This week I had a small epiphany. Amidst the craziness of trying to keep dozens of refugees alive and happy and under control (with my two coworkers temporarily in Africa and South America, respectively), something set in that I normally don’t experience a whole lot of: stress. Bona fide stress. I’d been coming into work early, leaving work late, and waking up in the middle of the night wondering if so-and-so’s rent had been paid. Increasingly, the thought of my upcoming trip to Costa Rica and then, this fall, returning to school and leaving my job behind began to seem more and more like utopia.

But the wakeup call came when it occurred to me that in this line of work I am pursuing, this vocation I think I am honing in on which will propel me deeper and deeper into the world’s worst rather than protecting me from it, utopian moments are probably going to be few and far between, like cool breezes on a hot, summer day. And it got me to thinking: what is it with us and our insatiable longing for utopia? Utopia, I’ve read, literally means “no place”. Whereas all of life on earth is lived in a specific time and place, we seem to be continually fighting time and seeking to escape to our perfect little “no place”. Maybe that’s why long-time pastor and writer Eugene Peterson says he has found it to be far easier to convince most people of the truth of Jesus than it is to cultivate in them “a sense of place as the exclusive and irreplaceable setting for following Jesus.” Exclusive and irreplaceable?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the well-known German theologian and pastor, while awaiting execution in prison for his specific actions at a specific time and a specific place, understood this well. He wrote, “I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith…. I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God.”

Maybe this longing for utopia is, at root, a longing for heaven. But I can’t shake the inescapable reality that Jesus sent his followers into the world, deep into the world, just as his Father had sent him into it, incarnationally. Seeking to escape the world’s problems is understandable, but it is not the way of Christ. The way of Christ is to enter the dark and broken places with light, with healing, and most of all, with love. Love happens here and now, in the muck and the mire. But unlike the muck and unlike the mire, love never ends.