Back from Paris

Bonjour!

I arrived in from Paris a few hours ago. It’s about a 12 hour drive from where I am in Germany. I was there with a team of 12 for a week doing work with the homeless, in the red light district, and just praying for the city. As any photography students would, we also went to Paris Photo on the opening day.

I’ll post later about the details of the trip, but I want to give a quick shout-out to God for making the whole thing possible, plus more.

First, we needed accommodation. We thought we had a pretty good in with a church to sleep at, but as time got closer and closer they weren’t responding and we needed something quickly. So, we prayed, and we ended up in this old factory which is now an art studio. It ended up being so much more than just sleeping accommodation to us.

Before we left, we divided up responsibilities among ourselves. Lisa, a fantastic girl from Wisconsin, and I were the food team. We were given a budget of 4 euro per day per person for food. We knew that it would be tight but possible. We decided that coffee was a luxury and to cut it out of the budget. But we still wanted coffee, so we prayed not only for coffee, but for Starbucks specifically (we are a little gourmand). The day before we left, a woman on staff came up to Lisa with a pound of whole bean Starbucks coffee, saying that she didn’t know what to do with it before but she knew that there was going to come a time when it was needed. God knew we were coming and that we wanted Starbucks! She gave us the whole pound. Unfortunately, halfway through the week, since our team loves coffee as much as we do, we were out. Revising the budget for food, Lisa and I found room for a few extras, so we set off to Starbucks. Expecting to pay the same amount as in Canada for a pound of Christmas blend we were glad to discover that an entire pound was only 5.50 Euro! What a fantastic surprise to find out that we could afford coffee all week long.

Before we left, we were also trying to figure out how to get music. None of us had a guitar, although a few of us could play. We asked around to a few people but not many had a guitar to lend us for a week. We joked around about God providing one, but we figured that finding a guitar sitting in the middle of an old factory was unlikely. We prayed for one, but ended up borrowing a guitar. As soon as we got to the factory, we found a guitar sitting neatly in the center of the room, much like  most of us had probably imagined it as we were laughing at how ridiculous that would have been a few days earlier.

Another small surprise that God left behind for us was a towel. A few of us had forgotten towels, and were just planning on using pajama bottoms or something. One of us prayed for a towel, and you can guess by now what happened. As we were getting a tour from our lovely hostess, she showed us a pile of clothes and shoes that were available for us to hand out to the homeless or whoever we felt needed it. We were able to borrow towels from the pile for the week, and also bless a few people with the items.

There are many, many other stories including a free cheeseburger, a discontinued camera piece that we were able to find within budget in stock at a store, a broken metro toll just as we ran out of tickets, and meeting tonnes of people. I really think that we were in the right place at the right time. God provided more than we could have imagined. Paris is a beautiful city with a lot of brokenness, and I am glad that I could at least be a part of it for a small amount of time.

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