I just went to a talk at my church, from a couple who'd spent some time in Malta, where a lot of migrants from Africa end up when they try to make it to Europe. There, many makeshift camps house people who have sold and paid everything they have to traffickers to travel miles strapped to over-crowded trucks, before being boarded on to boats - with hundreds of other people - not made to carry that many. Already by this point, they have seen people fall off the trucks and be left behind; already driven past graves by the side of the road and bodies simply left behind after a truck broke down. They have already been stopped at various points; the women and girls "inspected" and some taken away, most likely to be trafficked into prostitution or abuse. They have heard stories of the boats that don't make it, that capsize, where more people die. Yet they go on, because it's better than what they left behind.
And then when they do make it, they are not wanted. They are often detained, especially if they have no papers, under the suggestion that they destroyed them purposefully so they could not be sent back. They are seen as lesser people; coming to steal another country's resources. They are viewed with contempt; racism, islamophobia, lies viewed as fact such as they are all criminals; they are all violent; they are all lazy. The scale of this issue is huge. And I am not pretending the complexity of the solution is not the same. And yes, there needs to be some part of the solution working in the countries people are leaving from, to make them feel that they don't need to leave. But there also needs to be some humanity in how people are treated when they do try all they can to better their situations and help their families. Already, in light of the terrible killings in Paris over the weekend, this act of extremism is being used as a reason for not welcoming migrants into Europe. But as with any country and any group of people, there are always a few bad people among the many good - most just want to live peacefully, without the fear of war or persecution; without the fear that tomorrow they will have no food to feed their families; without the fear that they didn't do all they could to bring better lives for their children than they themselves have had. After the talk, a lot of the questions coming back were, "What can we do?" One lady's response was simply, "How?" And it is so difficult to see what we can do; so far away from the situation; so removed from these people. And so small, compared to the size of the problem! One of the things that came back as an answer, was to pray. And I guess as with many people, my immediate response is to feel like this is something of the easy way out. But then I remembered that I was preaching this morning, on the very theme of prayer! And one of the things I'd been saying earlier, and what the lady leading the talk was saying now, was how prayer opens the way for God to work. And actually, in praying for these people and this situation, we draw ourselves closer to them. It changes how we relate to them and how we see them. So that when our friends or families are believing the misunderstandings that have been presented as facts, and perhaps if we find ourselves with the choice to love and welcome the stranger, then we can have the attitude that God might have, because through our praying he has given us his love for these fellow human beings. And also, praying opens our minds to look for the ways that we can be the answers to our own prayers - the ways we can let God work through us to actually do something. This beautifully illustrates the whole starting point of this website; we think about something (learning about a situation, seeing it from someone's experience), then we pray, and that leads us to being able to do.
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AuthorI'm a recent Cambridge Theology graduate now studying for a Masters in Biblical Studies and blogging about all sorts of things! I'm interested in faith, Church, theology, social action, the great outdoors and being creative, and all of those things - along with many more - come through in my posts!
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April 2020
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