We didn’t sign up for this. I’ve said it once…I’ve said it twice…I’m even shamefully guilty of saying it three times.
We didn’t sign up for this.
West Africa’s not the most stable place in the world. It just takes one misfire election and people start lining up to cross over the borders into seemingly safer land. In West Africa borders are little more than streams, and dense forests. Fear rises in a neighboring country and suddenly already resource strapped communities see 1, 2, 30, 40, 120, 220, 320, 500, 1,000…more people added to their populations.
People who have left all; clothes, food, jobs, homes to come to a foreign land because the other option promises an uncertain future.
“You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” Exodus 22:21
We didn’t sign up for this…but wait…maybe we did.
The truth is when you throw your hands up to the sky and tell God, “Here am I send me” you don’t really know what you’re doing.
You don’t really know what you are signing up for.
He told us to “Go” but He never said what we’d find when we got there.
We look around and we realize that we've found refugees.
Then it dawns on us “We signed up for this.” Yes, actually somewhere between "Here am I Lord" and "Send me" we signed up for this.
So they’re here (more and more everyday) and so are we and they are strangers and foreigners and so are we…in so many ways... and we have to learn how to serve “the least of these” because it doesn’t always come naturally. Sometimes we balk in our hearts and more often with our mouths at the ministry God gives us even when it is running over the border towards us by the thousands.
Pray for us as we serve those that enter our lives from across borders and from across town. Pray for us this Christmas season as we imagine Joseph, Mary and Jesus searching for safety as refugees in a foreign land. Pray for us as we search out what it is exactly that we did sign up for.
May it always be for the sake of the Gospel that we give our holidays, hearts and lives.
Oh, Wow! What a powerful explanation of what happens when people say, "Here I am Lord, send me." Great wording. You've touched my heart.
ReplyDeleteGod is using you, training you, stretching you, enabling you, rejoicing over you.
I'm praying!
LT
And even when we sign up, we have no idea what it is going to look like in real life, or what it is going to cost us.
ReplyDeleteYes, I am praying. For you, for Liberia and the Liberians, for the refugee situation there, and for all of us who signed up for this.