Hannah Müller was nineteen, German, and on a gap year volunteering with refugees on Lesbos, Greece. She'd gone because it looked good on a university application — she was honest about that. She wasn't particularly religious. Her parents were culturally Lutheran but hadn't attended church in years.
The Meal Queue
In November 2022, Hannah was serving food at the Moria 2.0 camp. The queue stretched beyond what she could see. Hundreds of people — Syrian, Afghan, Congolese, Somali — waiting for a plate of rice and stew. It was cold, chaotic, and overwhelming.
Halfway through the shift, a Syrian mother handed her baby to Hannah while she collected plates for her other children. The baby — small, thin, wrapped in a blanket that wasn't warm enough — looked up at Hannah and smiled.
Something broke open in Hannah that she still can't fully explain. Standing in a muddy food line on a Greek island, holding a refugee's baby, she felt a presence so overwhelming that she had to sit down. Not sadness, not pity — something bigger. A sense that she was standing on holy ground. That the chaos around her was somehow sacred. That God was more present in this meal queue than in any church she'd ever half-attended.
The Kitchen Floor Prayer
That night, Hannah sat on the floor of the volunteer kitchen and prayed for the first time in her life. Not to a God she understood — to a God she'd just met in the eyes of a baby and the exhaustion of a meal line.
"I didn't have words for what happened," she says. "I just knew I'd encountered something real. Not a concept, not a philosophy — a Person. And He was in the camp. With the refugees. In the queue."
After Lesbos
Hannah extended her gap year to six months. She's now studying social work at university in Munich and leads a team that sends supplies to refugee camps. She was baptised in 2023.
"I went to Lesbos to pad my CV," Hannah says without embarrassment. "God met me there anyway. He didn't care about my motives. He cared about showing up. And He showed up in the most unlikely place — a plate of rice, a stranger's baby, and a queue of desperate people who taught me more about His presence than a lifetime of European Christianity ever did."