Not Exactly Refreshed, But Renewed

As I write, we’re returning at last from a two-week tour of England and Scotland. Just getting home has been an ordeal! Somehow United Airlines bumped us from our original return flight from Edinburgh on May 23, changing it without asking to May 24. After much hassle we finally got it changed back, a good thing as it turned out since an ash cloud from the erupting volcano in Iceland closed down all Scottish airports the following day. Then our flight back to Denver through Chicago got canceled due to maintenance issues and we were routed instead through Dulles airport in Washington, D.C., albeit too late to catch a flight to Denver.

We spent the night at Dulles, and our scheduled flight to Denver the next day also got canceled due to maintenance issues. Sheesh! We spent most of the day dashing from gate to gate registering for standby seats and finally our persistence paid off. In the end we landed in Denver some 35 hours after leaving Great Britain, sufficient time to have circled the globe. Those who think international travel is glamorous, listen up.

In contrast, the tour of the U.K. went off without a hitch, well, almost. En route to the very first event we found ourselves waiting in a very long line of cars on a motorway. A truck, or lorry, had crossed the median and crashed into a car a mile or so ahead of us, and authorities closed all six lanes of the highway–for six hours!  After sitting without moving for three-and-a-half hours while emergency personnel dealt with the tragedy, we were allowed to make a U-turn and go back up the entrance ramp to find an alternate route.  We barely made it to the venue in time.  Later we learned the sobering news that two women had died in the accident, and that if we had left the hotel on time that morning instead of a few minutes late we may well have been  involved.

I was speaking on the book What Good Is God? accompanied by a Christian theatre company called SaltMine. The first half of the program, I sat onstage with an interviewer, and in between our chats three actors did a series of five- to seven-minute sketches, some of which they wrote themselves and some adapted from such works as The Hiding Place, The Screwtape Letters, and Shadowlands. After a tea break (this is Britain, after all) the actors did one more sketch and I spoke for about 40 minutes.

We’ve done three similar tours in the U.K., as well as a tour in South Africa and Australia and a scaled-down presentation in the Middle East, and we plan to return to Australia (and New Zealand too this time) in September of this year. It feels far less lonely to stand on a platform supported by such consummate professionals. With moments of hilarity and poignancy in their dramas, they grab an audience and deliver them into the palm of my hand. Could a speaker ask for more? Dave Pope, a singer of note in the U.K., organized each of the programs, and the logistics were quite complicated. Several stagehands and technicians drove a couple of vans full of props, electronic equipment, and books for sale, and a caravan of five vehicles traveled between cities each day to stage the productions. In all we covered 2000 miles to put on ten performances.

As you may know, the church in Britain is a sad shell of its former days. The most impressive building in every town is the stone church with its pointed steeple, but most of those churches are virtually empty on Sunday. Much like the church congregations, the audience attending our events tilted heavily toward the gray-haired. And yet I find in places like Australia and Britain, the church is far more likely to show unity, with little denominational competition at stake, and also to express faith creatively. Much of the best worship music comes from Britain, and the kind of theatre talent produced by SaltMine would be hard to match in the United States.

The highlight for me each evening was sitting at a table to sign books and in the process hearing stories of people I have somehow connected with through my books. A woman whose 23-year-old son committed suicide. A young girl who rolled up her sleeve to show her self-mutilation as a “cutter” before her conversion. An elderly man who said, “Pray for my daughter please—she’s a prostitute and drug addict.” An Iranian believer who had just received his residency permit in Scotland after an eight-year wait and who asked me to sign his Farsi-language version of What’s So Amazing About Grace? A chaplain who leads a study on that book in a Glasgow prison. A surgeon who trained with Dr. Paul Brand in India. I never tire of hearing that something I work on alone in my basement office reaches out, in this case across an ocean, and connects with another person in very different circumstances.

We had no time for tourist excursions on this trip. After getting to the hotel after midnight, we’d sleep, get up and exercise, then load the car for the next day’s drive, arriving in time to arrange the set, do sound checks, hold a reception, and face a new crowd. Yet simply driving through the British countryside in Spring is a feast for the eyes: lambs frolicking in the fields, bright yellow rapeseed blooming, English gardens fronting the road in towns and villages. And one night we traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon and saw a magnificent production of Merchant of Venice by the Royal Shakespeare Company. We return not exactly refreshed, but renewed and ready to tackle the next adventure.