The
generosity that people around the world have shown still blows me away. This
past month in Croatia, our team was shown a whole new level of love and
generosity.
While in Split, Croatia we attended
church at the Café where we worked throughout the month. The first Sunday
there, we made a new friend named Alison. She is from England, and had sold her
house and everything she owned 6 years earlier, and followed God’s calling to
Croatia. When we got there, Alison had just recently moved to the mainland part
of Croatia, and had just started attending the church we were working with.
After church, Alison offered to
take our team to the beach and show us around town a bit. We thought this was
super sweet, especially since we had just met her. So we went together and
spent the day at the beach. After we left the beach, Alison offered to give us
a key to her house so that we could do laundry, hang out during the day while
she was at work, take showers, have some quiet time away from the rest of the
team, etc. She even told us we could sleep in her bed… as long as she wasn’t in
it.
One of the last nights we were
going to be in Split, Alison invited us over for dinner. She cooked a delicious
meal for our entire team. While we were there, she realized I was wearing a
knee brace and started asking me about it. I explained to her what had happened and told her that I
still didn’t really know what was wrong with it because I couldn’t get any of
the countries I had been in to give me and MRI.
(I don’t think I ever wrote a blog about it, so for those of
you who don’t know, I hurt my leg while rafting the Nile River, but they
haven’t really been able to tell me what is fully wrong with it.)
Alison
decided that while I was in Split I needed to get it taken care of. Her friend
that we had met earlier in the week, Renata, was coming over for dinner, and
because her husband was a former soccer player/manager, she thought he might be
able to help me out. Renata jumped at the idea of helping me. She took all my
info and offered to drive me once she knew where we were going. Alison had even
offered to help me pay for the MRI. This all totally blew me away. While we had
formed friendships with these two women, they were relatively strangers,
bending over backwards to help me out and to take care of our team.
The
MRI didn’t work out, because while we were there, the Split soccer team had a
huge game in Russia and literally all the doctors were gone. But, the
generosity the two of them showed was astounding. It gives me a whole new look
on what it looks like to take care of people, and what it looks like to really
give everything you have over to God. All Alison’s possessions and everything
she had, she shared with us. It was incredible. It’s funny how we go into all
these countries to minister to people, and at the end of every month, I feel
like I have received so much more than I have given.
