Light and Darkness

I saw another dead guy on the Metro yesterday. Pretty shocking intro huh? This is the second time I have seen someone dead in the subway system here. The first time was pretty gruesome. This time was a difficult beginning of the evening rush hour after a fun afternoon of ministry. Let me tell you more about yesterday.

In the afternoon some of us from the office went on campus to the main university to help out the local one-year team. We meet at a campus coffee shop (complete with food, internet, and cigarette smoke), we pair up, and then we go hit the campus. Sometimes we pass out advertisements for our weekly meeting, sometimes we do a prayer walk. All the time, we try to start casual conversations with English speaking college students. It was just a great and encouraging time to meet a lot of new faces and to get into their world.

After we had finished up, I had to make my way to a nearby travel agency to pay for an airplane ticket. I say nearby because its within the city limits, cartographically speaking. But it takes some time to get there. I had to subway there, exit the subway, locate it on a map, and then trudge through some slush and rain (it rained here yesterday!). I finally found the place and bought my ticket no problem. (I also found the Moscow American Express travel services office in case you ever want to go there.)

As I made my way back home I had to transfer from the red line to the brown line; no big deal. Except for the fact that the brown line was closed and I had to turn all the way around and find a new route! This lady next to me asked how come it was closed? and how could they do this? It was fun to hear her griping as I quickly left the transfer point and did a subway version of a u-turn.

Most of the time in Russia, you literally never know what is right around the corner. Life, tragedy, humor, whatever, something ALWAYS sneaks up on you. Every walk down the street is some form of adventure with unknown results. You can turn a corner and be delayed for several minutes. You can see some wild and unknown event taking place that never in a million years would you have dreamed it would happen. One time, I saw a lady dashing down the street in the snow with a towel on her head and the beauty salon cloak flowing behind her. She hopped into a money exchange place. Apparently, she did not have enough money to finish out her haircut so she had to go exchange some more in the middle of the styling! You just can't make this stuff up.

Well, no sooner than I rounded the corner to wait on the platform, I saw him lying there on the ground. He had not been dead long because I had just exited that platform 5 minutes before. But he looked like he had been dead for some time already. He was probably homeless, judging by his appearance. Who will miss him? Who knows his whereabouts? Did he know Jesus Christ as Savior because he certainly saw Him as Judge of the Living and the Dead. It made my afternoon time on campus more real than ever. Seeing that dead man gave me new reason and resolve about the importance of telling others about the Lord. Time is running out. Life with Him and death without Him are intertwined by a fine line. Sheep or Goats. Right hand or left hand. With or without.

But I don't know what is more tragic: seeing a dead man whose life is now over or seeing people's reaction when they too come upon his body. Some turned away in disgust. Some turned away in shock. Others were numb, expressionless. Where is the moral outrage that someone could die during rush hour in one of the busiest subways in the world? Where is the weeping for those without the Lord? You could almost imagine some people saying, "How dare he interrupt my commute?" Oh, the self-centered sin.

This is why I serve the Lord.