Wednesday 13 August 2008

Have you ever stopped to think about the people you've met who have changed your life? Perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse, but someone who has altered the course of your life and shifted the way you think. For me there are so many people to whom I owe so much. Some of them know it, and others are blissfully ignorant. But there are two students I met once whose simple hospitality humbled me more than I can say.

When I met Boro and Snezana it was in a little lean-to extension on a little wobbly house in a cobbled backstreet of a Slovak village in Northern Serbia. My friend and I had to duck to pass in through the tiny blue door off the street - its paint flaking to reveal many other colours underneath. Snezana, whose name means 'snow-white', had been a primary school teacher in her native Macedonia. Boro had been a night-club singer, and his speaking voice bore the rasp of too much second hand smoke. Mind you, hi mellow singing voice was still there, and he could pick up any old guitar and fill the room with rich and haunting music.

They had travelled all this way from their homeland to study in a Bible School for one year, before returning to their own people to share their faith. As with any visit in this part of Europe, shoes were removed at the door and before long the strong scent of thick black coffee was filling the tiny room. That's when it happened. Out came the coffees, four cups, and then out came a plate with one cereal bar, broken in two for my friend and I to share. There was nothing for our hosts, just this precious item from the cupboard for their guests. Having left behind their homes and livelihoods, they had very little money - but their spirits were so generous. Who'd have thought a simple cereal bar could mean so much?

I encountered this again and again on my visits to Serbia. The refugee in a former communist youth camp insisting I eat another slice of cake, the young man with war looming insisting on using his last fuel to drive me to the airport and to safety. Theirs was a generosity of Spirit which left me feeling like a spiritual pygmy with a shrunken heart. To have so little and give so much is to be the very best kind of human being.

In the early church there were some words of Jesus which had been kept alive but never written down until the Apostles came along. 'It is more blessed to give than to receive'.

On that day in that little Slovak house with a cup of strong black coffee in my hands those words meant more to me than ever before. You're maybe wondering whether I ate the cereal bar. Of course I did - to refuse it would have been to belittle their generosity. I ate it there and then - and the flavour of it has been with me ever since.