These reflections are based on a typical day here in life and
ministry in Antwerp, Belgium but were prompted by a simple comment in a
devotional journal.
As we finished off our morning devotions together, the
prayer focus for the day was “compassion for immigrants”. My reply to this statement in our
devotional book: wow, how cool is
that! Thursday is my busy ministry
day, first with welcoming so many immigrants and foreigners into my home as we
study about prayer together. And then it’s off to an afternoon’s worth of fun with women, welcoming them into our neighborhood and into our world as we build bridges of friendship and care.
My father immigrated to America through Ellis Island in New York via somewhere in Germany. We never heard his entire immigrant story; perhaps it was too painful to share with his children. But with all the buzz here in Antwerp about the newly opened Red Star Line Museum (www.redstarline.be), it has made me even more curious to figure out how my dad got to America; what welcomed him in Chicago when he finally arrived; who were the people in his neighborhood who made him feel at home; who had compassion on him as a foreigner, new immigrant, and registered displaced person through the Red Cross.
You can imagine, then, that the story of immigration means a lot to me personally. I never understood that my father had a foreign accent until I was in college (already 20 years old) and a friend asked "who" had answered the phone at our house, “you know, the guy with the heavy accent”. That was Dad. His accent was just his. There wasn’t anything foreign or heavy about it. I’ve become quite sensitive to accents over the years, as I’ve done a lot of language learning in preparation for ministry in cross-cultural settings. We all carry our accents with us. Mine happens to be an American accent, which comes out when I speak Flemish (the local language here). And native French speakers have told me that I speak French with an African accent, thanks to all my years living and working in the heart of Africa (and that actually makes me giggle!) In any event, our accents and our immigration stories go with us. Just like they had gone with my dad when he came from the former Yugoslavia and for so many others in the generations before us.
In the world that we live in today, no matter where you
live, there is someone who is an immigrant, perhaps someone who has been a
refugee or asylum seeker, someone who needs the compassion and love of Jesus to
be shared with them. My prayer is
that we all can make it a daily habit, not just a prayer focus for the day!
FYI planning to visit the Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp on a day off....soon!
