Getting Sea Legs

It feels like we've moved into a new season at Open Homes Hamilton recently.

We currently have 7 guests, more people than we've ever welcomed at once, but things are moving on pretty steadily. While there are always some curveballs, we know how to guide guests through their first months here. We know how to support a Welcome Circle and encourage companions and hosts as they welcome and support people. We have some strong policies, and we're starting to figure out how to invite full churches into welcoming refugee claimants.

Not everything is new all the time now--we're getting into a rhythm, and we're feeling grateful to be in a new stage of maturity as a ministry.

We also received the big news recently that we will be getting a substantial grant from NewGround, the arm of Diaconal Ministries Canada that provides start-up grants and support to new ministries that are connected to Christian Reformed churches!

This is huge for us. It certainly doesn't cover our whole operating budget, but it includes money for things like a volunteer appreciation event, learning opportunities for our volunteers, bus tickets and grocery cards for new guests, as well as some support for my salary.

If we're going to welcome guests well, we need to be helping volunteers to learn about refugee realities and unlearn the ways that charity and prosperity often train us to interact with people who are (for the time being) on the margins. So I'm very excited to be able to give that part of the work the attention it deserves!

The NewGround grant gets me started off on the right foot salary-wise, but I'm still just at the beginning of gathering a circle of supporters who can allow me to do this work long-term. Every person who gives to the work of Open Homes doesn't just represent a donor--to me, every person who signs on is giving another vote of confidence, both in this work and in me. Yes, churches can become places of hospitality for refugee claimants! And not just welcome, but real belonging! And yes, you can be part of making this happen, Danielle!

Sharon and Jim, helping our Nigerian guests to paint their new place, using paint donated by Meadowlands CRC!

My goal is to reach $1500 in monthly support by the end of December. I'm only at $250/month in salary right now, and that can't last long. So I'll be reaching out to each of you on this list in the coming weeks to tell you more about what's going on with Open Homes Hamilton, answer your questions, and ask if you would be willing to become a monthly supporter. If you can't right now, no worries! I’d love to chat with you over phone or over some good coffee regardless.

If you'd like to pre-empt my email and sign up right now, just message me! Relationships are so key to Open Homes thriving and surviving, not just by supporting networks of relationships across ethnic and class boundaries in Welcome Circles, but in relationships with our supporters too.

Examples of what your support can do:

$5: coffee with a new volunteer

$12.50: 5 bus tickets for a newly arrived guest

$20: snacks for a volunteer orientation

$40: round trip bus tickets + subway fare for a guest to visit their lawyer in Toronto

$50: a tank of gas for running errands with guests

$100: provide grocery cards until a guest is approved by Ontario Works and starts to receive assistance

$150: get a new guest started with a phone

It costs anywhere from $3000-5000 to welcome each new refugee claimant, including about 130 hours of Open Homes Hamilton time. (That's me! Or Katie, Alison, or Sharlene.)

Katie interviewing two recently arrived refugees from the Middle East about the support they received when they arrived, both the good and the not-so-good, at the Refugee Highway Partnership’s North America Roundtable this month.

That number is so variable for many reasons. Sometimes it takes longer for guests to be approved by Ontario Works and start receiving funds, especially if they are inland claimants, which means that they were already in Canada when they made their claim. Perhaps they were an overseas student at McMaster and discovered that they couldn't go home because violence had broken out.

The size of the family also makes a big difference, of course. We tend to welcome singles and couples, because most of our hosts just have one extra room to share with a refugee claimant, but when we are able to welcome a family, the costs for groceries and bus tickets increase quickly.

Right now we manage to cover a large portion of that cost by working without receiving much pay...but that's not sustainable!

In the midst of all this, the most precious parts of this work are the hours I get to spend with guests. This month, I got to drive a guest to Toronto to meet with her lawyer. Usually we would send people via the GO bus and the subway, but she had to be there early in the morning and I was nervous about her getting lost in Toronto. So we got to spend several hours together in the car, chatting about the differences between Canadian and Liberian politics, her family, what she can expect as she adapts to life in Canada, and some comfortable silences.

The other day, Dan and I picked rosehips with a former guest from Yemen and his daughter near our house. We'll bring the dried rosehips to his house soon and enjoy the fruity, flowery flavours together.

What a gift it all is.

A recommended resource:

Check out the Refugee Highway Partnership’s Beyond Soundbites podcast. It’s true to its name: you won’t get simplistic refugee stories here, told by people without lived refugee experience. Jacob Mau is very intentional about honouring the full humanity of the refugee-d people he interviews.

Find it at beyondsoundbitespodcast.org/

Prayer requests:

-That we would find good ways to challenge volunteers and invite them into an anti-racist community of learning.

-That the wife and family of our former guest from Yemen would be able to come here quickly. Family separation is so hard.

-For various apartment searches we’re working on at the moment, especially one for a guest with mobility limitations. Pray that we find good, accessible housing within her budget!

A Day in the Life at Open Homes Hamilton

In one day last week at Open Homes Hamilton we received calls from shelters about 6 refugee claimants who needed housing as soon as possible. 6!

It's always a bit of a scramble when we get a call. We shoot messages back and forth among our leadership team on WhatsApp, trying to decide if we have capacity to welcome a refugee claimant into one of our host homes.

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Busy times after receiving a new guest…so many phone calls!

A safe place for  a refugee claimant to land =

A willing host who has been screened and trained

+

At least one companion to help our new guest navigate life in Hamilton (ideally more than one!)

+

Capacity from someone on our leadership team to take on the guest's settlement tasks, like getting them set up with Legal Aid

Welcoming someone takes more than a host home!

Once we think we might have all the ingredients, we start reaching out to hosts. Inevitably, someone's on vacation, someone else's availability has changed, someone's house has stairs that are a barrier to a  guest with mobility issues.

The heart of Open Homes Hamilton are volunteers, so this is all part of the package. And since our vision is to mobilize resources (spare rooms!) that are already present in our church communities to provide safe communities of belonging for newly arrived refugee claimants, we wouldn't have it any other way.

It's always exciting when a host picks up the phone and says, "We'll get the room ready!" We've screened and trained and coached them...they've let us check their house for carbon monoxide detectors and fire extinguishers, smoke alarms and stair railings...and now the moment has come. Will they allow a newcomer to totally change their week? Will they allow hospitality to inconvenience them?

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A funny hairless pup at one of our host homes.

I know I would find it hard to suddenly get that call, even if I was expecting it. I know I would find it hard, because even in this role of facilitating sudden housing arrangements, it can be hard to direct my attention from whatever I was working on towards that call from another shelter that can't take someone in.  

It's like interacting with my neighbours...in principle, I want to! In practice, opportunities seem to come at the wrong time. I'm in a hurry to make dinner, or my mind is preoccupied with how messy the house has become, or I'm at work at 541 Eatery, or I'm sad about something I read in the news. But then the stranger knocks. The WhatsApp message arrives. The phone rings.

So I always admire our hosts for not just having the intention to welcome someone who they've never met into their homes, but also their responses when they actually get the call.

"Uhh...yeah! Sure!"

"That will probably work. Let me talk to my wife."

The companions are actually the harder part of the equation. We thought that we would have a harder time finding hosts than companions. Giving up a couple hours a week for six months to help guide someone into their new life in Hamilton is easier than inviting someone into your space!

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Dan celebrating after a successful Ride for Refuge!

But it seems to be more of an uphill climb finding people to offer friendship and support to refugee claimants. We're working on explaining the role more clearly and giving our companions better resources so that they know what supports are available in the city to connect their refugee friends to. Maybe the responsibility seems too nebulous. Maybe offering friendship and connections to community resources is more vulnerable than other more concrete tasks.

Our companions too get that surprise phone call. You've been preparing to meet a new friend, to open your life to the possibilities and uncertainties of accompanying a refugee claimant..and suddenly that person has a name, a country of origin, a personality, some quirks. Will your theoretical "yes" become a solid, incarnate "yes"?

What about down the line, when that person makes a choice that you wouldn't recommend or behaves in a way that you don't quite understand? What will happen to your "yes" then--will you work to keep your heart open to the humanity of the stranger even if they act in ways that you find...strange? 

It seems to me that this is part of what a commitment to boundary-crossing hospitality means: an openness to being surprised. Here's to the people who plan for hospitality...and then let it surprise them!

Prayer requests:

-Our Open Homes Riders team raised $2,164 in the Ride for Refuge! As the date drew close, we were still hundreds of dollars from our goal, but the donations rolled in during the days before the ride. I'm grateful for the people who believed in what we're doing enough to contribute. Every donation is more than money--it's a vote of confidence in what we're doing, a big "YES" to the work of welcoming refugee claimants into Hamilton homes. All together the 3 Open Homes team in the Ride raised $5,785 for Open Homes Hamilton! Wow. THANK YOU to everyone who donated!

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Part of the “dialogue” happening in my neighbourhood around immigration. It hurt to imagine refugee friends seeing this graffiti. (So I reported it…and the City of Hamilton removed it. Have your dialogue, but don’t say shitty, un-nuanced things that my friends will see.)

-The upcoming election--Who you choose election day makes a real difference to refugee claimants and the right to seek protection in Canada. Please pray that no matter who is elected, the right to cross a border to make a refugee claim would be protected and advocated for.

Countries all over the world, including Canada, agreed to enshrine that right in international law after boatloads of Jewish refugees were turned away from safety before and during WWII. Together we said: never again. That international consensus is under serious attack these days, with migrant boats being left to flounder in the Mediterranean and countries like the U.S. and Canada trying to weasel out of their obligations with new laws and policies. If you'd like to learn more about refugee rights and Canadian policies, you can check out the Learn page on this blog.

-People who are desperate enough to find a way out of their countries that they pay human traffickers and borrow from nefarious money lenders--My heart is heavy with a specific case of a refugee claimant friend of mine. Please pray for wisdom for this person and for our team and above all for protection for this person's family.

-Our guests as they adapt to so many new things and are still worried about family and friends back home.

BIG news!

I found a home! I signed on this week to work with the International Association for Refugees-Canada, the organization that my Open Homes Hamilton teammate, Alison Witt, is already connected to.

Besides their connection to Alison and the trust already built there, there were a few things about IAFR that drew me to them. The first is this, one of the first things you see when you visit their website:

“THREE REASONS WHY WE REFUSE TO LOSE HOPE
First, God is alive and well along the refugee highway. Second, refugees are more than people in need. They are an important part of the solution. And third, God has begun a worldwide movement of his people to welcome and love refugees. ”

Another big moment of confirmation came during a discussion with one of their lead staff, Rob. Our team was talking about how IAFR would think about the inherent risk of home-based hospitality for people that we don’t know, and the liability connected to that reality.

The risk is small, because refugees are just people who are fleeing for their lives. But the risk is still there…because refugees are just people, and we are too. Rob said, “Well we’re Christians, and this is what we do.” (Three cheers!) And then, “We’re just accepting the same risk institutionally that we are asking hosts to take on individually.” (Five cheers!)

That no-nonsense approach to faithful, courageous Christian living gave me a lot of confidence in these folks. We do our due diligence to make participating in home-based hospitality a safe experience for everyone involved (police checks, insurance, reference checks, safety checklists….), but ultimately we welcome, because that’s what Christians do. And who knows, maybe like Abraham and Sarah, we’ll end up meeting angels and be invited into a bigger story than ourselves (Genesis 18).

“And who knows, maybe like Abraham and Sarah, we’ll end up meeting angels and be invited into a bigger story than ourselves (Genesis 18).”

All this means that I now have a community of support across the country, some of whom came to Canada as refugees themselves.

And it means that those who donate to help me put bread on the table, help refugee claimants out with bus tickets, train volunteers, etc can now receive a charitable tax receipt!

If you give by the end of the week, I’ll receive it this month yet (otherwise, I’ll receive it next month). Just visit IAFR’s Canada Helps page and select “Open Homes Hamilton” from the drop-down menu when you’re asked to choose where your gift will go.

Losing Optimism and Finding Hope

It's not hard to see that our society, especially young people, is starting to lose faith in progress.

Take the proliferation of dystopian young adult fiction, The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead, the fascination with zombies...

Or the Fridays for Future movement, whose leader cautions people against easy hope and urges them to freak out.

Or the awareness among many people my age and (especially) younger that we might not have the same standard of living as our parents, that maybe things won’t just keep getting better and better.

Mary Jo Leddy, patron saint of refugees (not really, but she should be), puts it this way:

“The storyline called progress has shaped [North] America more than any place else on earth. Even Christians who supposedly lived by another storyline internalized this myth so deeply that it became difficult for them to separate optimism from hope.”

— Radical Gratitude, p. 109

I find myself looking for hope beyond this cultural optimism recently. When our lives or our readings of the news belie the myth of never-ending progress, when it doesn't seem as if things will just keep getting better and better, when more and more people are predicted to be forced to flee their homes, what is biblical hope?

If it's more than faith in progress, what is it? How do you live in hope in the midst of refugee crises and climate catastrophe?

I wonder if hope is that choice to keep on keeping on, even when you know it could get worse.

He applied for that visa, even though the immigration consultant told him his chances were slim to none. She moved across another border, hoping the war wouldn't follow her and her children this time. He filed an appeal after a failed refugee hearing, even though the last judge hadn't been educated on his country's ongoing troubles.

A refugee, technically, is defined by fear. (Not just a desire for a better life, as some might say.) The measuring stick that is held up against my friends' stories of flight was developed after World War 2:

“A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

— UN Refugee Convention, 1951

But maybe refugees could just as easily be defined by hope. A daring hope, a hope-against-hope for safety for themselves and their family. Perhaps it isn't my refugee-d friends who need hope, but who already embody hope. Maybe refugees are people who dare to hope.

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Speaking with Rebecca Walker from World Renew at Bethel CRC in Waterdown.

A few snapshots from the last month:

• Legal Aid for refugees in Ontario was restored!! It's a temporary fix, since the federal government has just stepped in for a year to make up for Ontario's cuts to the program, but it means that at least for now refugee claimants will be supported as they navigate the refugee system to prove that they need protection.

• I spoke with Rebecca Walker from World Renew at Bethel CRC in Waterdown and got to hear part of the story of a Karen family who the church had sponsored.

• I met with a Host to debrief a recent hosting experience, and was blown away by her excitement. This was her first experience interacting with refugees, and she has really caught the bug! It is an honour to get to be part of her learning journey.

• I brought two girls from church to visit a young Guest from Yemen. She spends a lot of time alone with her dad, and she has a way of almost screaming with joy when she laughs that always makes tears come to my eyes. To see the 3 of them connecting across cultures, without a shared language, over Beanie Boos, was such a gift. More than housing, that's what this is about. Binding us together with love.

• I had a chance to try out my French interpretation skills to help a Guest from Mali communicate as he got free glasses from Lenscrafters through their One Sight program. (Yay Lenscrafters!)

Between the highlights and lowlights, there are the same day to day kinds of tasks...keeping spreadsheets updated, wrestling though program details, and the like. And physiotherapy. Lots of physiotherapy for my arm.

Some ways you can be praying for Open Homes Hamilton:

• For refugee families to be reunited. The video above was made by a refugee friend who is waiting to be reunited with his wife, especially for the sake of his daughter, whose face appears in the video. The Arabic song is about a child missing their mother, so if that isn’t just a punch in the gut…

• For upcoming elections in the U.S. and Canada--may Christians in particular be truth-tellers about refugees.

• For more Companions for Open Homes! We need people to accompany refugees to appointments, help them navigate things like bus schedules and grocery shopping, invite them over for dinner, etc.

Two things I Learned from Breaking My Arm

Lesson #1

I remember somersaulting, but what I remember most clearly is looking down at my arm and knowing it looked very wrong.

I was already standing again, don't ask me how, and the panic was setting in fast. Was that bus coming towards me or had the bus driver stopped for his break? Did I still have Roo?

It had taken a split second for me to transform from woman taking dog for leisurely bike ride to woman screaming at strangers for help.

I somehow found my way out of the middle of the intersection with Roo, who hadn't bolted. The woman I had locked eyes with as soon as it happened brought my bike to the side of the road. My friend Ruth Anne, who had been at the ball diamond with me just minutes before, stopped and sat with me while Dan sped over. I was utterly panicked, staring at my arm until Ruth Anne told me to look away so I wouldn't toss my cookies.

Some rational corner of my brain thought, "This is not who I thought I'd be in a situation like this." Somehow I thought I'd be more chill. Less blubbering, more shock-induced efficiency. Which is pretty funny in retrospect, because my arm was broken in several places, my elbow was dislocated, and I had obviously given my head a good whack against the pavement, which I did not realize til later.

The woman who had heard my first frenzied screams apparently also had a hard time adjusting to the rapid shift of her role from woman walking her kids to the ball diamond to bystander facing down a panicked stranger, because she left as quickly as she had come, with a hastily offered apology.

Now that I'm through those first weeks after my rapid identity shift to a temporarily one-armed and drugged version of myself, the rupture of those first moments feels less stark. I've laid in hospital waiting for surgery, had surgery, watched so much Netflix while waiting for the pain to subside, and returned home to figure out how to type with my left hand and open the peanut butter jar by gripping it between my knees.

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Our friend Hagosa offering hospitality at Open Homes’ booth at Hamilton Newcomer Day. Hamilton for all!

I can't help but think of the refugee experience. I know people often struggle with the label "refugee"--one day, one moment, they were an average person, with a community, a life, things that gave them meaning and a sense of identity.

And then the bombs fell.

And then the gang came looking for new recruits.

And then the abuse began.

And then the night-time arrests of dissidents started.

And then the country unravelled.

And, sometimes in a moment, it happens: they're a refugee.

Maybe they respond in ways they didn't expect. Maybe those around them respond or don't respond. They're suddenly associated with whatever positive or negative feelings people happen to hold about this huge group of people, unified only by having to flee: refugees. The rug has been pulled out, and they're doing their darnedest to respond to a new reality, far more jarring than the sudden and temporary loss of the use of a limb.

And, depending on how long their journey is from danger to a Canadian border office, that's often when we meet people at Open Homes Hamilton, right in the middle of that vortex.

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The guilty culprit who pulled me over my handlebars.

Lesson #2

If you want to know how strong your community is, just break your arm.

From visiting me in the hospital to offering to wash my hair, from taking Roo for a day to bringing us fruit, from getting mad with me when surgery was cancelled yet again to bringing baby wipes, shampoo, and “headphones to make the hospital a more hospitable place to be, our community has shown up for Dan and I in ways great and small. As my favourite Mary Jo Leddy poem reads, "We walk on the waters of gratitude."

I feel like God could have taught me (yet again) that I'm not a stalwart individual, facing down the world on my own, in a different way than shattering my humerus, but I do hope that I can hold on to this deep, grateful awareness of interdependence. It feels like freedom.

That is what I want for refugee claimants. Even more than housing, welcoming refugees into communities of belonging and mutual support is what Open Homes is about.

When I'm really dreaming, I dream that Open Homes can show us all the way home. I dream that we can learn, both refugee claimants and those of us who have been here a bit longer, that we need each other. That our stories are already woven together, that we don't have to do it all, and that that is good news. Perhaps even Good News.

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Mary Jo Leddy, from Radical Gratitude

You can be praying for…

-My search for an organizational home: It has been a long and frustrating process looking for an organization to affiliate myself with so that I can fundraise and issue tax receipts. Since we haven't decided to pursue charitable status for Open Homes itself quite yet (long story), since that would mean pausing our placements for a time, I needed another option...

And I think I may have found it! I applied to an organization this week that is very much in line with my values and whose staff have a lot of refugee experience (some as refugees themselves and some from working with refugee claimants). Please pray that this arrangement works out, or if it's not the right fit, that both the organization and I would know that soon.

-Our guests: from Mali, Sudan, Yemen, Colombia. Pray that they would receive prompt hearing dates, have good legal representation, be able to gather the exhaustive list of documents that they need to prove that they are refugees, experience a sense of safety and community with their hosts and companions, etc.

-Our Open Homes team: We need discernment as we lay the foundations for something that we pray will be truly transformative. Every decision, great or small, matters.

Mud on My Glasses

Sometimes it takes your glasses getting dirty to remember that they’re even there.

I learned that I hold a pretty stunted view of hospitality from a woman named Marie Issaka in Bamako, Mali. When I was a very young, very naïve World Renew intern in Bamako in 2011, Marie and her husband Harouna insisted on being my homestay family. I would later find that they had just weathered their toddler’s cancer, and that Marie was in the midst of an unexpected, difficult pregnancy. Despite all that, they took me in.

For the nine months that I lived with them, they were my guides to West African cultures. They answered my questions, many of which must have seemed foolish. They introduced me to countless new experiences. They shielded me and prayed with me.

Marie’s hospitality is so open-armed that when I started calling her Maman, initially as a joke, she took on that identity without hesitation. Marie takes it for granted that she is bound up in networks of interdependency. And yet her hospitality has boundaries – there were parts of her house I never saw, conversations I wasn’t part of. This was a wise hospitality.

RADICAL TRUST
All this sounds a lot like a classic line often heard from people returning from mission trips: “The people were so welcoming!” Which prompted a friend to ask a provocative question recently: What if it’s not that people in the Majority World are uniquely hospitable and welcoming, but that Christians in the West tend to be uniquely un-welcoming? What if being influenced by our culture of individualism, security and privacy has put up barriers (some might say idols) that keep us from living into this generous hospitality that my family in West Africa practices?

There’s mud on my glasses! If we have eyes to see and ears to hear, the normalcy of robust welcoming-strangers-into-your-home hospitality is all over the Scriptures.

Right after warning his readers that the end of all things is near, Peter calls them to love each other, offer hospitality and use their gifts to serve the Body (1 Pet. 4:7-10). Likewise, in Hebrews, hospitality is considered important enough to list alongside “keep the marriage bed pure” and “remember those in prison as if you were together with them.”

Practicing hospitality also rates a mention in Paul’s climactic chapter in Romans, where he urges believers to offer ourselves as living sacrifices (Rom. 12). And it comes right after Paul’s urging that the fledging community share with God’s people who are in need. Could it be that this hospitality was part of that providing?

Hospitality was not a side pursuit – it was a key characteristic of Christian community. And many early Christians, including Paul himself, not only offered hospitality – they also depended on it themselves. Just check out the greetings at the end of Paul’s letters to find people on whom he depended.

In their new book on Romans, Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat point towards “an economics of radical trust in God’s provision . . . an economics of generosity and welcome.” They argue that as Paul works to nurture an alternative community centered around Jesus Christ in Rome, he is urging the Roman church to practice an alternative economics, an economics not of scarcity but of generosity and hospitality (Romans Disarmed, forthcoming from Brazos Press).

I see this alternative economics worked out by my Maman in Bamako, Mali. This is not pie in the sky stuff! Christians in the West need reminding by people in the Majority World that this hospitality is our heritage. And it could even be our future.

A Prayer for the Arrival(s)

Advent: Middle English, borrowed from Medieval Latin adventus, going back to Latin, "arrival, appearance"

Refugee claimants (people who have fled their countries of origin to make a refugee claim, and do not yet have refugee status) have been arriving in Canada, via plane, boat, train, long before the topic of border crossings was making headlines.

However, with the cancellation of protected status for people of various nationalities in the U.S. beginning in summer 2017, there was an uptick in refugee claimants making their way across to Canada across our southern border without passing through official border points. (To learn more about why people have not simply crossed at official border points, visit this page from Citizens for Public Justice.) It’s an uptick, but it’s not a flood. It’s a new challenge, but not an unprecedented one.

Refugee claimants have been arriving in Canada long before the topic of border crossings was making headlines.

I can sometimes forget how complicated the refugee system is, since I work in connection with various parts of it. But in a recent trip through Christian Reformed churches, I realized again just how much confusion there is around refugee claimants and the legal right to claim asylum, even outside of regular border points. So often, when I explained the basics of the refugee claimant system to people, their response was, “I didn’t know.” And why would you know that international and Canadian law protects the right to cross a border to make a refugee claim, regardless of where you cross the border, unless you had learned somewhere?

This is encouraging to me, in a way. Education can help CRC people in Canada, who have been faithfully welcoming privately sponsored refugees for 4 decades, to see refugee claimants (ie those who are making their refugee claim after arriving in Canada, rather than overseas) with the same eyes of compassion and understanding.

Educating ourselves is so important--otherwise we can far too easily be manipulated by people with ulterior motives for manipulating our lack of knowledge.

By FAR the largest numbers of refugees are hosted in countries that directly neighbour those experiencing war and conflict.

For example, here’s a fact that is not widely known: by FAR the largest numbers of refugees are hosted in countries that directly neighbour those experiencing war and conflict, not Canada or the U.S.:

• Turkey (2.9 million)

• Pakistan (1.4 million)

• Lebanon (1 million)

This Advent, as we welcome the travelling Holy Family and read again of their forced displacement and flight to Egypt, may this be our prayer:

A Prayer for the Arrival(s)

God, you come to us again this Holy season

In a guise we have come to expect,

Our mangers picturesque with their dusting of artificial snow.

But if we pause to think again

Of your incarnation as a poor baby, soon to be a refugee,

Born under the thumb of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen…

Again you give us the great gift of unsettled hearts,

Of de-throned idols,

Of re-orientation.

We struggle to be thankful for this great gift,

This anti-triumphalist vision,

This lengthening table,

And we pray that you would give us too the strength to receive it.

Free us from our cynicism

Our same-old-story, tired-old-story, how-much-will-this-cost-me, why-is-this-our-problem-story.

Free us from our small god, who can only handle so much,

Who draws up the accounts

Who weighs us in the balance.

Set us free to HOPE!

Free us from our nickel-and-diming,

From our white knuckles,

From our consumerist anxieties.

We want to decide who our neighbor is;

Narrow the field,

Lessen the load,

That caring for them might not lessen our comfort.

We forget that your Kingdom looks like relationship,

Like perichoresis,

Like kenosis.

Set us free to LOVE!

Free us from our fatigue, our busyness,

Our rhythms that keep us from community,

Especially from community with people

Whose kids don’t go to the same schools as ours,

Whose worship of you looks different than ours,

Whose fears include realities we’ve never had to contend with.

Wildly, extravagantly, cacophonously, joyously creative God,

Set us free for JOY!

Free us from our suspicion, our divisions,

Our convenient myths that let us off the hook.

Un-fence our hearts, God.

Un-wall our souls.

Set us free for PEACE!

CHRIST-CHILD,

When we meet you, when we face you,

When we are faced by the stranger,

May our idols fall away.

You who are as close as our next-door neighbour,

And as far beyond us as that brightly gleaming star that led the Wise Men onward,

You come when we are not expecting you,

When we are looking for a different kind of king,

And those who see you…

The poor labourers

The star-gazing strangers

The shelter-less travelers…

Rejoice.

May we be among them!