I arrived in Greece with a heavy heart. Leaving Colombia was difficult for me, I was in a ministry where I felt like I belonged, where I felt loved, and where I developed close friendships. After four days of traveling, I was so sleep deprived and jet lagged; I spent my first days in Greece exhausted and not knowing what to expect. I don’t really know how to describe how I felt about the idea of working in the refugee camps except that I felt a numbness, almost like I didn’t think I was going to be able to connect, so I closed my heart off.
When I first walked into the refugee camp it was already night time. I looked up at the barbed wire fence and the tents scattered everywhere. For some reason I had envisioned it looking the way I had envisioned what the holocaust would have looked like. I didn’t know what this next month would hold. As the days went on I was mostly in the clothing tent, and not feeling like I was doing any actual relationship building.
I couldn’t understand why I felt so closed off. One of my teammates presented me with the hard question, “Are you actually taking this to the the Lord?” At first I was a little defensive, “of course I am taking it to him” I thought to myself. After really sitting with it for awhile, I realized that maybe I hadn’t been. So I turned to him and said, “Dear God, please change my heart.”
The last few days when we were in Moria, I volunteered for the food line. My job was to read the tickets and tell the workers how many food orders to give. Then I would put it in the bag, and hand it to the refugees. There was always this tension and chaos in the food line, people hungrily waiting in the sun for hours, people trying to cut, people being kicked out of it, and never knowing if there was going to be enough food, and when lunch time came… there wasn’t.
I will never forget her face, this patient and quiet woman that came up to me and put in her order. She had several tickets and was retrieving food for her whole family. I turned around to put in her order, and thats when I heard those three heart wrenching words, “We ran out.” My stomach sank, I turned around and looked into her brown eyes and said, “I am so sorry, we ran out of food.” She looked at me, she wasn’t surprised, she wasn’t angry, she just softly said, “My life is bad.” My heart hurt for her. I could feel my emotions bubbling to the surface, hot tears in my eyes, I felt so helpless.
I excused myself, unable to hold the tears in any longer, and not wanting to cry in front of anybody I hid inside one of the volunteer tents. None of this fair, we couldn’t even provide enough food for them. That’s when he saw me, the 9 year old boy who had latched onto us from the beginning, keeping us company during our shifts. He had the sweetest brown eyes. He saw me crying and came up to me and just hugged me. He said, “Please don’t cry,” which obviously only made the tears come more quickly. He sat there with me, and he wrapped his arm around me.
Here this little boy was in a bad situation, growing up in a refugee camp, facing one disappointment after another, and he was comforting me, loving me in that moment. He didn’t know my language, he didn’t know who Jesus was, but he understood a love that most people cannot understand, and in that moment, he was Jesus, and Lord used him to change my heart.
The next day, even though it was so hard, I wanted to do the food line again. After we had left the day before a few riots had broken out, so tensions were extra high between the police and the refugees. Lunch was about to run out again, and in my mind I was pleading with God, “Please, provide a way.” Just when I thought we had run out, one of the organizations had put together a soup, and by doing so everyone was able to eat, and there was even leftovers. He had answered my prayer. He provided food, He gave me a place in the food line where I felt I belonged, and He sent a little boy to change my heart.
