I’ve been thinking a lot about the refugee ‘crisis’. It’s on
TV, the news, on social media.
It’s overwhelming.
Thousands, upon thousands,
fleeing war-torn countries, fleeing either in a moment of terror, or as the
result of years of bombings, unemployment and unsettled families, living in
camps and finally walking – weary – towards a better life. Any life.
The numbers are incomprehensible.
100,000. 1 million. Almost half of Syria’s population has been killed,
resettled in neighbouring countries, or is on the move. We cannot begin to
imagine.
Like our income for our appeal for Mozambique –
sometimes the figures are overwhelming. Our brains can’t quite compute these
vast numbers.
Small boats carrying 500 people
needing rescuing in the med. It’s beyond us to imagine what this means.
It’s got me thinking about “the
one”. The impact of one life in the midst of thousands.
One gold coin. One lost sheep.
The value of one. Even in fundraising, we use the power of telling the story of
one life. Not just because we know people respond to someone’s story, but
because that person matters.
Most people have been unable to
escape seeing a haunting image of a toddler – a little boy called Alan - this
week on social media. What thousands of refugees fleeing for years has been
unable to do, one little boy washed up on the shore has done.
My Mum tried to avoid seeing the
picture, but she couldn’t. It flashed up on Facebook before she realised what
it was. Suddenly it’s wasn’t someone else’s little boy. It could have been
hers, or one of her Grandsons.
What we can’t do for thousands. What
we’d be overwhelmed to do for the hordes at Calais according to the newspapers.
We will do for the one.
David Cameron (bless him) has
said that taking in more refugees won’t solve the problem. Whatever the problem
is, it will solve it for the ones we welcome. A tent, or a blanket, or a stove solves
the problem of shelter or hunger or the cold – for one. He talks about somehow getting
to the root of the problem – in Syria? In the World? Jesus has already solved
the root of the issue for the world! And what does he tell us to do?
Welcome
the alien / foreigner / stranger
Be the good Samaritan
Love
our neighbour as ourselves
Love one another
We
LOVE because He first loved us.
Somehow as a people we have lost
that value of ‘the one’. We will have different views on abortion, on euthanasia…
on the rise of atheism. But I believe they can begin to erode the value we
place on a person, who is irreplaceable.
A picture of a child washed up on a beach reminds us deep in
our core of this incredible truth.
That a unique, individual person
is of great, irreplaceable value to the world, and to God.
And that includes you.
Yesterday my brother returned the huge painting I did of Aslan
for a prayer room. It’s a painting from
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lucy is looking in the mirror, comparing
herself to her older sister Susan. Believing she is not pretty enough, clever
enough, just not ‘enough’. She wishes herself away. Aslan appears, with a roar,
because he places great value on her. A dream sequence shows her brothers and
sisters without her, and the impact there would be if she was not there – being
who fully she was made to be. Aslan’s words to her ‘Do not run from who you are’
are painted under the picture of Aslan.
We need to recognise our own value, and uniqueness. Our job
titles may be replaceable, but we are not. Rose cannot replace Charlotte. She can
do the job, but will bring herself to the role and to us, in a very different
way. When we realise our own value, we start to see the real unique value of others.
“For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you
because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are
wonderful,
I know that full
well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made
in the secret place,
when I was
woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days
ordained for me were written in your book
before one of
them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts,[a] God!
How vast is the
sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would
outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I
am still with you.”
