One Week In

My church is roughly one week in to really starting to work with a refugee family from Afghanistan. The goal is to help them settle into America, to acclimate (as best as they can) to the culture and the way we do things, and to share the love of Jesus through this. We’ve been ready to go since February, matched with a family since April, and now finally we met our family and are beginning the process of getting them settled.

We knew this was going to be…well, messy. During our training sessions we got a sense of the complex, messy, disorganized system of refugee resettlement that we are about to walk into. The government agency is overwhelmed by the volume of refugees. Case workers have too much going on. Welfare and social programs are equally overloaded and complicated to work with.

We knew there would be the mess of trauma on the side of the refugees. We knew they were coming from a difficult place and a difficult situation. We knew they were being ripped from their beloved homeland and forced to move to a new place. We knew that it would be important to form a welcoming community for them.

I don’t know that any of us expected what we have just got ourselves into. At least, I didn’t expect it to look quite like this.

It’s messier than I even imagined. The personal trauma this couple has faced is overwhelmingly heartbreaking. Tania* had two miscarriages and a third pregnancy that she carried to full term, delivered the baby, and then the baby died in the process of getting to a hospital that could give better care. Norman has a hand injury, apparently the result of a situation with the T-ban that makes it difficult for him to do certain things. Tania’s family is still in Afghanistan – literally hiding in a basement from the T-ban. Norman is having to work as much as possible in order to provide for his family, which he desperately wants to. There is an issue with Tania’s paperwork that they can’t seem to get a straight answer on. Tania is due to have their baby in a month. She is a high-risk pregnancy and should be on bedrest, but she is so concerned about her husband that she can’t sit still and do nothing.

The trauma is overwhelming. I’ve been reading books about refugees and about life in Afghanistan under the T-ban. But nothing I’ve read has prepared me to hear stories from people whose faces I actually know. Every time I hear a story, it twists my gut. The more I discover about this couple’s background, the more the weight in my chest sinks deeper.

It’s painful to step into the mess with someone else. It’s dangerous to step into the mess with someone else. What do you do? I want to fix it…but I can’t.

My prayer is that in this experience, our church will be able to love on this family, to care for them, to show them Jesus as we help them in practical ways. My prayer is that this would not be about us, but would be about pointing them to the gospel. I pray for soft hearts and for opportunities to share. I pray for lasting relationships with this couple that would lead to deeper conversations. My prayer is that their lives would be changed by the love of Jesus.

This is going to be messy. This is going to be challenging. It will hurt. It will stretch me, and it will stretch our church. It will not be comfortable for easy. But I think it will be good. I think (and pray) that we will not be able to look this kind of pain in the face, to walk alongside this couple, and come away unchanged. I don’t think we will be able to go back to doing things the same way we did. I pray that our time with this family will change their lives through the love of Jesus, and I pray that our time with this family will change our lives through encountering suffering on this level. I pray that God will use this experience to strengthen our faith and our practice of obedience at an individual and a church-wide level.

*both names are changed for security & protection