Elizabeth was part of our team living in Athens for two months this summer. I have been back in America for a week now, and my thoughts are constantly returning to the friends I left in Athens. So many of these moments and relationships are cherished in my heart – many of them in a [...]
So often we feel helpless and unable to do anything in the face of so much suffering. But you can and do have a role. Prayer is powerful and effective. Pray for refugees to have patience in the slow process. Pray for protection in the camps that are overfull and under supervised. Pray for the [...]
There is nothing like necessity when it comes to communication. The Afghan ladies who gathered at the center for the bi-weekly refugee meeting were gracious about the fact that I struggled miserably to put together a simply sentence in Farsi. As time went on, my pre-programmed, memorized phrases started to come out better as we sat around [...]
I have reached a wall of sorts in my ability to describe what God is doing here. He revealed something in my heart that I did not recognize in coming to Athens. Just 16 days ago, I walked with a mindset of this being an "us and them" situation. I knew that these people were [...]
Here's a first-hand account from one of our team members one what it's like to serve refugees in Athens. It's been a whirlwind this week. It's hard to reconcile the anxiety and hesitancy I had right before arriving to the joy that seems to course through my soul. It is not a sugar sweet happiness, [...]
Our second day in the refugee squat began to reveal the brokenness and pain in the lives of our new friends. Tonight, we gathered to share stories from the day – a practice that has been incredibly important to our team. During the day, it’s pretty chaotic and we are individually stretched very thin for [...]
I am a teacher; it’s what I do. For the past several years I have been involved with teaching those who speak English as a learned language. Some of those teaching experiences have been frustrating, some fruitful, but always interesting and many times entertaining! Recently, in Nashville, I was working with two Middle Eastern ladies. The [...]
I’ll always remember my first Newroz in Kurdistan as the time a Kurd literally gave me the shirt off his back (and his baggy trousers too!). My wife and I were picnicking with the family of one of our students. Among the many cousins, aunts, uncles, and others, there was a grandfather (or perhaps he [...]
[Gen 21:16 ] Then Hagar went and sat down opposite Ishmael a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot, for she said, "Let me not look on the death of the child." And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. This is the story I was pondering early [...]
There are candles lit in the living room, the wind is howling outside and we had a snow day last week. Were it not for the constancy of baklava and old men in huge pants, I could think I was in the US. (Though, honestly, my city in the US has baklava and big pantsed-men in spades.) This [...]
