“Once We Were Strangers” by Shawn Smucker

Working for a large company had its benefits and disadvantages. Pay and benefits were good; office politics wasn’t. But office politics exists no matter how large the employer is.

There was another benefit. Because the company had operations all over the world, it had employees and customers all over the world. And the company actively transferred employees to and from the United States. On a face-to-face basis, I worked regularly with employees from India, Britain, France, Belgium, Pakistan, China, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, Israel, and several other countries. 

Because my job involved social media, which is global, I worked virtually with employees from those countries and others from Japan, Argentina, Chile, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Vietnam, Germany, Russia, and more. I might have been physically located in St. Louis, but my work was all over the world. I was exposed to cultures, people, religions, values, and experiences that many Americans are not. And it’s an interesting set of experiences to have when considering the question of immigration (illegal and legal) and refugees.

Shawn Smucker has a perspective as well, and he shares it in Once We Were Strangers: What a Syrian Refugee Taught Me about Loving My Neighbor. Smucker and his family befriended a refugee family from Syria when it arrived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Working through a church mission organization, Smucker made a conscious decision to befriend a man named Mohammad, along with his wife and four sons. And then he made a decision to help tell this family’s story.

Shawn Smucker's friend Mohammad

Alternating between the chaos of war in Syria and how the friendship developed, what enfolds is two stories. One is Mohammad’s story – fleeing the destruction of war, getting to a refugee camp in Jordan, finding a way out of the refugee camp, and then finding a way to a new life in another country. Mohammad and his family were not set on living in the United States; any western country – any place where a family could be raised in safety – would have worked. But they found themselves in Lancaster, and Mohammad found himself befriended by a writer and part-time Uber-Lyft driver.

Shawn Smucker

Equally important, Smucker found himself befriended by a man with a different religion, a different history, and starting his life all over again in a country where he didn’t speak the language and didn’t have any job prospects. All he knew was that his family was safe. And what is there in story after story, page after page, is a man with a very different perspective on life. When your dining room has been shelled, and you’ve had to flee with your wife and children across the desert, you have a much more tolerant view of what we call “first world problems.”

It’s a moving, instructive, and inspiring story.

In addition to the novels The Day the Angels Fell and The Edge of Over There, Smucker has published three non-fiction works – My Amish Roots, Building a Life Out of Words, and Refuse to Drown. He and his family live in Lancaster.

No one argues for unrestricted immigration, and that’s not the story Smucker is telling in Once We Were Strangers. The story he is telling, and it’s a compelling one, is how we can be welcoming to the strangers among us, how we can see them as our neighbors, and how we will receive unexpected blessings in return.

Related:

My review of The Edge of Over There.

My review of My Amish Roots.

My review of Building a Life Out of Words.

My review of Refuse to Drown.

My review of The Day the Angels Fell.

Top photograph by Tobias Mrzyk via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Planting gardens for refugees: Meet some evangelicals

This past Sunday, our church hosted our annual Missions Weekend. Instead of the usual Sunday programs, we have a focus on missions – worldwide, national, regional, and local. Even our worship service had a focus on missions, but I’m not sure if it was a focus on missions we do or the missions outreach to us. 

The Rev. Michael Jones of Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church gave the sermon. Five singers from his church, the Friendly Temple Ensemble, sang both the welcoming hymn and the offertory. You can watch a tape of the 8:15 and the 11:15 service here; it’s available this week. I attended the 11:15 service.

I’ve never heard or sung an offertory quite like that one. Simply put, it rocked. And when the ensemble finished, the church roared in applause.

Yes, we are Presbyterians. But we rocked on Sunday.

Our Sunday School class has been studying the prophets, but we put that course aside to hear about the church’s Harvest mission. During the past decade, the Harvest mission has helped refugee families in St. Louis plant community and home vegetable gardens, hold programs for children, help refugees get acclimated to the United State and find resources. 

Many of these refugees arrive without speaking a single word of English. They come from central America, Afghanistan, Sudan, the Congo, Iraq, Nepal, Burma, Somalia, and other countries. Many of them arrive penniless. A vegetable garden may sound like a small thing, but it provides food, community connections, and introductions to people. It also plugs church members and their children into the lives of refugees. 

This is only one of our church’s outreach and mission programs. Last year, our church joined with Friendly Temple and sent a combined ministry team to Cuba. For years, our church has supported the Micah Project in Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras, which provides housing, stability, and hope to the city’s abandoned boys. We support an orphanage in India. WE support scores of missionaries all over the world. We have numerous mission trips to such glamorous spots as Kurdistan in northern Iraq. We have an active ministry outreach to local jails and prisons. 

We often laugh about being stereotyped Presbyterians, but we are also something else. We are an evangelical church. We identify as evangelicals. If someone asked my religious affiliation as I left a polling place, I would say evangelical. 

Evangelicals. That’s the group routinely disparaged and often sneered at by many of my Facebook and Twitter friends, usually in the same breath as “81 percent of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.” The people doing the sneering are often, and sometimes predominantly, other Christians, still angry about the outcome of the 2016 election. I can’t tell you how people at my church voted. I suspect a lot of them did vote for Trump. Some likely voted for Hillary Clinton. Some voted for third party candidates. How could they vote for a person such as Trump, someone who seems so antithetical to everything Christianity teaches?

I don’t know if I can answer that question, but I suspect at least some of the answer can be found in the church’s active pro-life ministry, which goes far beyond simply opposing abortion. Some of it can be found in people’s genuine concerns about the direction the country was headed. And some of it also can likely be found in a desire to see Washington, D.C. govern instead of rule. 

And some of it can be found in those vegetable gardens for refugees, teaching art to imprisoned women, providing a home and a life for homeless boys, leading Bible studies and Sunday School classes, and countless other things. These things speak to and from the evangelical soul.

Photograph by Morgan Clasper via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Evidence abounds

After Isaiah 28

The evidence of destruction

impending abounds, the bruised

and beaten refugees seeking

sanctuary inside our gates,

the cost of food exploding,

the mistrust with which we

observe each other

with averted eyes,

the ridicule with which we

greet each succeeding

proclamation and rule.

Evidence abounds of the terror

we know in our hearts, and we

speculate endlessly on whom

might save us, might rescue us,

might deliver us from what

surrounds us, the storm

whose clouds arch

the citadel, casting

their shadows and

darkness wherever

we seek light.

Photograph by Kai Stachowiak via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The first refugees

I believed the worst was behind,

the voyage over, cramped and tossing,

the first winter, harsh, finishing

the house as the snow began to fall,

and a spring, glorious, the explosion

of trees into green, into life. We prayed,

we joined in service, we planted what

seeds we had with us and what seeds

the people beyond the trees gave us.

Then came the fever. I dug your grave

as the children watched, our children

who alone kept me moving, caused me

to arise in the morning, he has

your dimple, she has your eyes.

The harvest was good, not overflowing

but good, we would not hunger this winter,

and the leaders and the women thought it

right to mark the harvest, and we prepared

our game, our squash, our maize,

fruits from the forest, and the people

beyond the trees came through the woods,

and watched for a time, finally walking

into our midst, with more game, and fish,

and berries we had not seen before,

creating an abundance. And we spoke

of God’s provision in this beautiful, hostile

land, and we prayed, and ate, and shared

all we had.

But I still think of you, your dimple

and your eyes, and measure the pain

in the thanksgiving.

Photograph: recreation of Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts.