I knew going into this month things were going to be different and they were going to be hard. That part I got right; everything else I got wrong.
We were rerouted to Greece for the month of December to help serve alongside volunteers in the refugee migrant crisis. We didn’t really know what to expect and weren’t really told anything other than what I’ve just given you. All I knew about the refugee crisis was what I had heard from the media – thousands of refugees fleeing from Syria every day and entering the EU through Greece. In October I read one article that said more refugees had entered the EU in one week that month than all that had fled in all of 2014. And as true as that is and as much as I tried not to let that influence my outlook for the month, it shaped my expectations for what we would encounter during our time on Lesvos. And that’s where things got difficult.
We arrived in Molyvos and were informed that just a few days before we arrived the EU paid Turkey €3 billion to prevent refugees from coming into Greece. The volunteers we worked with weren’t sure how that would affect the flow of refugees coming across the few kilometers of Aegean Sea separating Turkey and the island of Lesvos, but we soon found out. Skala Sykeminia, the refugee transition camp where we worked, had seen thousands of refugees coming through every day before we arrived, but while we were there that number dropped to just a few hundred refugees a day. In fact, our team worked evening shifts at the camp for two weeks before we saw a single refugee come through the camp.
That was hard for me. I wanted so much to help the refugees in any way that I could, but they simply weren’t coming. For those first two weeks I asked the Lord often what his purpose was in us being there – after all, he doesn’t make mistakes and didn’t accidentally send us to Lesvos at the wrong time. I quickly realized that it was more than just about us serving refugees – it was also about us serving the long-term volunteers who had been there for months and serving the locals who, for years, had incurred their own set of costs as a result of aiding the refugees.
Yes, I knew that the Father had a purpose in us being there…but I was still frustrated, so it was at that point that I decided to do some listening prayer along the shore where the refugees land. And during that walk the Lord clearly told me that the source of my frustration actually stemmed from the condition of my heart – that the selfish motive out of which I wanted to serve created the tension in my heart when the reality of what we were experiencing did not match the expectations I held in my head.
It didn’t take long for me to ask the Lord for forgiveness and change my heart. Not long after that the floodgates opened and we saw hundreds of people come through the camp during our shifts. The Father just melted my heart even more.
It is so easy to think of refugees as just a number, but meeting them showed me who they truly are: people. People just like you and me. People with lives and stories. The only difference being that they walk through the camp with nothing in hand or sometimes a small bag of their belongings and are frequently soaked from head to toe because of the boat crossing they’ve just experienced. They are hungry, cold, tired, and uncertain. And you realize they are people who have just left their countries, homes, families, possessions, jobs, statuses. They have left war-torn and conflict areas of Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere. They are people who are seeking new hope, new life, new joy, and often the only thing we could do was offer a warm smile, food and dry clothes. But in that moment that was enough.
So even though reality did not match my expectations, the Father far exceeded anything that I could’ve asked for or imagined, just as he always does.
