22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Galatians 5:22-23
Imagine, if you will, that you are a young boy or girl living in a foreign land. You live in a house with your mom and dad and your younger brother. Every day you wake up to the sound of sporadic gun fire coming in different directions. This has become your norm and you have come to accept it; until that is, the gunfire comes eerily closer to your home.
On this morning you wake up to the sounds of machine gun fire, then cries for help before dead silence. You peer our your bedroom window and noticed uniformed soldiers running from door to door on a killing spree. You quickly run and grab a few remaining things before slipping out the back window just as you hear your father in the front room loudly gasping before he falls on the floor. You hear your mom scream in horror before she also collapses on the floor.
So you run and you run and you run until you catch up with other children just trying to survive this nightmarish ordeal. All you are thinking as you run is how you wish you could reverse time and sleep in your own bed after a bedtime story by your father. To just be able to go school and to play soccer with other boys and girls is all you think about, but now your life consists of being unable to sleep through the night because you keep hearing sounds of your mom and dad collapsing to their death from wounds caused by gun fire.
To a child living in America this would be diagnosed as PTSD and easily treated with good psychological care, but to a refugee who have no such luck finding this help those nightmares persist. 'Make the pain stop,' becomes the common refrain of the person caught with this trauma. This is the plight of the displaced refugees.
Now imagine to your horror when I tell you that only 1% of these refugees ever make it to American soil. Less than 1%! Well, that isn't exactly what my Presidential candidates are telling me. Donald Trump said we have a refugee problem and that it is they who are doing the raping, the looting and the drug dealing. Trump tells me we need to build a wall to keep them out. Fear fills the frontal lobe of it's citizens as those words are spoken.
Donald Trump is forgetting that it has been the refugees that have built and maintain his Trump casinos and hotel resorts. How convenient! Some are asking what does this video have to do with the refugee problem?
Simple, negative statements, are hard to get out of our mind. When you have success you will have a upward blip into escalation, but when something negative happens we slip below baseline and remain their longer than we ought. Instead of seeing refugees as tomorrows successful business owners, which they are, we see them as Trump has told us that they are the rapists and drug dealers we should fear.
As a child, one of my favorite songs was 'we will know that we are Christian's by our love, by our love.
As I look at each of today's candidates I am looking for the leader who can speak the truth in dignity and respect. I want a candidate who sees value in today's refugee and to see them not as rapists or drug dealers, but to see them as tomorrow's successful small business owners, fathers and mothers desiring a better life for their children.
I want to see our President use words of edification and encouragement, not words of shame and belittlement.
For any of us who has experienced grief, sorrow and trauma the words we hear do make a difference with how we are able to process and heal from our pain. Words of encouragement gives hope to not only those in grief, but to those who suffer from bodily distress and sickness.
I am reminded that had America reacted earlier to the plight of the European Jews then maybe millions more might have been spared from death at the hands of the Nazi regime. That is something to think about as we determine how each of us can be the solution to the refugees plight.
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