You Welcomed Me

Loving Refugees and Immigrants Because God First Loved Us

Kent Annan

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780830845538
• eBook ISBN: 9780830873777
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"Wait, Dad. Are we for them or against them?"Kent Annan was talking with his eight-year-old son about the immigrant and refugee crises around the world. His son's question, innocent enough in the moment, is writ large across our society today. How we answer it, Annan says, will reveal a lot about what kind of family, community, or country we want to be.In You Welcomed Me, Annan explores how fear and misunderstanding often motivate our responses to people in need, and invites us instead into stories of welcome—stories that lead us to see the current refugee and immigrant crisis in a new light. He lays out simple practices for a way forward: confessing what separates us, listening well, and partnering with, not patronizing, those in need. His stories draw us in, and his practices send us out prepared to cross social and cultural divides.In this wise, practical book, Annan invites us to answer his son's question with confident conviction: "We're for them"—and to explore with him the life-giving implications of that answer.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

MAYA ANGELOU,

ALL GOD’S CHILDREN NEED TRAVELING SHOES

Do you remember what it means when people are refugees or immigrants?” I ask my eight-year-old son.

“Yes, Dad. We talked about that last week. Remember?”

“I’m going to write my next book about this.”

“Okay. But wait, are we for them or against them?”

“For them. Remember. Being a refugee means someone had to run away from something bad, like war. They had to leave home, leave everything behind. Can you imagine if we had to leave our house and your school and move somewhere far away, where they speak another language, because we weren’t safe? And an immigrant is coming to somewhere new, which is usually hard too. We want to be people who help people in hard situations, right?”

“Sure. But some people are against, right? Why?”

“I think people are nervous or scared about a few things. Safety is one. They don’t want any bad people to get in who could hurt them. They also think people might take their jobs. And new people can bring change with them—like a different language, culture, or religion that they don’t want.”

“Okay, watch this move. You stand right there. I’m going to jump off the couch and kick you. You try to block my kick, but you won’t be able to because the crane kick cannot be defended.”

We’d watched the old Karate Kid as our family movie the night before, so 95 percent of the conversation then turned to punches, kicks, “not that hard!” and laughter. I knew the movie might put the rest of our family in danger for a few days as my son works out his new Karate Kid techniques. But as we keep talking, in between indefensible crane kicks—and in the future as he keeps getting older—I want him to recognize what is at stake:

• Love versus fear
• Who we want to be
• What home is
• How we deal with real concerns
• How we make difficult decisions about responding to other people’s suffering when there isn’t enough for everyone to meet their own wants and needs—in this world that gives lots to some and crushes others
• Wisdom versus naiveté versus ideals
• The future of our nation
• The way ethnicity and race affect lives and relationships

How can we see those pictures of Syrian children—a boy’s limp body lying face-down on a beach, a boy sitting in the back of an ambulance stunned after an explosion with his face caked in dust and blood; boys just a little younger than my son—and not forfeit some essential part of being human if we don’t help? There may be some risk to helping, but there is certainly risk to not helping:

• Making security such a high value that fear gains godlike power over our lives—instead of seeing security as one important consideration among others.
• Discovering that our faith is a resounding gong, a clanging cymbal, not worth much more than empty words when it comes to the rubber of love meeting the road of suffering and sacrifice.

Yes, so much is at stake in how we respond to refugees and immigrants. Working through such complexities requires open hearts, clear thinking, and practical acts. It also requires finding ways to disagree that help us all get better together rather than just making others and ourselves worse. Above all, it requires getting to know other people who we think are different—and then finding that yes, they’re different, but not so much.

I love being a dad. Besides spontaneous karate battles with my son, I keep finding that my kids expose my generosity and my hypocrisy, my love and my selfishness. They reflect myself back to me. What we model is more important than what we say.

How we answer my son’s question, “Are we for or against them?” reveals a lot about what kind of family, community, and country we want to be. After the answer comes the work to understand the nuances and navigate the complexity. As adults, we know there is usually a cost to being our best selves—and that it’s ultimately worth the price.

How can we live into a vision that chooses love over fear?

THAT COULD BE ME

After college I moved to England and then France to work with a refugee ministry for two years. A few years later, during the war in Kosovo, I moved for six months to Albania and Kosovo to help respond to the refugee crisis there. I’d seen heart-wrenching refugee photos on the front page of the newspaper. I needed to help if I could.

Friendships and working with refugees changed my life’s direction. I had Turkish coffee with Kosovar families who had fled, leaving behind their dead husbands and sons as well as the charred remains of their homes that had been burned to the ground. Later I pushed a wheelbarrow filled with a family’s only possessions as they boarded a bus to Kosovo to restart from nothing.

In France I lived in a hostel with refugees from Sierra Leone and Sarajevo, both places that experienced violent conflicts. We became friends and ate dinners together. Once I got lucky and beat the guy from Sarajevo in chess. He said he’d fought in the war there before escaping. The other fifty times he beat me.

One morning near Christmas, snow started falling. It was the first time the guys from Sierra Leone had ever seen snow. We all ran outside. We slid up and down the road, laughing and falling like kindergartners. The guy from Sarajevo also asked me to help him buy a bottle of rum because he needed help to sleep at night. There was laughter, but the shadow of loss they’d each endured always lurked nearby.

These guys were around my age. My experience with them transformed me because the distance between us/them, between you/me collapsed. I could have been the one who had to leave everything and everyone and hope for mercy along the way.

I want my son to see that we’re for them. I want my son to see we could be them. I want my son to hear that Jesus said to love our neighbors as ourselves. Inspiring, demanding words to live by. These words invite us to embrace our common humanity and risk love.

“That could be me” at face value can be a selfish formulation. But it can also lead our imaginations down the path toward deeper empathy and love—because it recognizes the stranger as ourselves and helps us choose to be for.

That could be me unable to find work, so my child can’t go to school and his hair is turning rust-colored because of malnutrition. I’ve walked along dirt paths and talked with dads and moms in Haiti who give all they can to provide for their children, and it’s not nearly enough. I saw them move to the Dominican Republic to work awful jobs cutting sugar cane, never seeing their families so they could support their families.

That could be me having to leave my family behind, crossing a border and a desert to work grueling days picking tomatoes or strawberries in the Florida sun, hunched over doing work nobody local would do, so I can send money back to my children who I don’t get to see for months on end.

That could be me without a home, without a place that isn’t haunted by fear and uncertainty.

That could be me, one of the Syrian refugees in whose home I sat drinking tea in Mafraq, Jordan. They lost their home, left all they had behind. They also talked, four years into being refugees, about how hard it was without full rights to work or start a business in their host country when they had lost everything. Though they longed to return, they had no idea if or when they’d go back to Syria—and meanwhile weren’t really even able to start over. On average, refugees are away from their home country for more than ten years.

That could be me loving my neighbor as myself—and discovering that in the deepest sense we’re all exiles trying to find home. Following Jesus means to some extent confessing that we don’t have a permanent home here. We want to belong most of all to God’s kingdom coming. We’re also to live with an eye to helping widows and orphans out on the margins. This isn’t liberal wishy-washiness or conservative literalism. This is the rigorous life of love worth living, love that opens the world to us, that leads us toward discovery and transformation. It leads toward the discomfort of growth. We carry the weight of caring and then find our hearts grow stronger.

THE CRISIS AND OPPORTUNITY

We’re in a crisis—nationally, globally, and existentially—because 66 million people have been forced from their homes:

• 44 million of them are displaced within their own countries.
• 22 million had to flee their country as refugees because of persecution, war, or violence.

This crisis is a large-scale version of times when a friend or neighbor has an emergency. The victim is in crisis, and a crisis is also forced on people to decide whether and how to help. Over half of these refugees are children less than eighteen years old. Their lives ask us: Will you welcome me? We’re also in a crisis because of how immigrants and asylum seekers are being treated at and within our borders—including around three thousand children who were separated from their parents.

A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Most likely, they cannot return home or are afraid to do so.

The United States has been granting legal residency to about 1 million immigrants a year, which includes welcoming about 75,000 refugees. Now the US is slated to receive fewer than 22,000 refugees, the lowst number in decades. The countries that currently welcome the largest number of refugees are places with conflict near th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• 1 Are We For or Against?
• 2 That Could Be Me
• 3 Real Concerns
• 4 This Is Our Story
• 5 Getting Practical
• 6 Form a Human Chain
• 7 Here Is Life
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Resources and Organizations for Next Steps
• Notes
• Praise for You Welcomed Me
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright