*I’m marking the various anniversaries that brought Husband and I together three years ago in February when I first visited Geneva. Part 1.
The hostel near the banks of Lake Geneva was starting to feel like home after five days. I survived on a diet of muesli, yoghurt, bread and butter and a can of tuna saved from my time in South Africa two months before.
My dorm-style room with six beds – three bunks – had a mix of women cycling in and out of it. We had loud snorers, late-night-coming-in-ers, a Brazilian police detective, a UN delegate from Uruguay, a Belarusian scientist, a Polish traveler, students from Germany and the United States and so many others I don’t remember.
Every day I set out with no idea of where I was going to end up. One day I went to the United Nations with my Iranian-Canadian-Swedish hostel mate. The tour is overrated but is a Geneva must-do, I suppose. Another day I got lost in the Old Town and ended up at the Lutheran Church office where a woman needed help with Microsoft Excel. I was happy to help. I walked around the lake. I ran around the lake.
During my last weeks in London before I went to Geneva, I was feeling desperate and had googled churches in Geneva. I chose two websites at random and sent its administrator an email explaining my situation and did they have a seminary with cheap accommodations for a single, female traveler. One emailed me back and said no, but that he was sending my email on to the missions committee. Through a somewhat-roundabout chain of events, my email ended up in the hands of a lovely, charitable young Indian woman who was working in Geneva and loved Jesus. She had no idea who I was, and heaven knows I must have sounded like one of those strange people from whom we all get emails that end up in our spam folders, but she emailed me anyway. She invited me to her flat on my first evening in Geneva. She showed me great kindness and hospitality.
She also told me about a young adults group that met on Tuesday nights, and she said that she was more than happy to send me the information for the following meeting.
I never thought I would go to it. I wasn’t interested in those types of meetings; my faith was progressing in a vastly different direction from the churchy, Bible-study-type gatherings. I was losing my tolerance for religious activity for the sake of religious activity. (I should mention that I had no idea what kind of young adults group this was – I was making a judgment without any real information, just for the sake of making a judgment.)
Life was filling my spirit though from the time I spent with the women I met in the hostel who did not know Jesus. Talking to them about their faith, sharing bits and pieces of my own journey and introducing them to Jesus gave me a new perspective on what it meant to even believe Jesus was real and that he was real in my heart. Attending a Christian group on that Tuesday night was far away from my mind and my heart. I went out on Monday night with the girls from my hostel room, and fully expected to do the same the following evening.
