I too have experienced many such offers of “help” and have polished my ministry of gently deflating these do-gooder dreams. The people in my neighborhood who had experienced forced migration don’t need a hug from a strange woman. What they need are good neighbors. They need people to live next door to them, to send their kids to school with theirs, to vote for policies that protect instead of harm them. They need people whose lives are intricately bound up with their flourishing. 

It’s a hard message to give in my city—which, like so many in our world, is segregated by race and class. Asking people to do good, to give, to be charitable, becomes easy in these kinds of societies; asking them to be neighbors with those they most wish to help is not, since it points out an inconvenient truth that most of us try hard to forget all the time: some of us have worked hard to make sure we are only neighbors with certain kinds of people, and now we have to live with the results. 

There is a famous parable Jesus told about a good Samaritan in Luke 10. It is about how a priest and a Levite—the pristine, untouched, religious, the followers of God—ignored a man who had been beaten by robbers and left for dead on the side of the road that went from Jerusalem to Jericho. It is a Samaritan man—someone Jesus’ audience had been conditioned to despise from birth—who took care of the victim and found him shelter and clothes. There are many reasons people love and fear this parable. Jesus was telling the crowd that it is often the people we least expect who are the ones who actually do the work of God in the world, saving those who have been battered by our culture. He was telling us that the people who think of themselves as good often turn out to be terrible neighbors. 

READ: The Surprising Success and Faith of ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor?’

But I often think, too, about the man who asked the question that sparked the parable. We are told that a lawyer—an expert in the Old Testament law—wanted to test Jesus (Luke 10). So he asked the mother of all questions, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus turned the test back on him, shrewdly asking him to sum up the law—which the man had studied his whole life. “How do you read it?” Jesus asks him, all innocent. The man is a good student, he immediately sums up the entire work of Scripture: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all of your strength and with all of your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus replies, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you shall live.” 

But the lawyer is not satisfied with Jesus’ answer. The lawyer could say all the words of what it meant to be good, to possess the keys to God’s approval and favor and eternal life; but he did not understand them. We know this because in verse 29 it tells us he reached out to Jesus again, not done with the conversation. “But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus ‘And who is my neighbor?”

This verse haunts me more than any other in Scripture, for it defines the ethics of our time. How many of us have orchestrated our lives around this same question, buoyed by a life of continual self-rationalization? In truth, I don’t really want the answer to that question who is my neighbor? I want to remain safe and secure, confident that I have accrued eternal life for myself, that I am a good person. But Jesus tells the lawyer, and he tells me and he tells you, that the good neighbor is the one who shows mercy to those who have been robbed and left by the wayside of society.

The irony is, the more you try to be the good neighbor, the good Samaritan with eyes to see the world, the more the battered and bruised bodies start to pile up. As one of my mentors once told me, you can only help so many people on the side of the road before you start to wonder where all of these damn robbers are coming from. The more you see a world that creates Jericho highways and profits off of there being a society full of both robbers and victims. The more you notice the outwardly righteous who either cannot or will not see their responsibility to alleviate the suffering, the more we might have to ask ourselves where we fit in the parable. I think about that priest and that Levite in the story, how they were so sure they were doing what was right. The Samaritan man possessed something they did not, something I am now on a perpetual quest for: curiosity at the way the world works and what our responsibility might be to each other.

Taken from Myth of the American Dream by D.L. Mayfield. Copyright (c) 2020 by Danielle Mayfield. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocusit shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. — Isaiah 35:1-2

So many times I have felt as though one of my ministries has been the duty of despair. I can go into any happy gathering and deflate the mood instantly by bringing up any number of topics: white supremacy, inequality, the strategic dismantling of the U.S. refugee resettlement program, slave labor, and unjust food practices. I wonder why I don’t get invited to many parties anymore!

The truth of it is that the world has always been full of people who are being oppressed and those who benefit from that exploitation. It is the age-old story of Pharaoh’s empire and the enslaved Israelites, of predatory economies and the disenfranchised people whom God sees. I see the threads of this scriptural theme everywhere in my own context. As a white evangelical American woman, I too have benefited from an economy of scarcity and extraction. I enjoy low, low prices on my food and clothes and electronics because of low, low wages paid to the workers. I am connected to the threads of suffering that enable my lifestyle.

But staying solely in a place of despair can lead us into places of paralysis, toxic shame, or burnout. How are we to respond to the great injustices of the world — including how farmworkers are treated in our own communities and countries — wholeheartedly? I believe it takes the imagination of the Creator God to move us forward and give us a vision for a world where everyone in our neighborhoods can flourish. 

When I am tempted to only see the world with the eyes of despair, I read passages like Isaiah 35 and something new is sparked within me. God, who is obsessed with those who have been and are being exploited, also seems to have an eye for beauty. God designed flowers and trees to burst into bloom simply for the joy of it. I read about the highway called the Way of Holiness, where people will walk to Zion, singing and shouting for joy, their sorrows and sighing long forgotten. What does it look like for me to live today as if I might someday be on the highway of joy to the new city, one where every person in our communities is flourishing? Perhaps it looks like leaning into joy where we can find it, even in the midst of these dark times.

One of my favorite activists is Dorothy Day, who is known for living in solidarity with the poor and getting arrested for the rights of others. But she is also known for her belief in the duty of delight, of being connected to the small joys and pleasures of being alive: a piece of pie, a hot cup of coffee, a tree blooming in the spring, a favorite novel. Dorothy Day lived and fought for the humanity of her neighbors until her death. Is it possible that she was able to live her life the way she did because she pursued joy in the midst of a world choked with despair? 

Sometimes it truly does feel like we are living in a wilderness, where xenophobia, racism, economic inequality, and misogyny have stripped our societies bare. But this Advent season, I am going to try and look deeper. I will learn from the Israelites before me, and from those like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that the fight for justice is also a fight for joy. I will walk in that precarious balance of having both the duty of despair and the duty of delight. I will keep walking the road in front of me, trusting that one day we shall reach the new city together, singing songs and eating in the house of the Lord, where the meals are marked by laughter, not tears. 

God, give us eyes to see both our neighbors who are suffering in the fields and factories of our communities and the eyes to see glimpses of your beauty at work in the world here and now. Give us the resilience needed to not stop the work until every single person in our community is flourishing. Take our impoverished dreams for the world and replace them with your expansive, joyful desires. Bless those who are at the forefront of the fight for justice, and give them a taste of your joy today. Amen.

Learn more about how farmworkers from Immokalee and consumers across the country are working to expand the gains of the Fair Food Program to cover thousands of more workers by bringing Wendy’s into the Fair Food Program. Spread the word about the Wendy’s Boycott through which consumers and farmworkers are demanding Wendy’s sign a legally binding agreement to use its purchasing power to guarantee farmworkers rights — just like McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, and Yum! Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut) are already doing.

Searching for a gift that matters this Christmas? When you make a donation to the Fair Food Program in honor of someone, your gift goes to protect and advance farmworkers’ human rights. And the Fair Food Program has beautiful holiday cards you can print or which can be emailed. Give a gift of justice, respect, and hope today. 

I first signed up to volunteer to help resettle a refugee family from Somalia at the tender age of 19. Little did I know that this experience would alter the course of my life.

The family I was placed with were Somali Bantu–a minority group that was considered by many to be second-class. The Somali Bantu worked the fields and practiced Islam that was mixed with animism. When civil war broke out in Somalia in 1991, they were some of the first to feel the effects. Fields were burned, women were raped, men were killed. There was famine and sickness, and children and infants died due to preventable diseases. Forced to flee for their lives, entire communities picked up and ran to the Kenyan border in search of safety. The family I worked with in Portland, Oregon, had spent almost a decade in a refugee camp in Kenyan, anxiously awaiting the chance to start their life anew.

It wasn’t until I’d spent several years with the family that I understood the central tragedy of the refugee experience: how much they longed to return to their home, and how that would never again be a possibility. They weren’t immigrants, hewing closely to the origin stories we like to tell ourselves, clamoring to be in America. They weren’t here to take our jobs or try and jump in and make something of themselves. They were people who had barely survived the end of their world.

I watched as their resiliency shined in the midst of difficult circumstances. They were non-literate and non-English speaking, coming from a communal and tribal way of life, and I saw first-hand how my country was neither welcoming nor accommodating to these differences. It was a sobering realization. My belief in the need to welcome refugees became stronger than ever, but I was also beginning to understand what an incredibly complicated task resettlement is.

Because of my relationship with this family, I eventually got my MATESOL and specialized in teaching literacy. I have taught recently arrived refugees for almost a decade now, and each person I have met has continued my education in profound ways. Each and every person–from Somalia, Oromia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, and many other places–had their own story of trauma and suffering, the reality of which I cannot fathom. And yet I’ve watched them them, day in and day out, taking the dogged steps of trying to rebuild their lives: learning English, going grocery shopping, cooking food, applying for jobs, showering me in hospitality. What a gift, to see such resiliency in action.

If there is any silver lining to the current political situation it will be this: that citizens who are concerned by our current climate of fear towards Muslims–and Muslim refugees in particular–will be motivated to take pragmatic actions towards making America more welcoming. Churches, non-profits, neighborhood associations, local politics–all can be mobilized to support the refugee resettlement process. As it is, we cannot expect the government to shoulder all the burden of the myriads of challenges that face those who are being resettled. Our new neighbors need relational, emotional, and systemic support that extends far beyond the eight months of assistance provided by the government. This is where the individual citizen has a role to play. You can, like me, easily find ways to donate your time and/or resources–and you yourself will be changed in the process.

I do not know who I would be without my refugee and immigrant neighbors. I do not know who I will be if future new neighbors are not allowed into my country. And I can’t bear to think about what will happen to the men, women, and children affected by war and terrorism and trauma if the doors to the world continue to close in on them. I pray this does not happen. And in the meantime, I will work harder than ever to be welcoming to the small percentage of stateless wanderers–the poor and huddled masses, yearning to be free–who make it onto our shores and into my neighborhood.

What can you do?

There are seven countries under the ban that the Trump administration is fighting in court to implement: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Find refugees from these countries (and others!) in your city. Locate your local refugee resettlement agency and ask how you can volunteer. Currently, places like Arrive Ministries in St. Paul have seen an uptick in both financial donations and volunteers due to the increased spotlight on refugees. The ways to help are endless—from sorting donated items to tutoring to family mentoring. Beyond the initial re-settlement period, many refugees remain culturally isolated. Coming from communally-based Muslim cultures, they find the busyness and individualism of America especially hard to adapt to. Jump in and share your life! My personal favorite agencies are World Relief, Catholic Charities, and Lutheran Family Services (but there are many more).

• Call your local representatives and tell them you do not support the restrictions as outlined in the new Executive Order, and that you do not believe in discrimination based on religion.

• Go to restaurants from the 7 countries mentioned in the EO (listed above) in your area. Eat delicious food. Thank the owners and staff for being there.

• Go visit your local mosque with a simple card that says they are welcome. (You can literally quote the Bible on this). Ask if they are in need of anything or if there is any way you can serve them and their community.

• If you are a Christian, ask your pastor/the head of your denomination to publicly address the Biblical call to Christians to welcome refugees from the pulpit. According to one study, only 35% of US churches have talked about the current global refugee crisis. Is your church part of the silent majority? Put pressure on to change this!

• Two of the sectors that disproportionately bear the brunt of refugee resettlement are public education and healthcare (specifically hospitals). Find people in your life (church, etc.) who work in these settings and ask how you can help support them as they encounter and love refugees. Volunteer at your local school tutoring English Language Learners.

• If you are a business owner, consider ways you can employ refugees and/or create positions that do not rely on English-only literacy.

• Donate your financial resources to places like Catholic Charities, Lutheran Family Services, World Relief, Preemptive Love, SARA, and other resettlement agencies/non-profits that work with refugees both here and abroad. Ask that these organizations be vocal in their support of continuing the refugee resettlement program for everyone. If you currently donate to an organization and they are not public about their support of refugee resettlement programs continuing on (without bias towards religion) then pull your support.

• There is no grand gesture you can do. There is no Muslim registry you can sign up for. There is just rampant Islamophobia in your friends and community that you will have to push back against constantly, for the rest of your life. Have discussions about refugees (and Islam) with your people. Gently correct misinformation, every single time you see it. Be vigilant against hatred, specifically Islamophobia. Specifically ask Christians to live up to their beliefs when it comes to loving our neighbor (and our responsibility to them).

I was shocked when I landed in Minnesota and discovered the diversity of my new state. There were over 100, 000 Somali refugees alone. My new neighborhood was in the hub of this community, and there were restaurants and entire malls where I would not see a single other white person. I taught English at high-rise apartment complexes comprised mainly of refugees and immigrants from East Africa. I bought $1 sambusa at the corner grocery stores. I smiled at the women in hijabs I saw everywhere. Sometimes, I had to pinch myself. Was this real life? Every day in SE Minneapolis felt like my birthday.

But not everyone feels like I do. I remember a nice Christian man in Minnesota who wanted to talk to me years ago. “They say in the refugee camps in Kenya, one of the first English words that everybody learns is Minneapolis.” The urgency in his voice belied a belief that his homeland was being invaded.

America may stumble through an extended hangover from this election, but when the fog clears we will look back and see that Donald Trump’s campaign rose on an extreme wave of anti-immigrant fear. All of his talk about building a wall and banning Muslims was about courting that man’s fear.

On a recent episode of “This American Life, ” reporters went to St. Cloud, Minnesota, a town about 2 hours outside of the twin cities. In the past few decades, this almost exclusively white small town has experienced an uptick in resettlements. Minnesota is home to large resettlement agencies, including Catholic Charities and Lutheran Family Services. It offer some of the best state benefits in the nation, and has plenty of jobs (including animal processing) for those who are willing to work. Horrible winters notwithstanding, Minnesota is an attractive place for new immigrants, and the numbers have continued to grow.

But many long-term Minnesotans feel as though everything is changing too fast. And they are scared. I marvel at the graciousness of someone Ayan, a Somali activist who says she would tell her frightened neighbos the same thing she tells her 3 year-old: “it’s ok to feel scared. It’s ok to feel angry. It’s not ok to slam doors.”

But when I hear people talk about their fear of Muslims or Sharia law overtaking America, I am not as calm as Ayan. I get afraid, Fear starts to freeze my very core. I am afraid because Trump’s American is where I came from. Republican, conservative, Christian, white, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, lovers of God and country, we go on mission trips around the world. People I know and love spend hours reading about how Muslims are trying to sneak into their country and convert their grandchildren, or worse. I listen to them talk, I hear the fear and misinformation, the hyper individualism, the fierce denial of both systemic injustice and civic and global duty, and it suddenly becomes clear: this is no longer my community.

But where do I go?

I feel safest surrounded by my neighbors. Currently, they are refugees and immigrants from Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, Mexico, and a host of other countries. The women cook me food and drop it off in the evenings. We walk back and forth to school five days a week. We commiserate about rising rent costs. Most of them are Muslim, and sometimes we talk about God. In many ways, I am more comfortable around refugees. They are the ones who first revealed to me, after all, both the depths of human suffering and the deep wells of resilience to be found in humanity. They are a daily, living reminder of the cost of war and the effects of trauma, of the joys of diversity and the destructive nature of the myth of the American dream. They make it so that I can never go back to the world I came from, a world where me and my own little family were the only ones I cared about.

This election season has been traumatic for so many groups. As a white evangelical woman, my grief and fear pales in comparison to those from minority groups who were targeted by Donald Trump’s campaign as enemies who’ve tarnished America’s greatness. I have been forced to reckon with the divide that has grown this entire time. The people I was raised to look up to, the male leaders of the white conservative Christian world, have disregarded the people I love.

Because I fell in love with refugees, I cannot be a part of a movement that doesn’t have space for them. Moving forward, I will be navigating a new paradigm, learning from new (and more diverse) leaders.

And I will be learning how to be an American from people who are experts at rebuilding from the ashes of life.

The thing I like best about the apartments of my Somali friends are the colorful tapestries on the walls. The fabrics, draped everywhere, to give a little comfort and beauty in low-income spaces. Velvet posters and elaborate tea sets and woven mats and faux-persian carpets cover the walls. Low, luxurious couches line the walls. It smells of cooking oil and ginger and meat. There is probably a thermos full of chai, somewhere. There is most likely a TV in the corner, watching either PBS or Jerry Springer or a video of a relative getting married far away.

I have spent countless hours in such apartments. I sort of wrote an entire book about it. Sitting in awkward silence. Getting in the way of the day’s activities. Trying to decipher bills and school memos for people. Going over homework that will never be fully absorbed. Watching Disney channel movies. Eating goat liver while sitting on the floor. Talking about families and relatives and catching up on all the gossip. Calling electricity companies and being put on hold for hours. Trying to sort out problems with money transfers, or helping older folks get onto Facebook, or troubleshooting broken cell phones. I am good at none of these things, but these hours spent being lost and confused and intrigued and welcomed inside these sacred spaces of East African life in the U.S.—they are the hours that changed me. They are the hours that made me who I am today.

//
Three men plotted to blow up such a space. A 120 unit apartment in Kansas where many Somali families lived. They planned to park trucks at all four corners of the apartment complex, the day after the presidential elections, and kill every man woman and child that lived there. These men were crusaders, they called themselves. The hatred in their hearts seems unthinkable to me, except that is no longer the right word. For Somali refugees, for instance, it is probably within their realm of normal thought that someone would try and harm them, try and ruin their way of life and kill their babies, that someone would want to exert their dominance in such a violent, horrific way. After all, such situations are why so many had to flee Somalia in the first place, so they are not new to this situation. But I am. I have never known before what it feels like when friends of mine are targeted for death, for hatred, like they are bugs to be squashed. I have never known what is feels like to be acutely aware that it is my people, my culture, that wants to eradicate others. Or maybe, just maybe, I have known. I just never wanted to admit it out loud. That white males are one of the most likely terrorist group of our time. And yet they are the ones who I was taught to look up to, to learn theology from, to uphold as the bastions of family virtues and values. And now, all around me, I see the opposite. I see my culture being so vocal in their lust for power, the belittlement of women and immigrants and Muslims and people of color, I see a culture that has betrayed me and just about everyone I love.

//

Here’s how I move forward:

I think about a few weeks ago. Visiting a friend who is a refugee from Afghanistan. She brings out trays of food to her coffee table, smashed in-between two overstuffed couches. She gives us pistachios and cake and candies wrapped in cellophane paper, dates and large glasses filled to the brim with cranberry juice. My children are ecstatic, eating the sugary items with great joy as I try not mind the inevitable crash I will have to deal with later. My friend has her oldest daughter take a picture of me and her and my children. It’s for my mother, she says,  so she will know I have a friend who visited me for Eid. I felt very small in that moment; I hadn’t even remembered that it was the Eid-al-Adha holiday. Technically it was the next day, my friend told me, but she decided to celebrate a day early once I showed up, just so she wouldn’t have to celebrate it alone. I was happy to fellowship with her, to chat and laugh and eat the festive food. But I was also acutely aware that I had just happened to stop by on accident, a whim, to give a reminder about some school related item. What if I hadn’t stopped by? Would she be alone that day, like so many others? Would I be alone in my own house, unaware of the trials of others?

The great wells of cultural isolation, the ocean of loneliness we all swim in—it overwhelms me. So I keep doing the only thing I know how to do: I knock on doors and sit on couches. The apartments of refugees are where I am doing battle for the light. I am fighting for my neighborhood, my community, and ultimately, my country.

//

If I lived in Garden City Kansas, I might have resided in that very apartment complex. Those are the kinds of spaces I am obsessed with, that I love, that fill me up and open my eyes to so many new experiences. Here in Portland, I lived for years in what was considered to be our own Little Somalia. If these men had lived here, me and my children and my husband might have been blown up. This does not fill me with fear, because it is still just a theoretical. And yet it is turning out to be a much more plausible fear than one that any of my refugee neighbors would ever harm me.

My country was founded on white supremacy, the belief that the white western way of operating in the world is superior to all others. The results of this underlying assumption that undergirds nearly everything of our country ranges from benign naivety to micro-aggressions to men plotting to kill hundreds of people based on their race and religion. If this election season has shown us anything, it is that white supremacy is alive and well in our hearts and minds, and always has been. It’s been jarring and depressing for people like myself, but this season is not without its own silver lining. Only what is brought into the light can be dealt with. And here we are, a blazing light being shown on the ugliness within. It’s time to figure out how to be white in a society which elevates us and denigrates others. It’s time for radical hospitality, empathy, and action. It’s time to give up positions of power and influence and platforms and listen to the voices who have been saying all along that there is another way. It’s time to mourn how oppressive white supremacy is, how anti-gospel and anti-Jesus it is. It’s time to start fearing for our own souls. People say they are scared of refugees, scared of Muslims, scared of foreigners and protestors and immigrants and activists. But these are the ones who have shown me another way. They have taken my fear and my despair and turned it into something else: they have turned it into hope.

//

Today a storm is hitting Oregon. It is wet and dark and rainy and the winds are starting to pick up. If the power goes out I will be worried about all of my friends in apartment complexes. Do they have water? Will they feel scared? And I realize they have survived so much more than me, they will survive a few days without power, a little bit of flooding, but still—I pick up a few extra gallons of water just in case. They would do the same for me, and more, in a heartbeat. They watch out for me and my family. As I grieve my own community—Christian men defending assault and xenophobia and outright racism—I find comfort in the safe spaces of the apartments of my friends and neighbors.

Survivors teach us. They teach us how to continue on, how to rebuild lives, how to exist in a world where people want you harmed, or worse. They are also the watchmen of our culture, and they are the first to suffer as leaders whip up aggression and fear.

Please keep our refugee and immigrant neighbors in your prayers. If you attend a church, or are a leader in a church, please consider contacting your local mosque and asking how you can support their community in this time of violent words and violent action. Contact your local refugee resettlement program and ask how you can volunteer or help with Muslim refugees, to let them know that we have a greater capacity for welcome than for hate.

Maybe someday, you too will find yourself in a similar apartment, a similar couch. This is the only strategy I have for these days and times, and in the end I think it is the only one that will work.

I am in the WIC office, there to answer some questions and get my vouchers from the government for free food—the milk, the cheese, the cereal. The woman is pleasant and professional, she coos over my fat little baby and tests the iron in my blood. I don’t drink or smoke or eat all that unhealthily, and I answer questions in a conciliatory manner. Five years ago I was in this same office with my firstborn, I remember it all—the dingy gray walls, the posters with fruits and vegetables arranged in a rainbow. As the woman gives me the informational packet, she rattles off what I can and cannot get—yes to tuna, no to those fancy-ass organic eggs—and then she gets to the juice page. She purses her lips and pauses. I interrupt her, eager to please—Oh, we don’t drink juice in our home. She is visibly relieved, and nods her head approvingly. We share a smile of those in-the-know. She finishes entering up all of my information in the computer, and I bounce my son on my knee. It’s just so crazy, she says, more to herself than to me. Years ago we used to be worried about people being vitamin C deficient, so we put juice on the vouchers. Now we know that in the long run, giving your kids juice is so much more harmful than any residual vitamin benefits might be. It just causes so many problems, it’s just so contradictory. She looks at me and shrugs. But, you know. We are a government program. And the juice lobby is pretty powerful.
 

I leave the office, my vouchers clutched in my hand. I didn’t know, until just now. I keep my baby’s teeth free from the sugary juices, and I feel good inside. But there are so many others, caught up in a game of making money off of the most vulnerable in our society. Women, Infants, and Children. We are nothing compared to those that whisper in the ears of the powerful. We drink our juice, and it sure does go down easy.
 

//
 

I always try and think of cheerful and yet accurate ways to describe my neighborhood. I never know if I am hearing gunshots or fireworks I tell people brightly, my anecdote tightly crafted. My neighborhood is under-resourced, pre-gentrification, “diverse”, post-urban. I want people to know something about me because of where I live. I am tough yet hopeful. Sometimes it’s actually both. Gunshots and fireworks, I mean.
 

One day I was putting my daughter to bed. I was pregnant with my son. I am patting her back and I hear gunshots, loud. It does not really sound like fireworks at all, it sounds like it is right outside of my window. In the end, I never know how close it is, if it happened in my front yard or in the back alley. It is all so disorienting to me. I am not afraid, probably because I did not see the gun, I did not see the person holding it, and myself have never been at the business end of a revolver.
 

One time, we called the police on a neighbor. He had been in a downward spiral for a while and there was a lot of drug activity, a lot of shouting, women wandering the hallways wearing nothing but an open trench coat, extremely lost. The screaming got so loud that grown men stood frozen in the stairwells, the shouts bringing back memories that made us all long for quiet. We called the police because at that time we didn’t know any better. The police showed up and they had guns that looked fake—so large and so black in such bulky yet long shapes. They waved them everywhere, running down the hallways, my daughter asleep behind paper thin walls. They screamed at us to get on the floor. Our neighbor barricaded himself and his guests inside, refusing to let anyone leave. There was a lot of pounding and shouting. And then, he left with them. The police questioned my husband, because he was the one who called. They were very unkind.Why do you live here? One asked, but it was not in a curious tone of voice. We reported him, we did not appreciate his attitude. We now knew why nobody else had called the police, preferring to walk quickly and quietly into their own apartments and to shut their doors.
 

//
 

When I was in high school, I was in a play. It was loosely based off of the Kip Kinkle school shooting—in Thurston, Oregon–where that sweet-faced boy with the bowl cut went and stopped the hearts of four people with the bullets of a gun. I played the shooter’s girlfriend, who breaks up with him for another boy. The play ends with all of the characters—a best friend, a teacher, a rival—standing on stage dressed in white. When we are shot, we each take our right hand, full of ketchup, and plaster it over our hearts before crumpling to the ground. We gave a several performances at our high school and then did a mini-tour of a few other places. I can still remember lying on the worn-out stage, breathing heavily, the smell of tomatoes and vinegar upsetting my stomach, the loud silence of an audience shocked and excited by the drama of it all. We held Q and A’s after the performance, but I don’t remember much of what we talked about. It was so horrible, so horrible, we would have told anyone. These kinds of shootings have got to stop. We really thought we were making a difference, our eyes sober and clear, our hands full of ketchup. The shooter was lonely, he felt wronged by the world. If you are sad, talk to someone. If you are sad, don’t shoot anyone. In my own heart, I knew what the answer was. It was love, always love. If you loved all the people, then nothing bad would ever happen. I didn’t know that there were so many more factors, so many more unseen forces, all pulling us in the same direction.
 

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My husband grew up in Roseburg, Oregon. A mill town, small and sleepy with hints of generational poverty hovering everywhere. He took swimming lessons at Umpqua Community College. A shooter walked in there today andkilled 10 people, and injured more. I imagine my husband as a small boy—brown eyes and hair bleached blonde by the southern Oregon sun—paddling underwater, carefree.
 

We live several hours from there, now. Our landlord is a real character, small and fidgety, dressed professionally but with eyes that dart all around. The rumor is that when he first showed up a year or two ago he wore a bulletproof vest and went door to door, evicting all of the tenants engaged in illegal and violent activity. I don’t know if it’s true but there is a stillness to where we live now; families, mostly immigrants and refugees, push strollers through the parking lot. I went for a walk this afternoon and there was a young boy on a pink bike, pedaling furiously. In the back of his shirt he had a long plastic assault rifle delicately tucked.
 

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I have been a bit depressed, these past few months. I went and saw a counselor for the first time the other day. She looked at me and she was so calm. You have a lot of anxiety, she told me. Yes, it was true. Things had happened in the past few months: I almost died in childbirth, my son got very sick, I moved across the country, I changed jobs. Our brains always want to solve a problem, my counselor told me. Your brain wants to solve the problem of you being anxious. This was why I was depressed, why the future felt like one long horrible event to be endured, why I found no joy or pleasure in my current situation or in thinking of what would come next.Buckle down and survive, was the answer to my existential questions. Suicidal tendencies can be the same. The brain just wants to solve the problems of sadness and misery. It’s not a good solution, but the brain never made those promises. It just fixes the problem.
 

Death is your trigger said my counselor, and I knew it was true. I lived in neighborhoods where thirteen year old boys were shot and killed in front of the community center. I worked within refugee communities where the stories of trauma piled on top of one another. Everyone had dead babies, starving relatives, stories of rape and war and famine. Sometimes it felt like everyone I knew had stared down the barrel of a gun. And sometimes I would log into my Facebook, and scroll past the posts. The ones about second amendment rights and tyrannical governments and yellow-bellied liberals. I thought about how protected the people who own guns are, and I thought about the rest of us. The women, the infants, the children. How we are just pawns in a game that was started long before we were born. That there were lobbies, ears being twisted, mouths moving fast, to keep our rights free.

It doesn’t matter that it isn’t good for us, it doesn’t matter that it is the most vulnerable that pay the highest price. We have rights, is the thing. And besides, it probably won’t ever happen again.

We have always needed images to spur us forward, to propel us from places of extreme self-involvement, of apathy, of injustice. When Amos, the bony-fingered shepherd-turned-prophet, characterizes the uninvolved wealthy women of his time as “cows”—arrogant, unconcerned, and overfed—it is an image that sticks with you. As the LORD declares his impending judgement throughout the rest of the book of Amos, his cause for anger is revealed time and time again: Israel has “sold the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” The people of God have become “those who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and turn aside the way of the afflicted.” The supposedly righteous profit off of the labor of the poor, then exact terrible taxes in order to live ever-more extravagant lives. It all culminates in the Lord telling his people that he hates their feasts and their sacrifices of thanksgiving. They mean nothing when the labor undergirding the celebrations is a product of injustice.

As America celebrates the Thanksgiving holiday, the words of Amos have a new-found poignancy to me. This has been a year of learning for me, a time of listening to the prophets who work the land here in America. This has been a year of learning about the realities of migrant labor in America, and realizing how much my life mirrors those of the women in Bashan.

The images that changed me were from a ground-breaking 1960s CBS documentary A Harvest of Shame. I stumbled upon a reference to the now-famous film while I was reading a book on modern-day trafficking in America. Intrigued by the title, I immediately googled the documentary, and my husband and I watched it together. Besides having the strange patina of another era (Edward R. Murrow, the narrator and lead reporter of the documentary, is grim and serious standing in field with a gigantic clip-on microphone attached to his lapel; in nearly every scene there are men—including Murrow himself—with a cigarette in hand) the film was astonishing in its commitment to evoke reaction. Indeed, Murrow himself would declare the documentary—which aired the day after Thanksgiving, a profoundly counter-cultural move—as a means of shocking the national conscience in regards to migrant rights.

And shock it does. Murrow and his team make the case that the people who picked the fruits and vegetables for our special feasts are living in conditions that rob the dignity of man. Lack of adequate housing, federal resistance to regulation, slave wages (and slave conditions), little to no educational futures for the children—all of these were hallmarks of the migrant working conditions. As a traveling pastor to the migrants observes in the film: “someone is making thousands of dollars off of their sweat. Is that a slave or not?”

It is the images and interviews of the migrants themselves that will change you, however. The shots of people—the image of God undeniable—in various stages of both determination and misery, is an invitation to care. To watch as the children of migrants get their few weeks of schooling, as they eagerly declare that they want to be doctors, nurses, and teachers—but as Murrow points out, in 1960 there was not a single documented case of a migrant worker’s child ever getting a college degree. The goal of A Harvest of Shame was to introduce the general American public—the most well-fed people in the world—to the “excluded Americans” who picked their food. Because, as everyone from Amos to Edward R. Murrow will tell you, we are loathe to change our habits until it becomes increasingly personal.

This year, in 2014, the onions, potatoes, yams, green beans, and pumpkins that make up the basis of your Thanksgiving meal more than likely were picked by people that still continue to struggle for basic human rights. As the landscape of poverty has shifted in America, the vast majority of seasonal farm workers still continue to experience sweat-shop like conditions. While garment and restaurant workers have their share of forced labor, one prominent lawyer has described agriculture as being made up of nearly all trafficked people. Capitalizing on a current political climate which demonizes the undocumented (making them live and work in desperate circumstances in fear of deportation if they speak up) as well as the market obsession with cheap prices, many individuals find themselves forced to work for wages that one cannot live on.

So how do we make it personal? In A Harvest of Shame, a seasoned journalist describes his transformation: “A migrant was just a person who lived on a farm to me. But after seeing what I have, I am sure I will devote the rest of my life to doing what little I can to help solve this problem.” A teacher who works with the children declares that she feels she has a responsibility to the migrant workers since all of New Jersey profits off of their exploited labor. Justice for the poor and the oppressed in the Scriptures looks very similar. The exploited, who are always very close to God, must be made visible to the oppressors. And the unconcerned and well-fed must be made to care.

In this, a season of short-sighted benevolence, of rosy-colored family holidays, of magic and goodwill, the need for these types of images is more important than ever. As migrant chaplain Julian Grieggs says in A Harvest of Shame: “Is it possible to have love without justice? Is it possible that we think too much in terms of charity, in terms of Thanksgiving day baskets, in terms of Christmas baskets and not in terms enough of eliminating poverty?” The Bible, and the 54 years since the documentary first aired, would say no. Activists and workers and numerous journalists have described today’s farm working conditions as “virtually unchanged from Murrow’s time.” (Life Interrupted). As Gerardo Reyes of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers says “The faces in the fields have changed from poor white and poor blacks to poor hispanics.” But Reyes echoes the prophetic imagination of Amos, and dreams of a future where “justice rolls down like waters, righteousness in a never-ending stream.” Reyes declares that “It doesn’t have to be a harvest of shame anymore. It could be a harvest of hope.”

I want a feast that pleases God, not one that makes his heart of justice break. I want to know migrants, personally, to be absorbed into their struggles and hopes and dreams. And more than anything, I want to be wary of how easy it is to be like the women of Bashan, the ones so concerned with their own needs and celebrations, that they ultimately miss out on true Thanksgiving feast.

For more information I recommend reading Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States by Denise Brennan. I would also recommend watching A Harvest of Shame in its entirety (available on YouTube). Or better yet, invite all of your friends and neighbors to watch it with you, and use the Coalition of Immokalee Worker’s recent discussion guide to further your reflections.

Thus says the Lord: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place. – Jeremiah 22:3

The other day, I walked into a Whole Foods to pick up a few items, my WIC vouchers in hand. I have the luxury of thinking carefully about my food purchases. My husband and I do not want to support the torture of animals, and we do want to put money back into the hands of our local economy. We try to eat more in-season, locally, organic, fair-trade. We still, however, sit somewhat close to the poverty line, and we have had to make a few sacrifices. Less meat, more beans. Rice and pasta to tide us over. Eating what is on sale, doing without non-essentials like alcohol or snack foods.

The WIC vouchers help too (especially in more expensive stores like Whole Foods). I wandered the aisles, looking at the beautifully stocked shelves, until I found a clerk at the back of the store. “Do you participate in the WIC program?” I asked. He had never heard of it before, but his female co-worker was sure that the store did. I didn’t see any of the tell-tale blue stickers placed under the proper cereal boxes or bags of dried beans, but I took her at her word. As I queued up to pay and saw the look of confusion on the cashier’s face (male, hipster glasses) when I handed over my voucher, my stomach started to sink. As the line piled up behind me I tried to explain what the WIC program was.

The boy was interested, but he had never heard of it. He called his manager and confirmed what I already knew. Whole Foods did not participate in the program. I left my small bag of groceries at the register and walked out the door, trying to keep my smile bright. I went home and e-mailed the customer service team, who responded to me within several days. “Unfortunately, ” they wrote, “we cannot participate in the WIC program” due to conflicts with “quality” in regards to specific products such as infant formula. It was short, conciliatory, dismissive. It was clear that they did not need my business, nor the business of anyone who finds themselves in need of a little assistance when feeding their children.

The e-mail brought me back into those harrowing first months of my daughter’s life: due to a vicious medical emergency, she was born nearly two months early and I was left without the ability to breastfeed her. I was shaken up by my traumatic birth experience, grieving the loss of my ability to feed my own child. I remember the price of formula–the staggering realization that it would cost us upwards of $150 a month. Due to both my medical emergency and the financial strain of losing work hours, WIC was a godsend. I had never felt more vulnerable in my life, both physically and financially.

In a flash, as I deleted the e-mail from Whole Foods, I was reminded of my vulnerabilities all over again. And I did not like it.

I am not the only one who has depended on the kindness of family, strangers, and the government to get through tough times. For many others, it is the same—according to their website, the WIC program (which stands for Women, Infants, Children) serves over 9 million participants in America. Walking into a WIC clinic is like seeing a living, breathing poster for diversity: women, infants, and children from all ethnic stripes, showing up to collect their food vouchers. It is loud, messy, chaotic, and fraught with contradictions. People yelling at their children and cooing at their babies. Overworked employees and stressed-out moms. All of us doing whatever we can to take care of our own, receiving a bit of help.

A few years ago, my husband and I were young and in love, and we considered ourselves materially poor. We decided to have babies anyway. After I signed up for WIC, I sat through basic informational sessions on nutrition (Eat the Rainbow!) had my blood tested for iron deficiencies, and handed over my pay stubs to prove I was hovering near the poverty line. In return, I got vouchers that allowed me to get food from participating grocery stores: corn tortillas, beans, milk, cheese, eggs, cereal, juice. I also got a tragic and precious voucher for $12 worth of fruits and vegetables for me and my growing baby.

Every month I would get the vouchers, and every month I would go off to the grocery store. The clerks eyed me, sighing at the extra work I was making for them, snapping at me if I got the wrong item (No organics! You got the 14oz peanut butter instead of the 12oz!). Handing off those tell-tale vouchers became a lesson in embarrassment, so I anxiously tried to do everything right, to be the noble and righteous poor, just so I could collect my few bags of food.

“I don’t really need this, ” I would tell myself, as I watched the other people in the grocery store size me up, or as I sat in the WIC office and saw other women struggling to keep their three children quiet. I am not really, truly poor. I have safety nets. I have a support system. And yet, here I am, taking the vouchers handed to me. Qualifying, fair and square, for a little nutritional handout.

I teach English to speakers of other languages for a (small) living, and many, if not all, of my students qualify for some type of government aid: SNAP (food stamps), cash benefits, Medicaid, and WIC. It is a small commonality we share, the mothers and I, trying our best to feed our children. Most of my students are from the horn of Africa, countries that have been decimated by war, strife, and ever-constant hunger. I heard a long time ago that there is a pattern to those who die in a famine: first the crops and then the livestock, then it is the babies, the elderly, the children, and the mothers. Finally, only the men are left. As a result of the 2010-2011 drought in Somalia, over 260, 000 people died of starvation. 10% of the children in the country were gone in the blink of an eye. In the south, one in five children died of starvation. In the quiet of the night, I let myself think of all of the mothers, so many with empty arms.

This is always the pattern. Infants, Children, Women.

Currently,  Somalia is again experiencing drought. To compound matters, there has been an increased presence of militants blocking towns, causing the most vulnerable to starve. In my own Midwestern, American city, summer means increased levels of hunger among children who rely on free and reduced-priced school meals to get them through the day. People who are not women, infants, or children are the ones responsible for over 80% of all violent crime, and they account for over 90% of all our lawmakers. The realities of our broken, hierarchical, violent world are laid bare when we stop to consider who are the most at risk in our world, and how we choose to perceive them.

Women, Infants, Children.

Some of us have the luxury of not understanding the vulnerabilities inherent in gender and age in our world today. Some of us can choose to be unaware of government aid programs that catch the hungry children before they slip through our fingers. Some of us, myself included, can slide up and down the poverty scale as it warrants us, choosing to live simply without ever experiencing the true crush of hunger. Some of us, myself included, would rather pretend that the world is equal and just, and that right living and right thinking will lead to right outcomes.

I wanted to write about how we all feed our babies. I wanted to write about how I do not like being reminded of how vulnerable we are, and how often I choose to look away. I wanted to write about about famines and government cheese, my neighborhood and community, all of us so hungry for a better world. I wanted to write about a God whose eye is always on the most vulnerable in the community, who longs for his church to be the shelter in a violent, hungry storm. I wanted to write about the orphan and the widow, about how so much precious blood is being wasted, how the most vulnerable are still oppressed everywhere we look.

I wanted to tell you a story about Women, Infants, and Children, but it turned out to be the story of all of us.

A version of this article first appeared on Christ and Pop Culture.