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The kids filed in, single file and full of energy, wiggling and bouncing and nodding their heads and waving their hands, eager to begin their songs. No doubt, the event kept the majority of the young singers up much past their usual weeknight bedtime and they were excited. The choir came from For the Nations Refugee Outreach in Dallas. But really, these kids came from across the globe. Their faces show the unique beauty inherent in each of God's image bearers, melanin from light ivory European to deep ebony African and the spectrum of shades in-between. The singers opened "Welcome the Refugee," the pre-conference to the MTW Global Missions Conference. 

10,000 refugees from 28 countries resettled in Texas in 2015. Those people represent 10,000 different stories. Certainly, refugees are not new to this country, nor are they new in light of history. From the very beginning of Scripture, we see examples of people displaced, whether it be due to sin and the actions of others, or to famine and disaster, or to human trafficking, or to war, or to religious persecution. 

Those of us who call ourselves Christ-followers also know what it is to be a stranger in the land, as Paul reminds us in Ephesians,  those who were "separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world." We see the mandate to care for the strangers in our midst throughout His word, and we see the promise that His gospel is for people of every nation, tribe and tongue. In the two days of speakers and seminars, we were challenged and exhorted and encouraged to not miss the opportunity to serve the strangers among us in the United States, right here, right now, today.

"Welcoming the Refugee" closed with a video of a Somali woman resettled in the United States being reunited with her husband after several years of separation due to displacement. I watched the face of the beautiful brave woman who gathered her children to wait at the airport customs area for her husband to walk through the doors. And I wept. Tears streamed down my face as I was reminded of faces so similar to hers, in situations so similar to hers, faces that I knew and loved when we lived in Omaha and met the nations in the basement of the church and in the hallways of crowded apartments scented with foreign spices, and in the aisles of my local grocery store. I remembered sharing life through that hard process of learning language, through the shock of the first blast of Midwest winter, through the struggles of parenting in a new culture, through the demands of meeting health demands of a special needs child, through the challenge of beginning life brand new in a far away foreign land. 

My heart remains soft for the refugee and the immigrant and the stranger in the land. My prayer is that many are challenged by the grace of the gospel of Christ to share his outward-looking, stranger-seeking love.





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