After We Had Torn Ourselves Away

Before Laura left for London, we had another quandary. A DTS is organized into two parts. There is a three-month lecture phase followed by an outreach segment. Our lecture phase was soon coming to an end and the outreach was going to be in an old haunt of mine – Greece, with a smaller team going to Romania.

Since we did not really have the money and I had already been on a number of outreaches in Greece with my father, I tried to see if I could get out of it again. Laura was struggling, not least because I would be away for a couple of months while she was alone in London. But then she got an amazing confirmation that this was the right thing to do.

For a portion of the outreach in Greece, the team was going to split up into three smaller groups. One of the smaller groups would be going to Turkey, one to Albania and one to the Greek island of Kos. Kos was the birthplace of Hippocrates, the man considered to be the father of western medicine. It has also become famous for the place where migrants land from Turkey. If I went on outreach, I would go on the Kos team.

One day Laura was praying about the whole situation and as a regular part of her Bible reading she was in the Book of Acts. She came to chapter 21 and it reads, 

“After we had torn ourselves away from them, we put out to sea and sailed straight to Kos.” (NIV)

She had no idea that Kos was even in the Bible but there it was, describing our very situation. Since it was decided that I was not able to get out of the outreach, we took the verse as a further confirmation. 

Laura went back to London where one of the American babysitting families allowed her to stay on the fourth floor of their row house, right in the middle of Kensington and not too far from work. Incidentally, the house belonged to film director, John Boorman. Once the Anastasis came out of drydock, the DTS returned on board and soon sailed to London as well.

We found out that the headmaster at Laura’s school owned a house on the Greek island of Mykonos. She was going to be going down there during the next school break. When she heard what I was doing, she offered to let us stay there for a few days if Laura wanted to come down too. We accepted. So we “tore ourselves away” from each other and, once again, I returned to Greece. 

We stayed in a building in Pireaus that YWAM, Greece rented. We had a couple of days off to start out so a few of us went to see the ancient ruins in downtown Athens. We went to Mars Hill, where the apostle Paul gave a famous speech about the Unknown God. We didn’t want to just take some dorky pictures standing in front of some famous spot so we created some shots where one of us would play Paul preaching and the rest would act like the crowd who were listening in rapt attention.  

We performed street outreaches around the city, usually one in the morning and one at night. One Sunday we went to a church run by Costas Macris, one of the other two men who stood trial in Greece with my father for proselytizing. He had a large family and they were all amazed to see me. Our connection from the gravity of the trial had given us all an uncommon bond. 

DTS dorks in Athens

(pretending to) Preaching on Mars Hill

Dean draws a crowd


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