As I entered my friend's apartment after work on that November evening, my brain fought to process the images I was seeing on the television in his living room. On the screen, there was video footage of an overjoyed crowd. The pictures almost looked like a mob scene, except the people in them were giddy with excitement.

Terry was so engrossed in what he was watching that he only noticed me when I handed him a box of day-old doughnuts from my job at the bakery. My nightly ritual involved stopping off at several friends' apartments with the day-olds the bakery usually threw out, but which the average college student was more than willing to eat.

"Isn't it just the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?" he asked, never taking his eyes off the screen as he reached for the box and fished himself out a doughnut.

"I don't know. What is that?" I asked, and then I recognized the location, "Wait a minute! Is that Berlin? Are they seriously tearing apart the Berlin Wall?"

I had been to Berlin five years earlier, while traveling with another group of exchange students around Germany during my exchange student time in Austria. Living for a time along the Iron Curtain border between Austria and Czechoslovakia, and walking along the Berlin Wall on the West Berlin side, I had felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the thing we so often take for granted: freedom. I realized as I walked along it, that mere pictures of the wall in school history books didn't do it justice. There was something about that wall; when I had walked along it, I felt as if the Berlin Wall stood there in the middle of Berlin as a symbol of oppression and tyranny.

Freedom. What a powerful word.

Maybe it hit me because, as an American, I would like to have thought I was free, but I knew I wasn't. I had always thought of freedom as doing whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to do it.

This led to spending large portions of my college years intoxicated, high, or flitting from one party to the next. The more I celebrated my freedom to do whatever I wanted to do, the more oppressed I felt by this crazy lifestyle. All of the drugs, alcohol and immorality left me feeling more frustrated, empty, hungry for something more.

Standing on my freedom and rights to do as I pleased was leaving me feeling burdened, depressed, and trapped.

Sitting at Terry's for over an hour, watching footage of Berliners celebrate and tear down the Berlin Wall piece by piece, I realized more than ever before that something in my life needed to change. I decided that maybe I should just leave college early, with an associates degree, take some time off, and clear my head.

I know what I'll do, I thought to myself, I'll take off, go to Europe, visit Berlin, and gather more photos for my portfolio. As a art major with a studio emphasis on photography, this seemed perfectly sensible at the time.

Before I graduated with that associates degree the following spring, I already had work lined up in Austria with a student work-study program, and I had saved up towards my plane ticket and spending money before I took off for Vienna, Austria.

Visiting first with my host family from my exchange student days, I soon was on the road and rails of Europe. I spent some time traveling around Austria, and then entered the now newly-opened Czechoslovakia with a group of American students I had met in Graz.

Being an artist, I often take notice of details that may not always be apparent to others at first glance. As we crossed into Czechoslovakia just months after they gained their freedom, it reminded me of the scene in the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy goes from reality into the land of Oz, and the film footage switches from black and white to color. The only difference was that I felt like we were walking from a Technicolor world to one that was still in monochrome.

The contrast between east and west was never more apparent to us spoiled American college students as when we decided, during a train layover in Breclev, Czechoslovakia, to grab some food for the road at a small grocers that was still open. We walked into the store, only to be greeted by an older woman, arms folded across her chest, staring at us with a harsh look, and then realized there was no food on any of the shelves in her little store. Nothing. She didn't say a word but just stared at us with an icy glare, and we awkwardly went back to the train station to wait for our connection.

We spent the summer exploring different corners of the recently-liberated, former Soviet-Bloc countries, even chipping off my own pieces of the Berlin Wall.

Traveling back through Czechoslovakia on my way to the job waiting for me in Vienna, Austria, I stopped off in the beautifully pristine capitol city of Prague. I wandered around for hours, looking in vain for the youth hostel, before I realized the map some street vendor sold me at the train station was faulty.

Finally, I found a lovely park, full of water fountains, in Malstronska district, where I sat down to rest my weary soles. The park was full of mothers and laughing children, and off in one corner, a teen girl was playing guitar. I sat near her to have a listen, and between songs I let her know how much I appreciated her beautiful music. She explained to me that she didn't speak English well, so we began to converse in our common language: French, which I had studied for a few years in college, though neither of us spoke French very well either.

Finally, Rachel looked me in the eye and told me that her music and her singing was all for Jesus. She took out a sheet of paper, and drawing stick figures, began to share the gospel with me.

I am still, 20 years later, humbled by this memory. How easy it would have been for her to not tell me of the Savior's love with some crazy backpacking American with a nose ring, reeking of Vodka, reasoning that our language barrier made it impossible! Instead she actually became more forceful as she continued her presentation, finally ending in an invitation: "Your heart — to Jesus — now!"

That was my cue to leave. I looked up, saw the subway station I had been looking for, and hopped on the first train away from the religious nut, as was my tendency any time I was confronted with the gospel.

There was something about the drawings she handed me, which I continued to stare at and try to make sense of. I considered returning to the park, as the reality of a God who loved me began to settle into my heart. I figured I had crossed the line, and that God didn't love me. My whole reasoning was that, if I am a sinner with no redemption, then I might as well dive headlong into sin. But God could really forgive me? God could really love me? God could really come and live in my heart? Maybe I needed to hear more.

The problem was, I was lost, both figuratively in the spiritual sense, and literally in that I had no clue how to find that park I had inadvertently wandered into in the first place.

I continued on to the downtown area of Prague, landing near John Huss Square, where, to my disbelief, I found a Campus Crusade for Christ open air revival going on. Just my luck, I thought to myself. Not only was my college campus crawling with Campus Crusade staffers, but now I've run into them in a communist country!

Walking around the outside of the square, I ran into a couple of women who didn't look like they were a part of the revival meeting, and asked for directions. They, in turn, invited me to dinner, and offered to show me to the youth hostel after we ate, as they were heading there later. The three of us walked into a buffet, and after dinner was ordered, one of them whipped out a tract.

My initial response was to bolt for the door, but this time, my heart was softened, and the soil was tilled to receive the seed of the Word. My own wall I'd put up around my heart, resisting Christ, came down. I bowed my head right there, in a cafe off of John Huss Square in Prague, and found freedom in Christ.