Amsterdam was one of the hardest places for us to be in. We were very excited to come to Holland and to see the canals and the windmills and the flowers.
The thing that struck us most immediately was the diversity of the city. There is Mexican food and Korean food and everything else you can imagine. It is truly an international city and a huge tourist destination.
Much of the reason for the tourism to Amsterdam is the “acceptance” of all things in Amsterdam, which is a careful way of saying that prostitution and a host of other sins do not hold the same stigma they do in most other places. There were a lot of stickers and t-shirts that said, “good girls go to heaven, bad girls go to Amsterdam.” I’ve never been to Las Vegas, but t reminded me of what I imagine Vegas to be like – a playground for our must vulgar desires. A place we can go and take refuge from conscious. Although we know it is a lie, we tell ourselves it is a deeper freedom.
Our hostel was just around the corner from the red light district. We have seen plenty of hard-to-view examples of blatant objectification of women, but this really took us back. You can literally window shop for women’s bodies in Amsterdam. And walking by each window was a bit piercing to our souls.
Amsterdam has everything you could want. Everything. And I confess it was hard for me to figure out where the Kingdom of Heaven is in this place. Harder than most the others. It says something that the hero of the city is a little girl locked in an attic, writing in her journal.
Kylie had to remind me that love was there. That Anne Frank is a great example of it, which may feel like a harsh contrast to a lot of the modern conveniences (to put it kindly) in the city, but that does not negate her heroism. Our hostel was a Christian hostel and Ky and I went to a Bible Study there one night. As dark as any place is, it is never abandoned. There is light there. Always.
And then, a couple days into our visit, I considered the canals. Born from the Amstel river, flowing throughout the city, lapping up onto the facades of houses and businesses and brothels. The canals are a constant reminder, at least they were to me, of the creation of God flowing through the city. At our worst, we get used to it and shrug it off as part of the scenery. At our best, we step out of our brothels and appreciate the beauty that flows from without and within.
We loved our time in Amsterdam. If anything, the darkness pulled us out of a tourist mindset and made us desperate to serve, to love, to care. We saw a prostitute and a man condemning her to hell in a yelling match. Our hearts broke for them both.
Those living in Amsterdam and fighting for the Kingdom are courageous life-bringers. And make no mistake, our world, through and through, is just as vulgar and dark as Amsterdam. We like to isolate it in places like Vegas, but the truth is that these are just cities of refuge that make safer the daily desires of our hearts at home.
Amsterdam is a microcosm of light and darkness, beauty and vulgarity. It represents the kind of battle that we fight within our world and within our own hearts and minds on a daily basis. It is easy to fall asleep to it at home, to compartmentalize Amsterdam as the darker place. Sometimes the darkness is a call to arms, an alarm that wakes us up to the reality of the world around us. For this reason, Amsterdam was one of our favorite places. It has awakened us, once more, to the battle for decency waging on this planet.
We really loved visiting Amsterdam and would love to go back. It exposed our complacency. It showed us the harder realities of humanity. But it awakened us to our part in the story and showed us that even in the driest dessert, the living water flows through.
