Do you ever experience a sense of foreboding when you arrive at a new place?
I do sometimes. I don’t know if there’s anything to it, and I can’t say either biblically or scientifically if my feelings are accurate, but I feel a hitch in my spirit in certain places.
We left Amsterdam for the U.S. yesterday. Criss-crossed with picturesque canals, featuring narrow houses, wonderful museums and ever-present bicycles, there’s a lot to love about the city. I enjoyed a couple of days there.
But aspects of the city nagged at my soul. In one museum I learned the prosperity I viewed all around me was built upon centuries of world trade—including the buying and selling of human beings.
Another exhibit took me through a brief history of Dutch colonization efforts and the brutal wars fought to protect wealth wrung from far-flung domains.
We toured the Anne Frank House Museum, where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis for two years before their discovery and deportation to concentration camps. Many opposed the Nazis and helped hide their Jewish friends and neighbors. But others in Amsterdam collaborated and benefited from the “final solution”.
Today Amsterdam generates wealth from two fresh sources—recreational drugs and recreational sex. Boasting a large red-light district, legal and regulated, people travel to Amsterdam to indulge in sexual pleasures. Alongside, a thriving drug culture encourages imbibing under the watchful eye of the regulators.
And so I soured on the city the longer I walked the streets.
While in Amsterdam I read these prophetic words from Jeremiah:
Woe to him to builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice.
Later I walked among the tall, narrow houses, built with upper rooms to store goods and house servants. I imagined the Frank family, hiding from the Gestapo, afraid of both the Germans and their neighbors.
And I understood why my spirit grew unsettled. A place with a history of terror retains a film that’s hard to wash away. And a modern city seeking to grow by unrighteousness appears headed in the wrong direction.
Jeremiah 22:13 in week forty of reading the Bible cover to cover
Photo is the front of the Anne Frank House Museum
Really good post here, Dave. You nailed that sense of unease we can have about beautiful things (or cities) that are funded by the suffering of others or by morally dubious sources. May we examine our own hearts, lives, and cities also.