Last August, when my family visited Switzerland, our tour stopped to see a most unusual church.

Our bus pulled up alongside a humongous rock jetting up into the sky with a large church built on top. The guide pointed out the steep stairs people had to climb to get up the rock to church and commented that over the years found it difficult to traverse, so people quit going to church. The elders decided a sanctuary needed to be built more accessible to the public, so they made other plans.

Without telling us what to expect, she directed us out of the bus to a set of doors inserted to the side of this huge rock. She opened the entrance and had us walk into dense blackness, insisting that we blindly trust her direction.

Into the dark we cautiously strode, holding hands so as not to get lost from one another. Once inside, she shut the door and turned on the lights. Everyone gasped in awe. We were standing in the middle of a beautiful church carved out of the rock. And it was no small space, seating perhaps two to three hundred people.

Soft wooden pews lined the interior, warm lighting graced the walls, and attention was drawn to the front altar where services were held. A church in a rock! I had never seen such a sight.

There are many spiritual lessons I draw from the chapel in the rock.

A rock is not an easy place to build a church. It is hard, forbidding, stubborn, maybe dangerous, and cold. Yet, a beautiful and endearing place of spiritual worship was constructed within its bosom.

I think about hard places of the heart that seem unyielding and isolated from reason and love. Like the conflict in the Middle East. It seems the two warring sides stubbornly hold to their positions and have no interest in reasoning with the other. Their individual stances appear locked in, and in direct opposition to each other.

The chapel in the rock gives me hope though. As the elders of that church saw a way to penetrate the hardness of that rock and build a sanctuary of peace and love for the benefit of generations to come, Christ can find a way to penetrate the hardness of heart afflicting the Mid-East today.

Right where stubbornness, self-righteousness, malice, and intransigence appear to have a lock-hold on reason, Christ can dynamite a path into the middle of leaders’ hearts and establish a space of peace and love that enables parties to talk, negotiate and reason together for the benefit of their citizenry and the world at large. I pray that this happens soon!