Where did I see God?

Where did I see God today?

This is something I have asked myself each day of this trip. The answer has been different each day. Sometimes it has been in several ways. Sometimes only one. 

The second question I ask is what one thing will I remember from this day. That usually involves something meaningful someone said, as opposed to where I saw God, which typically has to do with something that I felt. 

And truthfully, for the most part, what I have taken from this trip prior to today was some feeling, but mostly head knowledge. Lots and lots of head knowledge. Things to process. Things that I have had difficulty wrapping my brain around. Difficult things that I never knew and can’t believe I did not. But head knowledge.

Today, it hit me in the heart.

We went to a Methodist church which for the past 3 years has been the main church host home for many persons facing hearings to determine if their pleas for asylum will be met or whether they will be deported back to the countries that they risked so much to flee, because the life they had there was worse than the risk they took to escape.

The first tears came when the young pastor spoke of the start of this program, initiated by a letter from ICE to the area bishop, seeking help from area churches to care for people because ICE had run out of space to house them. He spoke of how the first refugees, primarily mothers and children, released from detention while the fathers were held, came at the beginning of the Advent season, and how the timing was not lost on him in its spiritual meaning and implications. How the expectation of the church volunteers was that the primary thing that the refugees would want was food. But how they soon realized the children just wanted the chance to run and play, as is true of all children everywhere. And the mothers just wanted to sleep, after having been on foot and on guard for more hours than the volunteers knew. He told of volunteers who spent hours holding babies they had only just met, handed to them by mothers so relieved to have a faith community to care for them that they were finally able to rest. 

He told of the fellowship enjoyed between the refugees and the parishioners before and after church services, in sharing coffee, though they often did not speak each others languages and only awkwardly smiled at each other as strangers sharing common space and experience often do. 

He spoke of the lessons they learned that this wasn’t a situation of people in better situations helping those less fortunate, but an experience of people simply living life together in a very complex world.

He told of the dichotomy on Ash Wednesday of the receiving of the ashes. His parishioners much by rote habit, as if on autopilot. The refugees, he explained, were different. They were trembling, as they came to him to receive the ashes. “I don’t know what their narrative was,” he explained, “if it was that their suffering had made them understand so much more clearly the suffering of Jesus, or if it was just their gratitude at having survived the journey and made it some place safe, but they brought the realness of what it is to die to Christ.”

The church houses the migrants short term until they are able to be on their way to a host home, where they will stay until they have a court hearing to determine whether or not they will be granted asylum or deported back to the country from which they fled. 

From the size of the church, I first assumed it was a pretty large congregation. As the conversation went on, the young pastor told us that their membership is only 189 and they regularly worshipped around 100 on Sunday mornings. And yet, since December 2016 when they first began to house these migrants brought to them by ICE, 12,000 people: men, women, and children, have come through their doors. 

Even as he spoke of the undertaking, you could see the amazement he still felt. That this ministry, that they did not ask for, that they did not go looking for, that was so much bigger than they should have been able to accomplish, has worked. Not because of them, but because God has provided, and they have been obedient to answer this need they should not be able to meet.

And then he took us to where the people were. As we walked in, the parents looked at us in obvious wariness. A group of 13, only four had skin darker than mine. Those in our group who spoke Spanish began to speak to the Latino migrants. I looked to the left and saw two little girls. One maybe five who we learned had fled with her mother and father from Kyrgyzstan. She was playing with a little girl around four from central Mexico. They did not speak the same language, their facial features and skin color were  not the same. And yet in this most unlikely of places, they had become friends. Tears filled my eyes and I had to turn away before they fell. I sat and listened for a time to the young pastor as he answered questions about the ministry. And then something caught my attention. I saw a bulletin board, completely covered with artwork from the children who had come through the shelter. As I stood looking at the pieces, most in a language I did not know, I picked up names of countries. The Spanish word for God. And the tears that had filled my eyes as I watched the two young girls, began to stream down my face. One of the other students, who I have grown close to on this trip, came to stand beside me and look. Unlike my silent tears, her sobs shook her visibly. I put my arm around her shoulder, and we both stood there together and cried. Two privileged white women, their hearts broken by the pain of little children we would never know.

So the thing that I will remember yesterday, and where I saw God? They were the same. As for me? I will never be the same. And for that, I am grateful.