Our recent affair with pandemic isolation yielded fresh awareness of the condition we colloquially describe as “feeling cooped up.” What relief to shed the restraints of quarantine as we frolic about these balmy summer days!

The frustration of feeling cooped up physically is mirrored by the ill effects of social bunkering. For instance, consider a young woman who lives with her wealthy, doting parents in a gated community. She attends private schools and vacations overseas each summer. Her friends are all equally privileged. Would it not serve this young woman well to scoop soup at a rescue mission, or join a team that distributes medical supplies to refugees in a war torn country, or the like? If this privileged woman never leaves her social comfort zone – never witnesses poverty and suffering firsthand – will her soul not shrivel?

Conversely, consider a poverty stricken inner-city teen. His neighborhood is crawling with vice. His prospects of escaping life on the streets are bleak. Do we not cheer a program that allows him to visit a working ranch, hike trails in a national park, or attend a youth camp in the Rockies, or the like? To experience another world just might do him a world of good.

Realizing you are physically cooped up is intuitive. Discerning that you are socially cooped up takes more skill to recognize and more effort to overcome. We so naturally find comfort in sameness, not wanting to journey beyond the limits of our social comfort-zones. Yet it can prove equally difficult to appreciate the negative influence of remaining cooped up historically.

By historically cooped up I refer to a condition prevalent in our scientifically oriented, technologically advanced age in which we fail to read ourselves into older worlds. As historical interest fades in our nation, due in part to battles among educators regarding what history even is, fewer and fewer people entertain conversations with anyone who lived before the twentieth century. We remain so cooped up in our own world we learn nothing from people who lived in earlier ages and have so much to teach us.

While we care not to experience many of the challenges they were forced to endure, we can read ourselves into their strange worlds and learn from their defeats and triumphs. Indeed, each of us needs the balance provided by traveling sufficiently far from home – by refusing to remain historically cooped up to the detriment of our souls.

By way of illustration, consider this anecdotal gem recorded in the autobiography of missionary J. Hudson Taylor. The date is Sept. 19, 1853. There are no airplanes in this strange world. Global travel is by ship. At the bustling harbor of Liverpool, England, young Hudson boards a vessel destined for the distant land of China. His purpose is to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in a land where that message was seldom heard and even less appreciated.

Taylor had dedicated his life to this arduous task, suffering astonishing austerities by our standards, and eschewing fame and fortune in the process. At long last, he stood on the deck of a ship headed east. As was custom among nineteenth century missionaries, he planned never to return to his beloved England. He was resigned to die in China in the service of his Lord.

Taylor’s diary recounts the moment of separation from his mother. It is a scene our technologically rich world would never permit and thus a scene whose benefit for us is immense.

“Mother had come to see me off from Liverpool. Never shall I forget that day, nor how she went with me into the little cabin that was to be my home for nearly six long months,” he wrote. “With a mother’s loving hand she smoothed the little bed. She sat by my side, and joined me in the last hymn that we should sing together before the long parting. We knelt down, and she prayed – the last mother’s prayer I was to hear before starting for China. Then notice was given that we must separate, and we had to say goodbye, never expecting to meet on earth again.”

“For my sake she restrained her feelings as much as possible,” Taylor continued. “We parted; and she went on shore, giving me her blessing; I stood alone on deck, and she followed the ship as we moved toward the dock gates. As we passed through the gates, and the separation really began, I shall never forget the cry of anguish wrung from that mother’s heart. It went through me like a knife. I never knew so fully, until then, what ‘God so loved the world’ meant. And I am quite sure that my precious mother learned more of the love of God to the perishing in that hour than in all her life before.”