In Macedonia during debrief my teammate Linsey and I would go to this one restaurant over and over because the food and atmosphere were so good. Every time we had a meal there someone from the homeless community would come up and ask for money to which we responded the same way each time: “how about we buy you a meal instead?”.
On one of our last days there; after doing that for the previous 3 days two young kids (a brother and sister; 9 and 12) approached asking us to buy the fans they were selling. We reciprocated the same way asking them to sit down with us and told them they could have anything they wanted on the menu. Their eyes lit up with joy as they repeated “anything?!”.
As they were browsing the menu a waitress came over to us to inform us they could not be in the restaurant and needed to leave. I explained to her they were now customers since they would be ordering and paying for food. She told me if I wished to purchase their food she would place the order, but it needed to be for take-out only. I was appalled. I agreed to be polite but, told the kids to sit back down once she walked away to place the order.
Their English was amazing. They were so happy that we let them order a soda too. Our food came out first so we put our fries in the middle of the table to share with them; everything was fine even the waitress looked over and caught on that I was not budging on them not being allowed to be pampered even if it was only temporarily.
After about 15 minutes she walked back over and in Macedonian told them they needed to wait across the street (we were sitting outside). They got up, left our table quietly with a look of defeat. My heart broke, my anger rose; who did she think she was to take that moment away from them? How many people actually stop to allow those kids to feel like they’re seen and loved, but she was just going to take that from them?
I cried out to the Lord – “give us the opportunity God to continue reaching out to those who feel unseen, unloved, and unheard”.
Which brings us to our Ask the Lord month here in Athens, Greece.
We used our first day here to do a prayer walk around the city during our walk I heard God say pass out sandwiches to the homeless community; feed the bellies in need. I prayed for confirmation through someone on my team to know it was not “my way” of redeeming what happened in Macedonia. Ask and you will receive – my teammate Hillary relayed to me almost exactly what I heard from the Lord; so we made a plan!
We bought bread, peanut butter, and jelly, the next morning woke up to make sandwiches, and then prayed about where we should go..
We split up in to groups of 2 and hit the streets of Athens.
I was paired with Linsey and after a slow start we finally found our rhythm in subway ministry. Our biggest prayer for the day was to come into contact with someone from the homeless community who spoke English. The very last man we spoke to, Demetrius, was an answer to that prayer. He was an interesting character to say the least, a chatty guy too which was awesome! The food he had for the next two days had been stolen and he was just thinking about how hungry he was and then we showed up! We talked to him about Jesus and that too turned into a very interesting conversation; somehow it turned into a Greek history lesson on Greek heroes (i.e. Hercules). He told us he was there everyday and would love to see us again. He asked us to bend down to him since he never sat up from the park bench during the whole conversation, asked me to remove my glasses so he could see my eyes, and then touched my face to say thank you.
Each group of 2 had different interactions and stories from the day. We met some christians; one of the men we spoke to the only English word he knew was Christian which he said showing us his cross after we gave him the sandwich. We were able to hand out 28 of the 36 sandwiches split up between the 4 groups. One of the men almost brought us to tears; he was asleep when we saw him so we placed the sandwich next to him for when he woke up. We were walking passed him on our way back to the subway and saw him happily eating and looking around trying to figure out who left it. Having the opportunity to be a silent blessing is so powerful. Very rarely do we get to see the other side of them and today we got to observe the happiness it brought that man.
