“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.

Saturday Serious Reads: What is Happening Here?

I’ve published this blog for more than four years now, and the one subject I’ve largely (if not completely) avoided is politics. Opportunities to talk about politics abound, but I prefer to let others seize them. An argument can be made that the state of American politics has almost always been abysmal, even if today we seem to be searching for new depths. And I’ve generally avoided the subject.

It will be no surprise that I lean to the conservative side. I used to lean a lot more to the conservative side, until the inept response of government at all levels to Hurricane Katrina. People died because of that inept response. And then to learn that the ineptness had been a disaster waiting decades to happen – poor construction of so many of the levees – well, it was more than I could stomach.

I didn’t think the ineptness of Katrina could be surpassed.

Then came Syria.

What my government was preparing to do in Syria – after so badly mismanaging what had come before, not only in Syria but also in Libya and Egypt – compelled me to write letters to my two senators and my congresswoman, urging them all to vote against military action. We’ve demonstrated we don’t understand what’s happening in Syria, and why we believed military action would solve the problem we didn’t understand in the first place was beyond me.

And we still don’t understand the problem. What is happening in Syria is not the good guys versus the evil government, but some good guys (we’re not sure who they are, though) and some bad guys (remember al-Qaida?) sometimes fighting the government, and sometimes each other. And caught in the crossfire are both innocent Muslim civilians and innocent Christian civilians as well. (And here's an interesting note: Christians are being killed and churches destroyed, and not by the Assad government.)

Of all the things I’ve seen and read, what’s made the most sense to me are some comments by Christian speaker and apologist Ravi Zacharias. And it makes the most sense because all we have right now are questions and uncertainties, and no real understanding of what's happening in Syria, or why.

Top photograph: Wounded civilians arrive at a hospital in Aleppo, Syria, October 2012; photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.