Pray Give Go

Field Notes from the Afterlife is a weekly-ish letter on the stories we tell ourselves, and the strange clarity that comes once the world you trusted falls apart. If something here steadies or stays with you, feel free to reshare it. Thank you for reading, liking, commenting, and helping this space stay alive. You can learn more about me and what I am up to at: www.sarahstiltner.com.

This is Part 4 in a Series. Read Part 1 Read Part 2  Read Part 3

Report on the current situation in Europe

The recent happenings in Germany and other countries have caused an awakening in the people of Europe. Things are not as they once were. It is an unsettling time in Europe. This has caused a new openness among the Europeans. May we give the Lord His way in the midst of this “sudden striking” that we are witnessing in these days in Europe. (source)

In 2016, Germany faced the largest influx of refugees in decades, the majority fleeing the war in Syria. Cities and towns became points of passage for families carrying what they could, navigating unfamiliar streets, crowded shelters, and bureaucratic hurdles that could decide the fate of a life overnight.

The brothers in the Lord’s Recovery put out a call and all were encouraged to participate. We all could PRAY, GIVE, or GO. We watched heartbreaking videos and I truly believed that after years of conferences and trainings and morning revivals, we were finally going to respond to real human need. My husband and I signed up to go as part of a larger team; we were assigned to Stuttgart.

For those of us arriving in Stuttgart that summer, the headlines and images of urgent need carried a moral weight we were unprepared to test against the reality that awaited us on the streets.

The bubble burst before we had even unpacked.

We were told that we would not be going to camps. At all. Instead we were handed Bibles and directed toward the streets. Not the refugee camps. The streets of Stuttgart, where German commuters were hurrying to work or heading home. Corners, commuters, polite refusals, indifferent acceptance, the weight of doctrine pressed into our hands like a measure of the absurdity we were asked to enact.

I carried each one and felt the first tremors of shame—realizing that what we had believed to be human care was already distorted into recruitment. We had come to help people fleeing war. We were handing out footnoted Bibles to people trying to catch a train.

One day, the fracture became something sharper. I was standing in hostel lobby when two “brothers” rushed in, urgently demanding to know who there spoke German. Their urgency was so intense, I honestly though there was some emergency. My German was barely conversational, but I had been classified as a “German speaker” so I stepped forward. Before I could even blink, I was literally seized by the arm and hustled off to a car. Without any explanation, we all jumped in and rushed away. It was several minutes before I fully understood what was happening.

A woman had broken down on the side of the road. She needed help.

And they wanted me to go to her… on the side of a busy, narrow road, and offer her a bible and invite her to a gospel event. I could not believe what I was hearing. I argued, insisting it was inappropriate, desperately wishing I wasn’t there. We pulled up and one of the brothers said that we would not leave until I “seized the opportunity to speak for Christ.”

We sat in the car, watching her standing beside her disabled car, frustrated and alone, and I felt the full obscenity of what I knew was inevitable.

I did what they asked.

I approached her in broken German, held out the bible, spoke words she did not need, and walked away while her car remained broken and she still alone. She had not asked for salvation. She had not asked for anything. And still I could not offer her any real help, because that was not why we were there. I walked away ashamed—carrying the awareness that her need had been recast as opportunity, and that I had become complicit in the distortion.

A few days later, we were invited to sit at a table that would undo something in me permanently. We had met a Muslim family on the street and, of course, had offered them a bible. They politely took it and then invited us to join them in their small apartment for a Ramadan meal.

We were encouraged to go, the brothers were excited even. Their goal for us to introduce the ministry and preach the gospel.

The night unfolded I never could have imagined. They welcomed us with ease, arranging the table with care, asking about our families and listening with genuine interest. They spoke to us as if we were neighbors, not projects. There was no agenda. No attempt to persuade. No doctrine introduced, no literature offered, no invitation extended to anything beyond the meal itself. They never once mentioned their faith. They simply lived it—in the food they had prepared, in the attention they offered, in the dignity with which they treated two strangers who had come to their table carrying obligations they knew nothing about.

And they did all this knowing they would never see us again.

I looked across the table at my husband and knew we were both experiencing the same rupture. It was the first time in my adult life that someone outside our tradition had offered a form of goodness that demanded nothing in exchange, that carried no doctrine as its frame, that existed independently of recognition or conversion. A goodness we had been taught to fear. A goodness we had been told was inferior to our own. And yet here it was—unmistakable, unhurried, and entirely free.

We were expected to invite them to a gospel event the next day. Neither of us could do it.

We could not turn their hospitality into strategy. We could not shape their kindness into a measure for our own purposes. In the silence that followed our quiet refusal, something inside me shifted in the story I had been living, years of belief and obedience falling apart during that Ramadan feast.

Even now, years later, the grief lingers. Grief for the harm I inflicted in the name of this so-called faith—for the corners I stood on handing out words instead of care, for the woman beside the broken car whose need I reduced to an opportunity for performance, for the people I welcomed into this system, people I loved, people whose lives were altered, constrained, or damaged by my compliance and participation.

What I could not name then, but understand now, is that what the Muslim family offered was not only human kindness.

They offered an indictment.

Not with argument, not with accusation, not with any attempt at correction. And they offered it humbly, in the measureless way they lived, in the care they gave freely, in the dignity they extended without asking us to change or become anything we were not.

The exact opposite of what we were doing.

Even to this day, the weight of that night has not lifted. Because I I now see so clearly, just how the system I served transformed need into opportunity and care into a transaction. And I did too.

And so I grieve. Not because I feel sorrow for myself, not because I hope for forgiveness, but because this is a lesson I can never move on from. There is no excuse.

Instead, it is a reckoning I carry, a persistent mirror hold up to the choices I made and the complicity I allowed.