We stood there in Costco in the pet aisle, and I stared at the dog beds while another shopper tried to sell me on one.
“I’ve had rottweilers for 20 years and these are the best,” he said. “You really should buy one while they’re in stock–they last forever.”
After about three minutes’ consideration, I loaded it onto my cart. Forty dollars seemed like a fair investment, and the rottweiler guy was pretty convincing. As I drove home, we talked about our spoiled puppy. Seven months old and on her second dog bed (the first too fuzzy to resist gnawing the guts out), we reckoned this homecoming would register as another in the long line of “best days of her life.”
As I pulled into our garage, the other kids burst through the door to the house like they always do after I’ve been gone.
“We’ve got a surprise for Minnie!” Jubal announced, and they all rushed to see what was in the trunk.
It isn’t lost on me that my dog sleeps on a nicer bed than most of the people in this world. And yet, dragging that pad into the living room and encouraging a dog to sprawl out on it is as much fun as eating a fluffy mountain of cotton candy. I am forever lost in this disparity, the unfairness of what I have in life, what others don’t. I try not to get carried away at the grocery store, the thrift store, the makeup aisle, or Chipotle. Amazon has my mailing address but it doesn’t have my soul. I don’t feel the urge to dress my kids up in nice new clothes or have a shiny car, but I will drop a mean wallop at Costco. I am grateful, most of the time. But I wonder–does my gratitude move me toward indifference? Am I so thankful for my own blessings and Dave Ramsey wisdom that I flat out ignore Rome is burning?
Several years ago my brother drove his family out to visit us for Christmas. As we played cards the Eve before, as kids squealed over Uno and we drank cream soda straight from the brown barrel bottles, I pulled my laptop open and searched for charities that served Syrian refugees. The compulsion to see outside my snowglobe and into a world where it was cold and hopeless drew me in, and I couldn’t help it.
“What are you doing?” they asked, and I shrugged it off. “Just wanted to sneak in an end-of-the-year gift,” I said.
It was that night I learned about the struggle of refugees, though I thought I knew something of it before.
As a foreign exchange student in Rio, I had seen the most awful street beggars. Little children with rods sticking straight out of their legs, wounds inflicted by favela drug lords to induce pity. It worked. I couldn’t bear their pain. On a visit to the city center I saw, for the first time, groups of children huddled around aerosol cans, passing them around to inhale and get high–any respite from their real life as orphans. Once, on the beach, a little fellow marched up to me and ripped my sunglasses right off my face. I was pissed. I grabbed them back and they snapped. We both lost that day. Oh, I’d seen despair. I couldn’t forget its hopeless, glassy gaze. It was hardened and indifferent–poverty and riches have the same outcome.
I still force myself to look it in the eye. It would be so much easier to look away, but especially on those days when I buy a forty dollar puppy pad, I sit down, open my laptop, and stare brazenly into its face. I watch videos from other parts of the world. I fix my eyes on what can’t be real, not possibly–refugees dragging an un-upholstered foam pad no bigger than my puppy’s bed–into a scrubby, worn, scrapped-together tent.
Lord, don’t let me feel immune to their despair.
Syrian refugees have been displaced in Lebanon and other countries for going on ten years. Folks who fled their homes thinking they’d be back soon have eked out a new life in another country–one that doesn’t want them there. Nearly one in four people residing in Lebanon are Syrian refugees. They are unwelcome, denied work, school, and most basic human rights. I learned this after I donated some money and signed up for quarterly email updates.
Now, there are other people we know around the world in grave need of help, loans for their businesses, food and education for their kids. But none seem as trapped to me as refugees in a camp. Their tents with tarps flapping and worn bedpads host memories of war, cold winter nights, futureless dreams.
Sometimes I don’t like to open my email. Honestly, I don’t want to hear one more sad story. Every media outlet plasters the heaviest woes on their front page, blasting fear and shame without a shred of dignity. We all eat up the news, ride the waves of whatever “journalists” deem their top ten. But CNN tired many years ago of talking about refugees. Those families, split at the border? If there isn’t a heartwarming or shocking story, it is largely forgotten or else misconstrued. News outlets thrive on exploitation, pulling heart strings and invoking anger. They stir pots and then they go home, remove their makeup, and sleep on feather beds.
I met a refugee at our school two weeks ago. He had been in the States for four years, and just ten days prior to meeting him, the rest of his family was finally able to join him. He was a bit nervous for his children to begin elementary school in a new country. But boy, was he thankful and excited. I hugged him–I couldn’t help it. I scribbled my phone number on a scrap of paper and pressed it into his hand.
“Call me,” I said. “Bring your wife and family to our home.”
“Everyone has been so helpful to me,” he said. “It has been wonderful to bring my family to America. How can I thank God for the blessing he has given me by allowing me to bring my family to this country? I will spend the rest of my life trying to thank Him.”
I stood there in the front office of the school, my hand on his shoulder, my heart and eyes leaking secondary joy. Then he said,
“You Americans, you do not understand how blessed you are in this nation. It is the very last frontier for freedom. You must protect it. You cannot let every immigrant into the United States, even though you think you can. The whole world would be here! This would be no life.”
As I walked back to my car, I let his words replay in my mind. I have never heard these words from the lips of a refugee. In fact, I’m pretty sure the news would have me to believe we are all a bunch of selfish brats for neglecting the rest of the world to live in our palaces. That if we don’t start drinking less water from plastic bottles, we will be cooking in our own carbon dioxide. That we might should consider more wind and solar power and stop being so wasteful. Well, I’ve seen piles of trash bigger than St. Louis, where people sort through discarded rubble a mile deep, looking for things to recycle so they can eat that night. I’ve seen shacks built on top of shacks on top of shacks in third world countries, but just down the street from me they’re building brand new subdivisions with solar panels on million dollar homes. Please tell me where wisdom sleeps, in a poor or rich person’s bed?
Perhaps we do not want to become another Lebanon, where hate is thick and compassion is scant, where refugees are a quarter of the population, unwanted and unhelped. But tell me, what exactly is the difference between refugee life here or there? Wealth that leads to stony platitudes of indifference, the lie that we actually might know how to take the higher road? Or is it true, scrappy poverty where hope is as futile as the high from an aerosol can? Until we toss out our good intentions in the garbage, we can’t even hold the gaze of a person who has seen their family bombed out of house and homeland.
You must protect it, the man said. He wasn’t referring to our country’s resources, but to her freedom. He never suggested we spread the wealth, but acknowledge what made us wealthy. He wasn’t pointing fingers at my dog bed, but at me.
And this, I’ve realized, is our duty. We can welcome those who have already entered, and we can better use the resources we have. But perhaps we can best help others by looking inside our own walls, those who have somehow slipped in through the front door, instead of inviting the whole world to our table. Do for one what you wish you could do for all, a wise person has said. Stop pretending you can be a savior. Instead, be a neighbor.
Still, we set a watchful eye on the heartbroken. We practice more of that quick-to-listen, slow-to-speak life. We aren’t building tables instead of walls or whatever nonsense makes us look better than we really are. We can’t rightly understand it, but the Lord didn’t make a mistake when He plopped us down in the land of the free and the home of the brave. So we will do our darndest to remind one another it doesn’t matter if our Chiefs win or lose a Superbowl this Sunday. We will revel in what we have, and we will look not only to our own interests, but also to the interests of others.
We will stare down poverty and wealth till it makes us uncomfortable, till every time I look at that puppy on her bed I’m reminded most people aren’t even half as lucky as us.
