No Passport Needed

Recently, I’ve been thinking about small luxuries in life like back massages and buying presents for people and having beautiful Bible study books and going out for breakfast and… Traveling.

If I was too poor to travel, for say a decade or two, would it matter?

People make so much of traveling these days.  And yes, I enjoyed my trip to the Middle East, aside from violent vomiting on the flight. I listened to refugees’ stories, ate chicken shawarma, and stepped in the Mediterranean Sea. It was truly one of the best experiences in my life, and gave me perspective.

But is it necessary to travel to have good experiences, to gain perspective?

In heart surgery, we see a lot of ultrasounds of the heart, called echos. We are usually looking at these ultrasounds because something is wrong. Sometimes, the muscle is barely moving because the person had a heart attack. Sometimes in the color mode, the normal blue flows forward, then a jet of red shows up as the blood goes back the wrong way through a torn or leaky valve.

“Look at the size of that right atrium,” Dr. Halloran said the other day as we looked at an echo. There was a valve not closing properly, and the blood was going backwards, stretching the chamber.

I’ve always thought it would be cool to get an echo on myself.  But there’s really no reason to do so.

Then, this Thursday I attended a women’s health lunch. I got my blood pressure checked and was ready to walk away when someone said they were doing echos–for free.

“I can get an echo?” I asked, surprised and delighted.

I walked into the curtained room and lay on a portable exam table.

“This will be cold,” the woman said, squeezing gel from a bottle onto the echo probe.

I twisted my neck on the pillow, trying to see the screen, without disrupting the ultrasound probe against my skin. After months (years?) of looking at the black and white ultrasounds of other people’s hearts, I saw my own.

“I’m looking at the chambers and the valves,” the technician said.

I saw the black cavities of my heart chambers and grayish outlines that showed my heart muscle wall. The technician flipped a switch and a burst of color rushed across the screen, showing the motion of my blood rushing through my heart.

“Can you tell what my heart function is?” I asked when I got up after the quick test. “Were any of my valves leaking?”

“Everything looks perfect,” she said.

No stretched atrium.  No mitral valve leaflet flapping in the breeze.

I knew I had a heart before of course, just like I knew about the Mediterranean Sea.

But now I’ve seen the Mediterranean Sea with my own eyes. I’ve seen my heart with my own eyes. In both cases, I was thrilled, because I got to see something I had never seen before.

I am beginning to believe that exotic destinations can be found, not only across the globe, but in the hidden details of our own lives.

Sometimes, the beauty around us is difficult to find because it doesn’t look like discovery.  Besides, it’s scary to learn to know a new person, walk down a new alley, or try a new skill. These things can require more courage than going through airport security. But these opportunities are on the doorstep of everyone with the alertness to notice, the courage to try, the determination to avoid stagnation.  No passport needed.

Whether I ever travel again or not, I want to find the beauty around me.

• I want to go places by exploring the hidden beauty of my own town.  Did you know that there are only three piano manufacturers left in the United States and one is Elkhart’s own Walter Piano? I visited their showroom the other day, for the first time. (Unfortunately, now I really want to own a Walter Piano, which doesn’t fit well with the poverty idea.)
• I want to go places by noticing conversation around me. Favorite quote overheard last week: “If you need me, I’ll be in the freezer.” (This just tickled me. Walgreens employee.)
• I want to go places by watching people who are so familiar with their job, they are completely comfortable where anyone else would panic. “Beautiful out yesterday, wasn’t it?” Dr. Halloran asked the other day, both hands blood-stained as he worked at an artery through a gash in someone’s chest. And it reminds me of the time last summer when I touched a beating heart for the first time.
• I want to go places by reading books I’ve never read before. Yes, definitely books. I have been holding The Cost of Discipleship by Bonhoeffer in a death grip, shocked that I am 33 and reading it for the first time.
• I want to go places by following God’s command and call wherever it takes me. I want to “have the eyes of my heart enlightened” (Eph 2:18), to trust God in places I never thought possible, to see Him in ways I can’t now imagine. I could spend my life studying Scripture, and never know the half, never exhaust God’s Word. The same is true of the Body of Christ, the believers at my home church or anywhere I meet them. There would be so much to learn from each person’s journey of surrender and obedience.

You don’t have to step off the continent to step out of your box.

Besides, you can’t buy curiosity. I’m convinced there are people who travel the world, and never see it. I’m convinced there are people who stay home, and see the world.

And for someone who gets motion sickness from traveling, there’s an added advantage to the latter: no barf bags needed!