How I Met Jesus in Iceland... and All Over Europe

I hopped in the rental car and was a nervous wreck. I didn't want the rental company to know that I only had less than 2 hours of experience driving in a manual car. Breathe. I shifted into first gear, depressed the clutch, and applied a little bit of pressure on the gas. The car didn’t stall. I’M MOVING. (!)

And, I was off. I navigated to my Air BnB address and arrived at the street a few minutes later. I was looking for a specific house number, but couldn’t quite find it. Despite hearing the car stutter and shake, I drove around twice in a circle before I decided that it would probably be best to park it and find the Air BnB on foot. I got out and started walking. Mind you, it’s a tiny street with maybe 3-4 houses on either side of it and I thought, this shouldn’t be too difficult… as I spent the next 15 minutes walking around in laps with no success. To my dismay, there wasn’t a single soul in sight to ask for directions.

I started walking back to my car and from the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of pink moving. I looked more closely and saw someone coming out of a house. The person was a woman wearing a pink cap. I walked closer. I noticed that she was also Asian. She seems approachable, I thought. If not, she’s a tiny old Asian lady. I think I can handle her. I decided to go against all the advice that people told me about not talking to strangers in foreign countries and walked up to her. I explained my situation and was met with warmth. She wasn't certain but gestured in a general direction to where she thought my Air BnB would be. As she spoke, her slight accent sounded ever so familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. As we got talking, I decided to ask her if she was Filipina. To my surprise, she said yes! No wonder the accent sounded so familiar. I told her that I was also Filipino, and the next set of questions followed:

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Why don’t you come inside?”

“Are you hungry? I have pancit in the fridge! Come on in, I’ll heat some up for you.”

And the next thing I knew, I was eating pancit, a type of Filipino noodle dish, in the kitchen of a Filipina woman’s home in Iceland.

I was almost in disbelief. Her name is Basilia.

Me and Basilia sporting her magenta scarf and pink cap.

After dining in her home, she offered to drive me to my Air BnB which was literally just two houses down on the same street. As she dropped me off, she said, “If this isn’t the right one or you still can’t find it, you’re more than welcome to stay in my home.” In my head, my jaw dropped at her hospitality. I was a stranger to her, yet I was being treated as if I was one of her own. I nodded and thanked her. I started my journey around 2pm that day and didn’t come back until it got dark around midnight. I was utterly exhausted: I had hiked to hot springs atop mountains and swam in them, watched water get blown from the ground, heard the deafening roar of 100 foot waterfalls… I felt like I discovered a true treasure seeing such an abundance of beauty and having such a blast that day on my own. Although, it seemed almost unfair not to share something so precious with others. In a way, I desired to have a companion to accompany me in admiring the beauty of God’s creation. I prayed that evening and thanked God for the beautiful day.

I decided to visit Basilia the next morning and to let her know that the house she dropped me off at was indeed the right place. I had no idea if she would even be awake yet, but I knocked on her door, and to my surprise, she answered. She invited me in for breakfast, and as we were eating, I found out that she too was Catholic. I asked her for some recommendations of where to go and what to see that day, and she responded by saying that she actually hadn’t been to many places in Iceland before. I was curious as to why, and she told me that she wasn’t too comfortable driving on the highways apart from grocery shopping. I also found out that her husband passed away several years ago and that since then, she didn’t really venture out much unless one of her four kids drove her.

Considering that I was about to explore more of the country that day, I asked, “Why don’t you come with me?” An expression of bewilderment and surprise crossed her face.

Basilia, still sporting her pink cap, and I at Seljalandsfoss featuring a double rainbow.

“But, I can’t.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Well, I have an appointment with my son at 1pm.”

“Do you really have to meet with your son at 1pm?”

Her eyes grew, and she smiled. “Let me call him.”

After getting a hold of her son, she passed along the phone to me. I asked her son if he would permit a stranger to take his mom on an adventure… and he said yes!

A trip to the grocery store and a car loaded with gas and goodies later, and we were on our way. We saw several waterfalls and this beautiful glacier lagoon. The day ended at Vík where we watched the most beautiful sunset I had ever seen in my entire life. The dome above us was saturated with hues of pinks, oranges, purples, and yellows. Away from the obstruction of buildings and trees, we could truly soak in the vastness of the sky.

We reached her home fairly late that evening. She showed me to my room and gave me a towel and told me to let her know if I needed anything else, as if it was already assumed that I would just be staying there that evening. I felt so welcomed; I could call the place home. I ended up staying with her for the rest of my time in Iceland and in many ways, she became like a mother (or as Basilia likes to say “…more like a grandmother,”) to me. My prayers were answered.

I left for London a few days later, and it was immensely difficult to leave. I wished that I could have taken her with me on the rest of my journey in Europe. Although Basilia and I had to part ways, I had similar encounters all throughout my trip. There were Alan and Michelle who drove me from an airport in France to my Air BnB (if it weren’t for them, I never would have found my Air BnB in Lourdes). There were also George and Ester from the U.K. who I met at a Mass. They invited me to a pub afterwards, paid for my drink, and took me home (they are still good friends of mine and I miss them dearly!). There were Sonia and her husband who paid for my bus fare in Napoli when I didn’t have cash, and many others who took care of me, showed an unforgettable act of kindness or simply shared their generosity with me even when it was inconvenient for them or they didn’t have to.

So, how did I meet Jesus exactly? Allow me to digress so we’re all on the same page:

The only way we can communicate love is through our bodies. Whether it’s through moving your lips to speak the words, “I love you”, using your hands to create a meal for your family, or a father holding his baby in his arms, you are using your body to communicate your love.

God loves us. So dang stinkin’ much. But God is a pure Spirit, an immaterial being, and we on the other hand are human beings with material bodies. In order for us to receive and interpret information we must use our senses through different parts of our bodies—our ears to hear, eyes to see, our hands to touch. And so, how can God communicate His love to us when He doesn’t have a body?

This is where Jesus comes into play. Because God doesn't just want to ghost us or leave us hanging, He manifested himself in a way so that He could communicate his love to us and in a way that we could understand—through Jesus, who does have a physical body.

To answer the question, this is how I met Christ: through his mystical body as I encountered him in each individual whom I came across on my journey.

As Saint Teresa of Avila said,

“Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes with which Christ looks out his compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.”

The hands of Basilia who made me food, the feet of the Croatian family who accompanied me home when it got dark, and the countless other acts of kindness received and given—all communicated through our bodies—were expressions of God’s love and encounters with Christ himself.

This is how I met Jesus in Iceland and all over Europe.