My husband is writing a blog for every country/city that we go to on our post squad leading travels across Europe, on top of that we are keeping a daily journal of the things that we do and see (I have written one entry, day 1), he encouraged me to write about our trip too because our perspectives are soooo very different. What started out as an email to our co-leader from squad leading about our trip thus far quickly turned into this blog post about my seeing the Kingdom at work in London. Here it is….
Our travels so far have been so incredible, every single city that we go to is so very different, and there are so many awesome things to explore. The U.K. was incredible, my favourites were Belfast and Edinburgh, I find the Belfast part kind of funny because I spent a month there when I was 21, and Joe and I did a lot of the same things that I did when I was there, so maybe the reason that I loved it so much is because of the nostalgia of it. But, I digress.
London was our first stop, beautiful, so rich with history and tradition, my favourite part of this city was the Portobello Market, which has been running for almost 300 years. We also went to Saint Pauls Cathedral, Westminster Abby, the London Eye, Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, a Queenspark Rangers football game, London Tower, and the Tower Bridge, just to name a few. The one part of London that really struck me was the diversity of people here, and the fact that a lot of the people that were staying in our hostel were not travellers at all but working class people that came from many other EU countries in search of work. I spoke to quite a few of the people that were staying in the room that we were in and most of them were there for work, they were from poorer EU countries where there was no work and no way to provide for themselves or their families, and they were living in the hostel because that was the most affordable place they could find at $20/day. I cooked dinner for us every night in the hostel kitchen and I saw the same people down there night after night. One of the women was living in the hostel with her two teenage children, I would see her daughter every evening with her homework spread out on one of the tables while her mother and brother prepared dinner. I remember being in the kitchen one evening cooking mine and Joe’s dinner on one of the 4 burners on the stove top, and this Spanish mother was using two to cook her own dinner for her family. The kitchen was full of people waiting to use the stovetop, one particularly impatient Nigerian woman was standing directly behind us trying to get her ridiculously large pan onto the one tiny remaining burner, in doing so she was pushing the Spanish woman’s pot off of the stove. I think I would have been pretty annoyed with the Nigerian, and maybe even pushed back a little bit, but not the Spanish woman, she actually gave up her larger burner to the Nigerian, put off cooking her dinner for herself and her family and allowed the other woman to take her place. It really struck my heart, that this woman, who probably fights for a space in the kitchen almost every night so that she can enjoy a family meal with her children before she has to go and work her night shift would sacrifice in order to put someone else first. She doesn’t even have a home, and yet she is sacrificing the little that she does have for the benefit of someone else. It reminds me of the story in the gospel of Mark about the woman that gave her last two coins.
Mark 21:1-4
And He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury, and He saw also a certain poor widow putting in two mites. So He said, “Truly I say to you that this poor widow has put in more than all; for all these out of their abundance have put in offerings for God, but she out of her poverty put in all the livelihood that she had.”
This woman will never know it but her simple actions demonstrated the love and grace of Jesus to me in a way that struck me so much so that it has become one of my most vivid memories of London. Through all of my travels I am seeing and learning that the Kingdom of God is everywhere, we just have to be willing to open up our eyes and see it, it appears in the ordinary, and transforms life into the extrordinary. We just need to say yes to the things that God is showing us and actively participate in them.
