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May 28 - July 7, 2020
the years of trying to save people, drowning in loneliness, disconnected from the love of God.
Meditateon this
Now, my are eyes trained toward growing in solidarity, in mutuality, in slowing down enough to listen and sit with—to
This is what it means to pray these days: to watch the cherries slowly ripen and to listen to the stories of suffering big and small.
Prayer
I want to live there;
I want to do this in every apartment complex in America. I want to know and be known by every person who lives in these spaces that cater to those working very hard
Xenophobia is the opposite of hospitality.
Xenophobia Is oppositeof hospitality
There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around like the sun.
Isolation And lack of perspective . Thomas Merton quote
they are shocked that most people in the United States don’t know their neighbors. They feel sorry for us.
there’s also a sense that this loneliness is on purpose, though we never say this aloud.
the very few spaces in our country and our culture where interdependence is a necessity, where it is a discipline that can be cultivated.
fear sharks instead of mosquitoes. And yet, on an average year, sharks kill less than six people worldwide (more people die from their refrigerators falling on them) while mosquitoes kill on average over two hundred thousand people a year.
Our fears are misplaced and focus on dramatic threats
the fear and paranoia are not relative to the actual odds of something bad happening.
convenient way to blame an outside group for the anxieties we carry within.
point to economic evidence—our economy depends and runs on immigration continuing. Or I can bring up the moral argument—we have a responsibility to help resettle people at the forefront of human rights abuses and those escaping the trauma of war and extreme poverty. Or I can go the theological route, hauling out verse after verse where God commands his people to look after
Justification For welcoming the strangers
tired of trying to convince my fellow citizens of the humanity of God’s children born someplace else.
This quote
He would pull grieving parents on stages and give them microphones—but only if their children had been killed by immigrants.
what is more depressing are the crowds at these events. Men and women, mostly older, mostly White, faces set in stony anger or joyous exaltation.
Americans—the real Americans—have our own families to think of. We have a commitment to safety and responsibility. We are only doing what is wise, what is necessary.
Selfish justification
“Peace that comes through the annihilation of the enemy,” he says, “is no peace at all.”
I have the same feeling deep within. Wouldn’t my life be better, simpler, and easier if everyone who hated my beloved neighbors simply didn’t exist anymore? The seed of eradication lives within me too, though I don’t want to admit it.
Liberal wanting to eradicate conservatives, etc. With values to justify, this can seem high minded. But its just another brand of hatred
a 1 in 3.6 million chance of being killed in a terrorist attack by someone who is not a US citizen.3 It is so far-fetched that to waste any amount of time worrying about it is almost an affront to God and the life that God so freely gives to us.
This is what we should fear: what our own desperate desire for safety might end up doing to those who are beloved in the eyes of God,
“God knows what it is like to lose a son.”
most of us spend an awful lot of time trying to convince ourselves it isn’t true.
book on vaccines called On Immunity.
On immunity eula
the conversation never veered into the effects their individual choices to opt out would have on the community as a whole.
Endangering Others
vaccines are the perfect example of the dire consequences that can occur when people of privilege choose to idolize the safety of their child over the safety of another.
When people of privilege choose to value their own safety over the common good, it is the most vulnerable in the community who will suffer, as they always do.
Danger accrues to the most vulnerable
His suffering, his fever, was the final straw that snapped whatever faint illusion of control I had.
Mary knew her son was going to die from the beginning. And still, she loved him, and she loved the God who gave him to her as fiercely as any mother among us.
always relinquishing her child, always holding him as close as she could
Mary's Motherly love
God does not protect us from suffering, but God does promise to be with us in the suffering.
Gods promise rlate to suffering
I, who had barely escaped death, wanted to save everyone else myself. I didn’t trust God to do it anymore.
Me as savior
“In heaven, you will feast with those who have suffered the most on earth.”
Current events tell us otherwise. The narrative continues on a loop: desperate families seeking shelter, twisted by politics and popular imagination into the violent, the unsafe.
because the people who could have given them shelter shut their doors and minds and hearts to their neighbors in need.
The people I met were survivors. They were the lucky few, the less than 1 percent of refugees that get resettled worldwide.
Before the US refugee resettlement was slowly dismantled, piece by piece, in front of our eyes.
Every Friday we will feast together in the house of joy known as one of the lowest-rated schools in the state.
sat in the front of the auditorium because I cared so much. I wanted to be so close to all the action.
He was actively trying to make people afraid of Islam and Muslims. He had given us no information in the video other than birth rates. It seemed a strange point to focus on,
human impulse to fear. And it is our human impulse to baptize it under religious language.
many people believed we should focus on Muslim ministry not because they were valuable people made in the image of God but because they posed the biggest threat.
Fearing (Muslims ) disguised as loving
By conservative estimates by those who work in these fields such as Matthew Soerens and Jenny Yang of World Relief, it will take decades for the program to get back to the place it was in the last few years of the Obama administration or even to the previous average of 75,000 a year.3
Decades of impact fromcTrump policies
the fears of our age have solidified into actual policies that devastate actual lives.
the only way to change it is to fix it the same way. To change hearts and minds, to expand our idea of who our neighbors are and what our responsibility is to them, and to then change the policies themselves.
Hearts and minds, then policies
“your mother held my son at the party. And I cried because that is the first time someone besides me or my husband have held that child for these two years.”
our morality has slipped to the point where we do not care that people will suffer and die due to our own desire for safety.
Letting Others die so we can FEEL safe
Do we really want safety? Or do we want true peace? As Aisha and countless prophets and poets in the Scriptures will tell us, there is no way to guarantee safety in the world.
Our Muslim friends think that children are a blessing from God and treat them accordingly. They do not have multiple children in some nefarious plot to take over the world. Their religion and relationship to God influence these decisions—who
