“Wait, what’s this you’re reading?” Vida said pointing to Anna Beth’s Bible.
Abby, Anna Beth, and I had met Vida only ten minutes prior when Vida overheard our conversation in the TOMS coffee shop about the best beaches to visit in Greece. When it was clear that none of us knew where to visit, Vida came over and offered her expertise as an American woman who has lived in Thessaloniki for thirty years.
After offering three different beach options, Vida spotted Anna Beth’s Bible and journal that were sprawled across the coffee shop table and started to ask questions.
It’s not uncommon for people to be curious about what a large group of American twenty-somethings are doing when we travel, so I gave Vida the usual speech about traveling the world and loving Jesus.
Many times this speech is met by polite nods and smiles, but Vida wanted something more.
For over an hour Vida poured out her heart over a God she heard about as a child- a God that was so pure and perfect she would never be good enough to reach. A God that was separate and distant.
She said that as a fifty-three year old woman, she is going through a cleaning process in every area of her life. She is deleting Facebook, cleaning out her closet, abandoning dying her hair in favor of a more natural look. She wants to start fresh and feels there is something more for her spiritually in this season. God is something she wants, but Vida said she doesn’t know where to find Him.
Abby, Anna Beth and I shared with Vida about the relationships we have found with Jesus. The God who bridged the gap between the imperfect us and a pure God. We also shared that in each of our lives we have seen God seek after our hearts even when we rejected Him. We said that Christ wants to love us- His imperfect people.
From our conversation, I could tell that Vida is a curious woman who craves knowledge, which was even more apparent when Vida said she wished she had a Bible to read for herself. Anna Beth immediately gifted Vida hers, which moved Vida to complete shock and the brink of tears. One act of generosity sometimes shows more Christ than hours of conversation.
Vida said that she normally doesn’t go to TOMS and felt like something was drawing her to go that day. Even then, Vida was seeing the hand of God that brought the four of us together.
Anna Beth recently wrote about Vida in her blog and included this follow up:
“Abby ran into her again a couple days later at Tom’s. Vida told Abby how she purposely came out of her way to go to Toms in hopes that she would run into us again!!! She said she was so excited the other day that she forgot to tell us that about 10 days ago, she sat down to meditate, and said, “Jesus, if you’re out there, show me.” She asked him to give her a sign, a big one. Then she met us.
She went on to tell Abby she has been reading her Bible 2x a day & had some questions but “It has been beautiful! I have been overwhelmed. I don’t feel like I’ll become a Christian or really belong to anything at this point in my life, but I do feel I’m about to enter into a very special relationship… I do feel something big, something changing. As I left Toms the other day with the Bible, I felt like there was something alive behind me, in my bag.. I felt like I had wings & I wasn’t a lone!”
Sometimes it feels like God isn’t pursuing me or remains silent, but moments like the one with Vida remind me that God is fighting for us and loving us even when we can’t seem to see it.
ALSO:Check out this sermon by Erwin McManus about Christ inviting people to Him and how Christians seem to shut people out of God’s party.
