Luke.

And, eventually, for us! We are, after all, the recipients of Luke's gospel account as well as his account of the early church, neither of which we'd have likely ever seen if God had not used the agents of both heaven and hell to get Paul to Turn Left.

Planting Gardens In Prisons

I heard a quote in church yesterday, and it moved me. It is taken from the autobiography of Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, in which he described his long incarceration on an island prison.

I've never spent time in a real prison, but I am certainly a prisoner to certain formative themes in my life. I suppose we all are. I have escaped (or been freed from?) some of these prisons. Others seem very much to be a part of my present reality. This blog post is not the forum to delve into the details of these metaphorical prisons, but suffice it to say that I have had particular reason in recent weeks to reflect on the nature of them and my limited hopes for a full escape. Enter this story...

Nelson Mandela, leader of the anti-apartheid movement spent nearly 30 years in prison in South Africa. He would go on to lead his nation toward a better future after his eventual release, but that hope was not on his horizion while he rotted away in prison. Year in. Year out.

So what did he do while he languished in prison? Among other things, he planted a garden. Here are the words that touched my heart this morning:

“The Bible tells us that gardens preceded gardeners, but that was not the case at Pollsmoor, where I cultivated a garden that became one of my happiest diversions. It was my way of escaping from the monolithic concrete world that surrounded us. Within a few weeks of surveying all the empty space we had on the building’s roof and how it was bathed the whole day, I decided to start a garden and received permission to do so from the commanding officer.
...
A garden was one of the few things in prison that one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a taste of freedom.”

I am not the first to have been captivated by what Nelson shared. I see this quote all over the internet, but for me it is fresh and new.

We are all captives to various forms of bondage, and most of those chains are buried in our souls. That being the case, these words challenged me to reflect again upon a simple question. "What, Pilgrim, do you want to plant in your prison garden?" One might reasonably exclaim, "Why plant gardens when you can escape?" I'd reply just as quickly, "Why seek grace and forgiveness when you can just as easily live a perfect life that doesn't require them?"

Yes, ideals are wonderful, but we live in the world of the broken. So what will we do within the confines of the walls we don't know how to scale? What Mandela did in his bricks-and-mortar prison is what we ought to do our figurative prisons. Plant a garden.

In planting a garden, we nurture life. We foster growth. We encourage all that is good, from a plant's perspective. Of course, plants don't have a great deal of perspective when compared to humans, but plants do want to grow, and when we garden, we enable them to do so. That's a good thing.

The fact that I found this quote from Nelson Mandela moving ought to be quite amusing to those who know me. Gardening is not on my short list of favorite activities. Or my longer list. But the thought of gardening as a metaphor captures my heart today. I want to encourage life. To foster growth.

I found this picture of the island where Nelson spent decades of his life. I don't know if Nelson had a view like this from his prison cell, but I suppose he had some view from time to time of the water and, on the other side, Cape Town. I share this image here because in it I found myself reflecting on what it would take to swim the distance.

Perhaps it's too far a swim, but my thoughts had little to do with the physical realities of Robben Island. I was thinking in metaphors. Before I share where my mind was going, however, let's first return to something else Mandela shared regarding his garden.

“Each morning, I put on a straw hat and rough gloves and worked in the garden for two hours. Every Sunday, I would supply vegetables to the kitchen so that they could cook a special meal for the common-law prisoners. I also gave quite a lot of my harvest to the warders, who used to bring satchels to take away their fresh vegetables.”

Nelson could not escape that island. But some of his vegetables clearly did, and the rest of them served to nurture and strengthen the bodies of other prisoners. Though I didn't hear this portion of the quote from the pulpit, it (on both counts) points where my mind was already going as I sat in that church service.

In my mind's eye, I found myself imagining a person raised on that island from birth. A lifelong prisoner who during key periods of childhood lacked the nutrition necessary to develop a full, strong frame. This stunted person has no hope of swimming to distant shores by his own strength. But what if there are others on the island? Little ones who can yet attain full strength tomorrow if only they are well fed today. My heart leaped to the eager conclusion. A garden for others can be a very beautiful thing, indeed. Even in a prison.

Some prisons are of our own design. Some forced upon us by others. Some perhaps decreed for us by the mouth of God for reasons we'll never understand fully here on Earth. But I am certain of two things. First, we all experience them, and second, it is the character of God at work in us to desire that we all be freed from them.

By God's grace we may ourselves escape some prisons. Perhaps not others. But there will always be gardens that we can plant. Souls we can nurture. We can express something of the nature of God by fostering life. Even in a prison. By God's sovereignty we can perhaps help others to walk upon those shores that we ourselves are destined only to see. Writing these words reminds me of a passage from scripture:

Deuteronomy 34:1-5
Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land—from Gilead to Dan, all of Naphtali, the territory of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Mediterranean Sea, the Negev and the whole region from the Valley of Jericho, the City of Palms, as far as Zoar. Then the Lord said to him, “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it.” And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab, as the Lord had said.