Love and War

I traveled to Lebanon in May 2016. Before then, I had searched for ways to serve refugees in the UK, Turkey, and Greece, but in the end, it was Lebanon that opened its arms to me but, though not without complication.

I had first reached out to a church in Beirut, hoping to join them in serving Syrian refugees. A young man answered my messages on their social media, but he often forgot—or avoided—connecting me with the pastor. Eventually, he gave me his phone number, telling me to call once I arrived in Beirut. After a few unsettling interactions, the Holy Spirit revealed to me that he was not a believer at all.

Determined, I searched for the pastor’s name on Google and found another way to contact him. To my surprise, he explained that his team had been receiving my messages and they were trying to message me directly from their personal profiles, but the person replying was a hacker. When I later found and sent them the hacker’s Facebook profile, they were able to recover their church page. Less than a month later, I landed in Beirut. I stayed with a radiant woman named Marielle, a Lebanese makeup artist for MAC who loved Jesus deeply. Through her, I met other believers who I traveled with to the Bekaa Valley and shared the gospel in the streets of Beirut. One friend I made was a young man from Tajikistan who had fled his country after his Muslim family threatened to kill him for owning a Bible and giving his life to Jesus.

Most days, I chose to set my camera aside, immersing myself in the lives and setting surrounding me. I listened more than I spoke, wanting to see people as they were. At first, many were unsure of my race, my nationality, or what had brought me there. After realizing with was safe enough, I decided to carry my camera with me and people began to seem more friendly and open to me as an outsider. Marielle once explained that, in a nation scarred by war, it was more believable that I was a journalist documenting their lives than a stranger showing up to love others.