refugees – Hope and Be.Longing

Giants

October 19, 2017

He’s Goliath, this tiny preschool African boy with skin of creamy cocoa and beautiful wide eyes. He stands in the center of the rug, smiling and shrugging his shoulders in embarrassment, though he was the first of all the children to volunteer.

We sing together again—all of us from Myanmar and Nepal and Sudan and Somalia and the US—the song of David and Goliath. “Only a boy named David, only a little sling. Only a boy named David, but he could pray and sing…”

And the sling goes round and round and round and round and round and round and round. We watch one invisible stone go up in the air…and the giant comes tumbling down. Though this little boy’s tumble is in slow motion, and he never stops smiling.
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Stories of Hope, Belonging, and Longing

Yellow Dot Stickers

August 22, 2017

She stumbled in and immediately dropped down on a bench.

She wiped tears from her eyes as she waited to be registered. The baby girl in her arms was bundled tightly against the cold, against the cruel world. I watched as her four-year-old pulled off bright pink gloves, welcoming the warmth of the church onto chapped hands.

Name tags in hand, we padded down the steps to the children’s area, one slow step at a time. I held tightly to the tiny hand of her daughter, dark brown skin now dotted with the round yellow stickers she had discovered on the ESL registration table.