June 5th, 2009

Today was a little slower paced than anticipated.

A little background: the Universities in Athens are zoned so that police may not enter. This is to facilitate free speech, freedom of opinions and protests, etc. This also means that students have a basic run of the school and may decide to close it down as they please. They really have begun abusing this law, and it is best described by the endless display of graffiti on the buildings.

Today, as we have been doing the past few days, was dedicated to asking the students certain questions - hopefully leading to helpful data that is useful for our partner, Tim, who is planting a church here in the next few years. Tim, a Cambridge/Oxford scholar, has designed these questions with the aim at guiding them to an open mind about a possible "new" church.

However, we bused in the hour and a half to arrive to a locked up school building and a ghost town of students. This is the nature of student life in Greece: unstable. Many uber-political kids belonging to such groups as Communist (a surprising number of supporters actually), Anarchists (who were the cause of mass riots earlier in December), and Socialists frequent these places. So today we were left with a few hours not accounted for.

We decided to take advantage of this opportunity to go visit the well ornamented Greek Orthodox Church down the street and learn a little more about it. We walked in to an amazing, semi-temple looking building and observed the people in there. They walked around from image to image, crossing their hearts, saying a prayer, kissing the glass, and going to the next one. (It was actually kind of gross, as you could see the multitude of kiss marks smudged on the glass from the people before them). It was pretty surreal, yet sad at the EXTREMELY apparent legalism of the Church.

That night, we split up and went to the two community centers belonging to the two churches we were serving. I went to the center for the 2nd Evangelical, and Caroline went to the center for the 1st. We started with a time of prayer, and then the kids began piling in. Immigrant children belonging to soo many nationalities (Pakistani, Albanian, Bulgarian, etc) were running around playing games. This one kid named Mufahsa (YES, just like Lion King) taught me, Rachel, and Emily this new game called Jungle Speed without any common language. It was actually neat to see us catch on and have fun without ANY words being exchanged. High fives were going all over the place and laughter as I kept messing up and getting all the cards sent my way for punishment was common. I played futbol (foosball) with some Albanian kids and got killed! Rachel gave her testimony and taught them how much Jesus has meant to her in her life, and it garnished some good responses. I learned later that the little girls thought I was a "hunk" and were more well behaved than usual (haha). We really had a great time as we found the language of "fun" is universal. We made it home around 11:30 (about standard here in Greece). Please pray for our patience as we must travel 3 hours every day to get to and from Athens...our human nature tends to feel as this time being "wasted", but in reality it is opening opportunities not existing back at the Bible School.

Εφηαστοωε (Thank You) and God Bless,
Austen Weatherly