Bread, lots and lots of bread has filled my time over these past few days as I and my teammate Kelsey have been working at a soup kitchen here in the city of Thessoloniki. For baguettes, you cut the ends off, while loaves are sliced almost completely through the middle so that they can be folded more easily into the grocery bag with soup and spinach pastries donated from the abundant bakeries and patisseries of the city.
This soup kitchen is run through a local church of three hundred people, the largest non-orthodox church in Thessoloniki, and has been open for thirty six years. Over and over again we were reminded by Iliana, one of the ladies who volunteers there, that “God has always provided! Thirty six years and God has always provided!” This little box of a building, set down in the ground so that the bags can be passed up through large windows, is filled with joyful, hardworking beautiful people on a daily basis and I have enjoyed their company so very much.
While it operates as a soup kitchen in the mornings, the church also has a ladies coffee/shower day on Thursday afternoon and the same for the men on Friday afternoons. Wednesday night is Coffee, Bible study and worship and Tuesday afternoon is for handing out clothes that have been donated. The soup kitchen serves the homeless and impoverished of Thessoloniki as well as a small group of refugee families. Below are some simple observations that I have made in the past week about the people I have encountered:
1)Some of the people in the line, are so kind, chatting with the soup kitchen workers and one another, others are extremely rude, shoving people in line, snatching the bag from the person handing them food and then cursing in their face about the type of bread they got that day. As I have watched this second group, I see that they are operating from fear, they do not know who they are or whose they are and frantically fighting for food is often more about stuffing down that fear, then it is about satisfying physical hunger.
2) Today one of the refugee families came with a little gift of date stuffed cookies that they had made to give to the people at the soup kitchen. I only interacted with them for about an hour, but what an hour! Kelsey and I set and chatted with the three girls (11, 9 and 7), the oldest of whom is coming along quickly with English. We chatted about building snowmen (after singing an excellent Arab/English rendition of “Do You Want to Build A Snowman”) and I learned that in Syria, there is definitely snow and that these precious girls grew up building snowmen. The mother was gracious, highly intelligent and the Father was kind and so respectful. There is more that passed in this encounter than I can put into words.
3) The country of Syria has lost half of its population. They have either disappeared, been brutally exterminated or risked their lives to take refuge in other countries around the world. I am so earnest when I ask that you pause for a minute as you read this and actually dwell on the thought of what it would be like to wake up one morning, walk out into your neighborhood or town and see that every other house was blown up or eerily empty, that half the people you knew were suddenly gone. Imagine being the person left behind and imagine being the person who has left it all behind. Many of these refugees are middle class. They are educated doctors, lawyers, teachers, grocers used to a decent income, a house with running water, a few bedrooms or more, a garden a social life and more. They and their families now live in makeshift tarp tents, with one or two showers to over a thousand of them, stuck on a small patch of land without any certainty of what the future holds for them. They are discriminated against for being muslin, for being Middle Eastern, for being refugees, for the clothes they wear and for their very existence. We are all working with Refugees in some form or another this month. Please pray for compassion, for obedient hearts and for the power of the Holy Spirit to work through us. The name of Jesus is being spoken, Bibles are being read and people are experiencing the love of God for the first time in their lives. This issue is so large, goes back so far and involves so many people groups and continents that all I can ask you to do is ask the Holy Spirit what He has for you to pray into and be obedient.
Life Updates:
I cried when…Stanley, an intercessory prayer warrior from India, taught on the relevance of Jesus and the importance of the pursuit of life in Jesus over knowledge…in English.
I have been learning…the Greek alphabet and a few Greek words
I laughed when…after bumping into Kelsey a few times in the soup kitchen, she stopped, turned to me and said, “It’s ok, God guards our rear”
I felt patriotic when…our squad had a huge fourth of July celebration that included sparklers and singing the national anthem outside of where we are staying.
