CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: We long for refugees to experience Christian love, by John Dempster
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There’s tragedy in the Christmas story.
Some time after Jesus’s birth, King Herod, having heard of the arrival of the one born to be king, whom he saw as a threat, ordered the slaughter of all boys under the age of two. But, warned by an angel, the Holy Family fled, and were refugees in Egypt.
There are now over 79 million refugees in the world – more than 60,000 in the UK.
We remember the Good Samaritan. We reflect on the reality of refugee life, on the low level of financial support for asylum seekers in the UK, and the plight of those facing crisis while deemed to have ‘no recourse to public finds.’ And we are prompted to act, to support individual refugees and to campaign for a more generous immigration policy.
We long for refugees to experience Christian generosity and love at its best.
In my 20s, I managed a Christian bookshop in Falkirk. Too fearful and immature to rent a flat in the area, I commuted each day over the moors to Carluke where I lived with my parents – a 50-minute journey. But what about when the snow came?
I need not have feared.
A local GP, Eric Fischbacher, was a friend of my father, though I had never met him prior to working in Falkirk. Every day when there was the slightest threat of snow, Eric’s wife Mary phoned me. ‘Come and stay over,’ she’d say.
There was no judgment of my foolishness in not finding a flat. Simply acceptance.
Did they care because I was father’s son? Possibly, yet I had the impression that I was loved for who I was. And as I saw, helping others was as natural as breathing to Eric and Mary and their four children.
I was welcomed into the heart of the family. We sat round the table, sharing prayers, food and jokes. I have never felt more loved than I did those evenings. I’d lie in bed at night, deep snow outside, listening as the gritter cleared the road as far as the house in case Eric was called out overnight. I felt completely safe.
Eric used to say ‘I can rest secure when all my family are under my roof.’
The Fischbachers’ modelling of Christian love is an example to us as we care for refugees and asylum seekers, and those who though not physically refugees, are refugees of the spirit.
We love them because they are God’s children, and we learn to love them for their own sake.
And does God look forward to a future beyond time, when his children are safe home, when he can rest secure because all his family are under his roof?
