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TEAM TALK
The Power of Giving
By Graham Ries
Have you ever been homeless and destitute? Living on the streets? No? I didn’t think so. I have, and let me tell you
this – it changes you.
The following tale is a true one – I know because I was the one it happened to.
Fifteen years ago I came down from Zimbabwe to start a new life in South Africa with a woman I had met on the
Internet. This was surely one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made in my life – and I’ve made some big ones be-
lieve me. But there are silver linings behind many clouds in life and the Lord uses even our biggest mistakes to help
others, and teach us lessons at the same time.
Things turned bad when we crossed the border at Messina in Limpopo province and proceeded to get a whole lot
worse as we journeyed towards East London. Without going into much detail here, because that part of my story is
not what this article is about, it was a scant four months before I found myself sitting on the edge of a sidewalk in
East London with nowhere to live and unable to afford a Coca-Cola, wondering what the hell had happened.
It was on one of these evenings that I was standing outside a restaurant in the East London suburb of Vincent and I
turned to look at something that had caught my eye. There was a man sitting alone at a table in this restaurant who
at that same moment in turn caught my eye with a gesture of his hand. “Come and sit at my table” his gesture said.
So I went into the restaurant and up to this man. “Sit down” he said, “and order anything you’d like from the menu.
I’ll pay for it.”
And so I did. It had been so very, very long since I had sat down in a restaurant and had a good meal it was hard to
keep my manners and eat genteelly, in order to thoroughly enjoy the meal. As I recall I think it was an Indian dish I
ordered, Biryani or Tandoori Chicken or something like that.
Sitting in that posh restaurant with a waiter serving me from a menu a nd drinking water from crystal glasses with
the soft lights and music, I felt like a very, very rich man. Royalty with dirt in my pockets.
And so a meal was enjoyed together with a man who never ever knew the impact that single gesture of kindness
had on me. For 2 solid weeks after that, I was filled with hope for the future, my thoughts had turned from negative
to positive and things didn’t seem anywhere near as hard as they actually were. All because of a meal shared with a
stranger.
That stranger actually became my boss and my landlord but neither is that what this portion of the story is about.
Many years later, having left East London and moved to Port Elizabeth, I was blessed to be able to initiate a mission
outreach called The Matthew Lunch, reaching out to the poor and broken of the city. It happens once a year.
The Matthew Lunch, which will happen again soon, is based on treating the broken and destitute, like I was, as
royalty for a whole day with hot showers, hair and nail treatments and make up for the
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