God’s Property

This isn’t my typical travel post, but a brief encounter I had in Lyon, France last May impacted me deeply, so I decided to write about it. This is the result. I always say that God never fails to show up when I travel, and this is one example.

Lyon’s train station is called Gare de la Part-Dieu which means, literally, “Property of God railway station.”

And his property is everywhere--the place is absolutely heaving with humanity.

The girl on my train from Burgundy, who carries with her a string bass and struggles to step down onto the platform. She looks around for a moment, wondering the best way to lug her heavy instrument to an exit.

The gorgeous, high-cheekboned African woman in a beautiful black dress and black high tops, her long black hair pulled into a tight, high ponytail, who is holding the leash of a very thin, very long-legged black dog. Everyone around her is staring—she is stunning, and so is her dog—but she is oblivious.

I wonder: is she really oblivious or is she just used to being stared at?

The young waif with dirty hair, dirty clothes, dirty shoes, walking up and down the terminus, holding out her hands, asking for something to eat. The woman ahead of me in the coffee shop uses the girl as an object lesson for her two children, buying her a sandwich while her children watch on.

I am in no mood for all of this gorgeous-dirty humanity, the crushing crowds waiting for their train or alighting from one.

I’ve just come off a ten-day trip, leading an invigorating, inspiring, extremely memorable spiritual retreat with a wonderful group of women through Burgundy. Our tour has ended, and now I’m waiting for my husband who will meet me here.

I’m filled up, but tired. Drained, in fact.

I’ve got about an hour to wait, so I take my coffee and, miracle of miracles, find a small cubicle in which to sit, gloriously alone.

Two blue vinyl benches face each other, room for four, and I shoot a quick prayer to God that none of his “property” decides to join me there. He gives me about two minutes of peace before a young man sits down, phone in hand.

I give the man a half-smile, half-grimace and notice his appearance: black t-shirt, gray sweatpants, black leather suspenders, black tennis shoes. He carries a black leather jacket that is slung beside him on the bench directly across from mine. His hair is dark with speckles of gray, cut very close, and I can see some stubble of a black beard beginning to poke through the skin on his cheeks.

I’ll admit, he makes me a little nervous. He looks like someone from another part of the world with which I’m not familiar. Or maybe from a rough part of town. At any rate, he isn’t the type of person I generally know.

I avoid eye contact.

Until he looks up from his phone and starts speaking French to me like I’m a local. Me? French? I laugh to myself because I know I can’t look more American.

But he jabbers on in French until I can jump in and say, “Non Francais.” That’s about all the French I can muster.

He looks surprised. You’re not French? he indicates, and I laugh and say, “No, American.”

He doesn’t speak English, and I don’t speak French, so I take a sip of coffee thinking that will be the end of it. But he keeps going. I hear words like “Hollywood” and “New York.” I smile at the thought that these are all he knows of the vastness of America.

But he’s trying to connect, so I smile and play along. Using hand motions and his limited English and my (very) limited French, we begin to communicate.

Somehow, I pick up that he lives in Paris, works as a baggage handler at the airport, and is in Lyon to meet his brother for the day.

I explain that I am waiting for my husband to arrive from Chicago.

“Ahhhh! Chicago! Al Capone!” (Why is it always Al Capone?)

We laugh, smile, and haltingly get to know each other on the most surface of levels.

Then, out of the blue, he asks me if I am a Christian. I hear something like “Jesu Christu,” and say, “Yes. I follow Jesus. Do you know Jesus?”

He puts his hand on his chest, patting the place over his heart, and says, “Oui! Jesu Christu!” I have Jesus in my heart.

“You have Jesus in your heart?” I ask.

Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have sounded as incredulous as I did, but I absolutely could not believe it. And yet I did. Because I wasn’t the one who sat down with him. And I wasn’t the one who started the conversation. And I wasn’t the one who turned the conversation to Jesus. He did.

God did.

Between hand motions and single words, I ask him how he came to know Jesus, and he somehow explains that he grew up in a Muslim household. His father was Muslim, but his mother had been raised Catholic in Italy. She had kept a Bible (hidden? I wonder), and she taught him about Jesus. Somewhere along the line, he rejected his Muslim upbringing and accepted Jesus Christ.

“I am saved, and I will go to heaven!” He says this in French and some halting English, with lots of hand gesturing.

“Me too!” I say, my eyes shining with tears. We sit with this knowledge between us, both of us knowing that our meeting was not by chance and would not be the last.

Just as we’re coming to this understanding, in our incredible non-French, non-English conversation, a woman in a burka sits down next to me. She doesn’t say a word, but she slowly unwraps a sandwich and starts eating. God does, indeed, have a sense of timing, if not humor.

Suddenly, a lightning bolt strikes me: why haven’t we been using Google Translate? I pull out my phone and open the app, only to tell him how nice it was to meet him and that it was time for me to go meet my husband.

He grabs his own phone and slowly punches in some words:

“I wish you a superb weekend with your beloved in two words your other half. I was delighted to speak to you because you are good company.”