the refugees

today my faith was re-affirmed. it was unexpected. i woke up this morning with my plan: church, home to write a verbatim, back to church for an hour or so for the children's "night in bethlehem" and then dinner with friends in pearland. well, my "night in bethlehem" was much more than i could have imagined, so now i know why my friend texted early this morning to re-schedule our dinner for next week. God had other plans.

let me just say that 4 rwandan refugee children lit up my world today. i met them at "bethlehem." our outreach team picked them up from across town to bring them to our church, in an effort to foster the relationships started when they helped a refugee family move into their apartment a couple of months ago. stella is a child of this said family. peace, hope and balak are children of the neighboring family whose dad was a methodist minister in rwanda. their family arrived in february after being in 3 different refugee camps across south america, kenya and samalia. peace told me that her dad tells the family that they need to keep preaching to all the refugees here because they can never forget God now that they are here. peace also loves to tell her story because she says that every time she does she knows that a little piece of her will be in someone else's heart.

i will never understand what genocide is like. i will never understand what it means to move around your whole life in order to protect your life. i will never understand why peace thinks the best part about being in the apartment with her family is that she doesn't have to be scared to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom...she finally lives in a place where she knows that no one is going to attack her or take her.

on our drive back to their apartment, i was blessed to nestle in between stella and balak as they fell asleep, one under each arm. i was blessed to listen to peace teach us how to sing "i have decided to follow jesus, no turning back, no turning back" in swahili. i was blessed to realize that God brought the two words i have been reflecting on these first two weeks in advent, "hope" and "peace" to life for me today...literally. God said, "here you go, this is what hope and peace look like." i thank God for making it so real.

i'll take God's plan over mine any day. my cup runneth over.