A charged spiritual zone

On a recent Saturday I was with a group of 25 women who were strangers to me. The “ice-breaker” assignment was to find four things we had in common with the woman seated next to us. I was next to Carmen, and after eliminating as unworthy the commonalities of gender and being born in the 20th century, we got down to business.

Number of children? Carmen has none. As a stab in the dark she said, “Do you speak French?” and I smiled, “Depends who’s asking.”

But this line of inquiry led to the discovery that Carmen had spent a few formative years at a boarding school in Switzerland. “There’s one common thing!” I pounced. “I was in Switzerland too!” Not only that, but Carmen was in the French part of Switzerland. Not only that, but she was in the town of Villars-sur-Ollon. Not only that, but she worked at the Roc D’Orsayski lodge and took the same télécabine ride up to it that I rode five days a week. To make the coincidence more “formidable,” Carmen’s time there started in November 1973, and mine in October of the same year. For some reason, we had either never met or had forgotten each other.

Then came the backstory. Carmen’s family had neighbors whose two unruly boys had been sent off to a boarding school in Villars and had returned gentlemen. Carmen’s father, making the natural assumption, shipped off his two daughters for similar reasons. What the father didn’t know was that the young men’s transformation had not come about through the educational institution but through a chance meeting with Francis Schaeffer and his commune called L’Abri, 3 kilometers down the mountain.

The boarding school, in fact, was to do Carmen more harm than good. One professor in particular was an atheist who hated Schaeffer and who counted it his mission to make atheists of his students. But Schaeffer ended up pursuing the professor, and eventually the man came to faith. Whereupon the professor, feeling dreadful about having damaged so many lives through his teaching, contacted as many former pupils as possible—including Carmen and her sister—and invited them to Switzerland for a week with him and his wife to talk about Jesus Christ.

This is how Carmen came to faith, through a former atheist boarding school professor who was brought to God through Francis Schaeffer.

John 21:25 tells us that if all the things Jesus did were written down, the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Likewise, there are many true stories of hippies and disaffected individuals who found themselves, in spite of themselves, hitching rides up to the top of a mountain in the 1970s in a very spiritually charged zone of Switzerland, and coming down the hill again a different person.

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